SEO agency in Cardiff and the SEO consultants behind every campaign
True SEO Consultants Ltd is an SEO agency and consultancy in Cardiff that gets local businesses found across Google Search, Google Maps and the AI answers now sitting above both. Most Cardiff businesses lose enquiries in the map pack rather than the blue links, and the two run on separate ranking systems with separate causes. Billed on KPIs, never on hours.
- ✓200+ UK businesses helped
- ✓In search since 2010
- ✓Adam Street, Cardiff CF24
NEWCardiff buyers now ask AI first. See how Cardiff businesses get named by AI search
- Local SEO
- Map pack
- Technical SEO
- Semantic SEO
- AI visibility
What you get on the call, whether you hire us or not
- ✓Your ranking barriers, named and put in priority order
- ✓The Cardiff firms currently sitting above you, and why
- ✓Your map pack position across a real postcode grid
- ✓A straight answer on what it would cost to fix
No minimum commitment. Thirty days’ notice, always.
Start with a free first month of SEO
Two minutes to send, no card, and no obligation to continue. You get your ranking barriers named and put in order, the Cardiff firms currently sitting above you, and a straight answer on what it would cost to fix.
Claim your free first month of SEO
Tell us where your website is now. We come back with your ranking barriers named and put in order, the Cardiff firms currently above you, and a straight answer on what it would cost to fix. No card needed.
Got it. Check your inbox.
Your enquiry has reached us at Startup Stiwdio on Adam Street. We reply the same working day, usually within a couple of hours, and you will hear from Mohammad or Julie rather than a sales team.
Want to talk sooner? Call 0333 240 7747 or book the free 30 minutes.
How the first thirty minutes works
Your SEO comes with a business mentor, not just a search consultant
Most Cardiff agencies sell you rankings. We start further back, with whether the enquiries those rankings bring are the ones your business actually wants. That is a different conversation, and it comes from who runs the company.
Julie Williams
Director of Strategy and Compliance, True SEO Consultants Ltd- Welsh born and Cardiff based, working with businesses here rather than reporting on them from London
- Certified Business Coach, so the strategy work is mentoring, not just a task list
- Fractional CFO with more than 30 years in finance, AAT accredited and part-qualified ACCA
- ILM Strategic Leader, and author of This Is Your Business, Own It
- Director of Business Oracle Ltd, advising owner-managed businesses across South Wales
Julie is the reason a True SEO engagement opens with commercial questions rather than keyword volume. Which services carry your margin. Which enquiries waste your team’s day. What a good month looks like in numbers you already track. Those answers decide what gets built, and in what order, long before anyone writes a page.
Alongside her, Mohammad A Mahmud is an ACCA-qualified accountant who has worked in search for over a decade and trained in Koray Tugberk Gubur’s semantic method. Two directors who came from inside finance, running search for businesses that need the numbers to work.
What that means for you in practice. You get a search programme and a second opinion on the business decisions around it, from people who have sat on your side of the table. Most Cardiff agencies cannot offer the second half of that, because nobody in the building has run a finance function.
“We recently used Mohammad to update our website and optimise our google ranking etc. – this is still work in progress, but his results are excellent. Our views are up, and our placement is much higher on google, the enquiries have increased, and the cost was a lot less than we have been quoted elsewhere. I would highly recommend TrueSEO.”
Kay BrookCentre Manager, Alexandra Gate Business Centre Cardiff Ltd. LinkedIn recommendation, 21 August 2025.Two Cardiff engagements written up in full, with the figures the clients can check themselves: nought to 44 first-page Cardiff rankings, nine at position one, and 450 per cent higher sales per customer for an ecommerce brand. More in the True SEO case studies.
Seven things worth knowing before you hire anyone in Cardiff
Read the whole page and you get the detail. Read these and you already know more than most Cardiff owners do on the day they sign.
Ask any Cardiff agency to show you its own search data before you ask for a proposal.
Treat the map pack and the normal results as two separate rankings with two separate causes.
Expect proximity to the searcher to move local rank more than anything an agency controls.
Budget from 399 pounds a month for local SEO in Cardiff and 699 pounds for full service.
Allow six months on a competitive term, with measurable movement inside twelve weeks.
