SEO without the snake oil: what to spend your budget on

The SEO industry has a snake oil problem. Monthly retainers that produce PDF reports. Backlink packages from sites in countries you have never heard of. Audits that list 200 issues and fix none of them.

Here is what we actually recommend, and what we cut.

What to spend on

Technical foundations. If Google cannot crawl your site cleanly, nothing else matters. Core Web Vitals, clean URLs, proper canonicalisation, no broken internal links. Unglamorous work that compounds.

Content that answers real questions. A 1,500-word guide that genuinely answers something your customers search for will outperform ten 300-word keyword pages every time, and it will keep ranking when the algorithm updates.

Local signals for regional businesses. Google Business Profile, consistent NAP citations, local schema markup. For Welsh businesses this is often the highest-return SEO work available.

Internal linking. Most sites have dozens of orphaned pages that get no internal links and therefore no authority. A proper internal linking audit costs a few hours and has a measurable impact within weeks.

What to cut

Backlink packages. If someone is selling you 200 backlinks for £150, the links will hurt you. Quality backlinks come from doing work worth linking to.

Monthly reports with no actions. A report that tells you traffic went up 4% is not a deliverable. Ask your SEO agency what they changed last month and what they will change next month.

Rankings as a primary metric. Rankings move. What matters is whether organic search is sending qualified visitors who enquire or buy.

The honest version

Good SEO is mostly writing useful content, keeping your technical house in order, and being patient. It is not complicated — it is just slow, which is why agencies sell dashboards instead.

Get in touch for a plain-English review of your current SEO spend.