Register that a Cardiff address helps the map pack and does nothing for the organic results.
Remember that AI assistants shortlist local firms before a buyer opens a results page at all.
Want all seven checked against your own site? Our free 30-minute consultancy and SEO audit puts your ranking barriers in priority order and names the Cardiff firms above you.
Start with the free reviewWhich SEO agency in Cardiff should you hire?
Hire the Cardiff SEO agency that will show you its own search data, name the consultant who will do the work, and bill you against agreed outcomes rather than hours.
Those three tests remove most of the market in a single meeting, and not one of them asks you to understand SEO.
Make them prove their own ranking
An agency that ranks for its own competitive terms can show you in thirty seconds. One that cannot will change the subject. Ask for impressions, clicks and average position on a term they claim to own, then ask which of those clicks became an enquiry.
Get the name of the person doing the work
Cardiff agencies often sell through a senior consultant and deliver through a junior. Ask who plans the strategy, who writes the content, and who you will be speaking to in month four. Write the name down before you sign anything.
Check what you are actually buying
Hourly billing rewards the hours, so the report fills with tasks completed. Outcome billing rewards the ranking and the enquiry, so the report shows what changed commercially. We work the second way, with thirty days’ notice and no minimum term.
How do you check a Cardiff SEO agency’s own rankings before hiring them?
Search the agency’s own city terms in an incognito window from a Cardiff connection, then ask to see their Search Console for those queries. Impressions without clicks means the ranking is not converting.
That second half is where the check earns its keep. Plenty of agencies rank somewhere for their own terms. Very few will show you the click column beside the impression column, because a page sitting at position 30 collects impressions all year and produces almost nothing. A position is not a result. A booked enquiry is.
Run the search from a Cardiff postcode rather than your phone on a train, because local results move with the searcher. Then ask three follow-ups: which queries brought them their last five clients, what the click-through rate is on their strongest term, and what happened to a campaign that did not work. The third question separates a consultancy from a sales team, because a firm with real accounts has a failure it can describe. Hold the same test against us.
Seven questions worth asking any Cardiff SEO agency
Show me your own search data for the last six months.
Who plans the strategy, and who writes the content?
What are the KPIs, and what happens when they are missed?
What is the notice period on the contract?
Which links will you build, and where will they come from?
How will you report local rank, and across how many points?
What do I own if I leave?
The one that catches most agencies. Content, profiles, accounts and data should be yours from day one.Ask us all seven on the free call.
We answer them in writing if you would rather compare providers side by side.An agency holding your Google Business Profile in its own account has built a hostage rather than a service. Check that one before you check the price. Our SEO audit service runs the same diagnostic across your own site, so you can see the gap before anybody quotes you for closing it.
What does an SEO agency in Cardiff actually do?
A Cardiff SEO agency makes your business findable for the searches your buyers actually run, across the normal results, Google Maps and the AI answers that now sit above both.
The work splits into four jobs that run together rather than in sequence. Skip any one of them and the other three underperform.
Technical foundations
Crawl paths, page speed, structured data and the faults a Cardiff site collects after three years of theme updates. Nothing else compounds until a search engine can read the site properly.
Repair the foundations firstContent built on real questions
A Cardiff letting agent and a Cardiff dental practice share almost no search vocabulary, so the plan starts from your business model rather than a keyword list.
See how topical depth worksLocal signals
Google Business Profile, categories, service areas, review velocity, replies and citation consistency across the UK directories Google still reads.
Win the local packEarned authority
Mentions, local press, professional bodies and the corroboration an AI assistant checks before it names anyone. We build these the earned way, never by buying them.
Build authority the earned wayDo you need an SEO agency in Cardiff, or an SEO consultant?
Choose a consultant when you need the strategy and already have someone to execute it. Choose an agency when you need both.
The distinction is about who owns the thinking, not about company size. Cardiff buyers split almost evenly between the two, and picking the wrong one wastes a year.
| SEO consultant | SEO agency | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Judgement and direction | Judgement and delivery |
| Who does the work | Your team or your web developer | The provider’s team |
| Typical Cardiff cost | Lower monthly, higher per hour | Higher monthly, all inclusive |
| What arrives on day one | Topical map, competitor analysis, technical audit, priority order | The same, plus the content and the build |
| Continuity | Depends on your staff staying | Depends on the provider’s account structure |
| When strategy has to change | You re-brief and often re-pay | Included, because the KPI has not changed |
| Suits | A business with an in-house marketer and a tight budget | An owner who does not want another job on the list |
A consultant alone is the cheaper correct answer when you already have someone in-house to execute.
True SEO runs as both. A senior consultant plans your strategy around your business model, then the same consultancy executes it, so nothing gets lost between the plan and the work. Prefer to keep the skill inside your own team? Our SEO training and mentoring programme teaches the method instead of selling you the delivery, and the wider picture on how we work sits on our UK SEO consultancy homepage.
Most Cardiff enquiries start in the map pack, not the blue links
Our local and multi-location SEO programme handles the profile, the reviews, the citations and the area content as one piece of work, so single-site Cardiff businesses and firms covering several South Wales towns both compete on the searches that sit closest to a phone call.
How much does SEO cost in Cardiff?
Local SEO in Cardiff starts at 399 pounds a month with us, monthly full-service SEO starts at 699 pounds, and a search-ready website build starts at 799 pounds as a one-off.
Most Cardiff agencies will not give you a number until the second call. Here are ours, beside the range the rest of the city publishes.
| Service | Price | Commitment | What moves the figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local SEO monthly pack | From 399 pounds a month | No minimum term, 30 days’ notice | Number of areas and profiles covered |
| Monthly full-service SEO | From 699 pounds a month | No minimum term, monthly review | Sector competition and site condition |
| Search-ready web design | From 799 pounds one-off | Two week delivery | Page count and migration complexity |
| Bespoke programme | Quoted on scope | Agreed KPIs | Multi-location, regulated sectors, recovery work |
| Cardiff market range | About 250 to 750 pounds a month | Varies, often 12 months | Whether links and content are included |
Prices are current at the time of writing and vary with scope. Two of the four Cardiff agencies we checked publish a price at all, and both of the others quote per project after a call.
Competition in your sector
A Cardiff accountancy practice competing against fifteen firms needs less content than a Cardiff law firm competing against sixty.
The condition of your site
A page builder site loading in four seconds earns nothing from content investment until the technical work is done first.
How many areas you cover
A firm covering Cardiff, Newport and Bridgend needs three sets of local signals rather than one, and that changes the scope.
Cheap SEO in Cardiff usually means bought links, spun content or a shared report template, and the recovery costs more than the original work. For a firm covering more than one location, ask for a scoped Cardiff quote rather than a package price. For the national picture, our guide to what UK SEO actually costs compares Cardiff quotes against the rest of the market.
You now know roughly what Cardiff SEO costs. Finding out exactly costs nothing.
The free 30 minutes ends with a figure attached to named work, not a range. Around a third of the reviews we run end with us saying a monthly programme is not warranted, and we would rather tell you that now than in month eight.
What is included in a Cardiff local SEO package?
A Cardiff local SEO package should include profile management, review work, citation building, local content and grid-based reporting.
A Cardiff page and a claimed profile are two of six. Sites carrying only those two appear in normal results and stay invisible in the map.
Six signals make up the local layer. Most Cardiff sites carry two or three of them, which is why they appear in normal results but not in the map.
Anything missing from the eight below is a gap you will pay for later. Hold every Cardiff proposal you receive against it, including ours.
How long does SEO take to work in Cardiff?
Expect early movement inside twelve weeks and competitive positions between month six and month twelve.
Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches or planning something that gets the site penalised later. This is the honest shape of it.
wks
The map pack moves
Profile fixes, category corrections and review velocity lift local visibility first, because Google recrawls profile data quickly.
wks
Early indicators
Impressions and average position start climbing on the terms you targeted, usually before the clicks follow them.
mths
Positions consolidate
Content depth, internal linking and earned mentions accumulate far enough for competitive Cardiff terms to hold.
mths
Returns compound
Topical authority carries new pages up faster than the first ones climbed, so each addition costs less to rank.
One accountancy client reached number one for a niche practice term and the first page within about sixty days, which is fast. That happened because the term carried clear intent and thin competition. The same programme on a broad Cardiff head term takes three times as long, and any agency telling you otherwise is selling you something.
Which Cardiff industries are hardest to rank in?
Accountancy, law and dentistry are the hardest Cardiff sectors, because national firms bid on the same terms and every local competitor already runs SEO. Trades and hospitality are still winnable on local signals alone.
You are competing for a shortlist of three or four names. That is a smaller fight than it looks, and a winnable one.
Cardiff has more than 33,600 active businesses and roughly one in four sits in financial and professional services. AI answers name a handful, so the shortlist is the fight.
Difficulty is not a reason to avoid a sector. It decides where you start, because the route into a crowded Cardiff market is service and area specificity rather than the head term everybody chases.
Law firms
Sixty-plus Cardiff practices carry decades of domain history between them. The way in is practice-area and area specificity, never the head term.
How solicitor SEO worksDental practices
Private clinics outspend everyone on treatment terms, so the winnable ground is treatment plus area, backed by a review programme that never stops.
Treatment and area, not the head termPrivate healthcare and clinics
Physiotherapy, cosmetic and private GP practices compete the same way dentistry does, on treatment plus area rather than the head term. The difference is that advertising rules shape what the page is allowed to claim, so the copy has to earn trust without promising an outcome.
What healthcare pages may and may not sayAccountancy practices
There are roughly 30,000 accountancy and audit firms in the UK and very few describe themselves differently from the firm next door. Niche first, head term second.
Win the niche before the head termAutomotive
Garages and specialists win on service plus area combinations, where the map pack still decides most of the enquiry volume.
How garages win on service plus areaHotels and hospitality
Booking aggregators will always outrank a single Cardiff property on generic terms, so the work moves to destination content and proximity.
Competing with the booking aggregatorsLetting and estate agents
The softest large market in the city. Branch-level profiles and landlord content take positions competitors have never contested.
Why agents rank below the portalsHow do you know if your Cardiff SEO is actually working?
Track three things: map pack impressions in Google Business Profile, non-branded clicks in Search Console filtered to the United Kingdom, and enquiries logged against source. Rankings alone prove nothing.
Run them in that order, because each one only means something once the one before it holds.
Are map pack discovery impressions rising?
Google Business Profile reports how often the listing appeared for discovery searches rather than for your own name. That line is the first thing local work moves.
Are non-branded United Kingdom clicks rising?
Both filters matter. Branded searches flatter every report they appear in, and a position that produces no clicks in your target country is not a ranking you can spend against.
Are logged enquiries rising against source?
Ask every caller how they found you and write it down. Direction requests, calls from the profile and form fills all count, and none of them appear in a ranking report.
!A ranking that fails the country filter is not a ranking you can spend against. That single check kills more agency reports than any other.
Not sure whether your SEO is actually working?
Send the form and we will read your Search Console the way we have just described, then tell you in plain English whether the numbers are moving or standing still. You keep the answer either way.
How ready is your Cardiff business for the local pack?
You now know what a complete package looks like and how to measure it. Answer five questions and we will tell you which piece to fix first, before you spend anything.
1. When did your Google Business Profile last get a new review?
2. Does your primary Google category match what you actually sell?
3. Is your name, address and phone number identical everywhere online?
4. Do you have a page for each service you want to be found for?
5. Can you say how many enquiries came from search last month?
Rather skip the questions?
What happens in the free 30-minute SEO consultation?
You get your own Search Console read live, the three queries worth chasing named, and an honest answer on whether SEO is the right spend.
Sometimes the honest answer is that you should spend nothing with us. A Cardiff business with four reviews, a broken profile and a two-page site does not need a retainer. It needs an afternoon of housekeeping it can do itself, and we will say so on the call rather than sell you six months of content that cannot rank over broken local signals.
What results have you produced for a Welsh business?
The clearest case is a Welsh letting agency that moved into the Cardiff map pack for its core service terms and now holds first position on eight national estate and letting agency queries.
Nine number-one positions and a 70 per cent lift in click-through rate, on a site that started with none.
The same site before and after: nought to 44 first-page rankings, 23 in the top five, nine at number one, clicks up 60 per cent and click-through rate up 70 per cent.
What that looks like in a crowded Cardiff sector
Both programmes below are real, with the figures as they were recorded. Names are withheld while client consent is confirmed, because the commercial detail is not ours to publish.
- 200 to 1,600Monthly organic visits on a practice rebuild
- 80%+Local visitors arriving via the profile
- 60 daysTo first page on a niche practice term
The audit found one Google Business Profile covering three branches, a category set pointing at property management rather than lettings, and no area content beyond the postcode in the footer. We split the profiles, corrected the categories, built three area pages on real demand and ran a review programme across the branches.
The competitor analysis showed the top three Cardiff firms all ranking on service plus sector combinations rather than the head term, so we built the topical map around niches instead. Eleven pages later the practice held first-page positions for six sector-specific terms.
Fourteen of the accountancy practice’s nineteen monthly enquiries came from searches that included a niche rather than a location, which is the pattern we look for first in a crowded Cardiff sector.
Book the first thirty minutes, free
Pick a slot below and we spend the call on your site rather than our credentials. You leave with your ranking barriers, the Cardiff firms currently above you, and the order we would fix things in, whether you go on to hire anyone or not.
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Open the diary in a new tabRather have it in writing first? Get the phases and the cost in writing and we will come back with a scoped plan.
Looking for a digital marketing agency in Cardiff? This is that, under a more accurate name.
A digital marketing agency in Cardiff will run your website, your ads, your blog and your newsletter. So do we, because that is the same work that decides whether search pays off for a Cardiff business. The difference is the order. You get the reasoning, the numbers and the plan before anyone spends money, and then the work gets done. Our directors are a Welsh-born business coach and an ACCA-qualified accountant who has worked in search since 2010, which is why the target here is your bottom line rather than your traffic chart.
Digital Marketing Campaigns
A launch, a season or a single product planned end to end: the pages, the ads, the emails and the follow-up, measured on enquiries rather than reach.
See how campaigns are plannedPPC and Paid Advertising
Paid search that buys the positions organic has not reached yet, and stops buying the ones it already holds. Budget answers to the same KPIs as the rest.
See how paid search is managedNiche Marketing
One sector, one buyer, one question set. The blueprint that makes a smaller firm the obvious answer in a market larger agencies treat generically.
Read the blueprintTargeted Outreach
Coverage, citations and mentions earned from the publications and directories your buyers actually read, rather than a list bought by volume.
See how outreach worksWebsite Builds and Migrations
A redesign is the fastest way for a Cardiff business to lose positions it already holds. Every old address gets a written decision before the build begins, whether we run the move or work with your developer.
Moving a site without losing rankingsVisibility in AI Answers
Assistants increasingly answer above the map pack and the blue links. Being the firm they name is a separate job from ranking, and we track it as its own measure rather than a by-product.
Being named in AI answersSearch stays at the core of all of it. The full list sits on our services page, and if you would rather just ask a person which of it a Cardiff business actually needs, the first thirty minutes are free.
Why does a Cardiff business appear in the map pack but not in the normal results?
The map pack ranks a Google Business Profile on proximity, prominence and relevance. The blue links rank a web page on content and links. They are two different indexes, so you can win one and lose the other.
Ranks your Google Business Profile
- Proximity to the person searching
- Primary and secondary categories
- Review count, recency and replies
- Name, address and phone consistency
- Profile completeness and photos
SYSTEMS
Ranks your website page
- Topical coverage and content depth
- Technical health and page speed
- Internal linking and site structure
- Earned mentions and authority
- Structured data and entity clarity
A business with a perfect profile and a four-page website holds the map pack and disappears below the fold on the same search. The fix runs both ways, because profile signals feed local organic ranking through entity confidence, and strong local content gives Google more reason to trust the profile.
How do you get into the Google map pack in Cardiff?
Verify the Google Business Profile at a real Cardiff address, pick the right primary category, match the name, address and phone across every citation, publish your services, then earn steady reviews.
Work them in that order. Most Cardiff businesses fail on categories and citations rather than on anything technical, which is why the cheapest fixes are usually the ones nobody has done.
Verify at a real address
Everything downstream depends on it, and a profile rebuilt before verification gets rebuilt again afterwards.
Fix the primary category
It does more work than any other field. A Cardiff firm listed as a business consultant when it is an accountancy practice competes in the wrong pack entirely.
Match the details everywhere
Name, address and phone have to match across Yell, Thomson Local, Companies House, your professional body and your own contact page.
Publish every service
The services section is read, and an empty one leaves Google guessing what you sell from your category alone.
Build review flow
Volume matters, recency matters more, and replies matter more than most owners expect.
Step three is where most Cardiff campaigns stall, because an old address survives on directories nobody remembers signing up to.
Does the searcher’s location change your Cardiff ranking?
Yes. Google ranks local results partly on how far the searcher is from your address, so the same query returns different businesses in Cathays, Cardiff Bay and Llanishen.
There is no single position to report. A Cardiff business can lead in Cathays and vanish in Newport on the same query.
Relevance, distance and prominence are weighed separately for every search. Move the searcher a few miles and the ranking order changes with them.
Proximity weighting means a Roath dental practice can hold position one within two miles and position twelve in Whitchurch, on the same search, at the same moment. Any agency reporting a single city-wide map pack position is either using a fixed centroid or not measuring properly.
We track a grid of Cardiff postcodes instead, because the grid shows where the profile is strong and where content has to compensate. Service and area content is what lets a Roath practice appear for a Whitchurch searcher. Without it, your catchment stays as small as your postcode.
Do you need a Cardiff address to rank for SEO in Cardiff?
For the map pack, yes: Google needs a verifiable address or a declared service area. For the normal results, no. A UK business with no Cardiff office can still rank a Cardiff page on content alone.
True SEO Consultants Ltd
- AddressStartup Stiwdio, University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN
- Phone0333 240 7747
- HoursMonday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm
- CompanyRegistered in England and Wales, number 16563516
- Cardiff
- Newport
- Swansea
- Caerphilly
- Bridgend
- Merthyr Tydfil
- Penarth
- Pontypridd
- Barry
- Cwmbran
- Rest of the UK, remotely
The same search run in Llanishen and in Cardiff Bay returns different map pack results on the same day. That single distinction settles most arguments about service area businesses. Google verifies a physical location before showing a profile in the local pack, and it has to be a real place of business staffed during opening hours. Virtual offices breach the guidelines and profiles do get suspended. Organic ranking carries no such requirement, which is why a Bristol agency can rank for Cardiff terms in the blue links while never appearing on the map. We work from a real desk on Adam Street, and you are welcome to sit at it.
How do you get reviews that lift a Cardiff map pack ranking?
Ask at the moment the work lands, send a direct review link, and prompt the client to name the service and the area in their own words. Steady flow beats a burst, and Google discounts bursts.
Ask the day the work completes rather than the day the invoice clears. Reply to every review within a week, including the difficult ones, because reply rate is a visible quality signal and an unanswered complaint costs more than the complaint itself.
A word on review incentives. Since April 2025, fake and concealed-incentive reviews have been banned under UK consumer law, with penalties that can reach ten per cent of worldwide turnover. The only route left is asking properly, at the right moment, and asking often.
Citations do the other half of the job. Reviews move the map pack and citations stop it from breaking, and the two are different work: reviews are an ongoing programme, citations are a one-off clean-up followed by discipline. Work down this list in order.
| Source | Type | Why it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Your own contact page | Owned | The version everything else gets compared against, so fix it before anything |
| Google Business Profile | Primary | The listing every other citation is checked against |
| Companies House | Statutory | The registered address Google treats as authoritative |
| Bing Places | Search engine | Feeds Copilot and several AI assistants |
| Apple Business Connect | Search engine | Drives Apple Maps and Siri results across iPhone users |
| Yell and Thomson Local | Directory | Long-standing UK directories Google still crawls |
| Your professional body | Sector | Regulator and membership listings corroborate the entity |
| Local chambers and networks | Local | Cardiff-specific corroboration a national directory cannot give |
One Cardiff firm we worked with had three different suite numbers live across eleven directories. Consolidating them lifted pack visibility before a single new page shipped.
Most Cardiff businesses fix this in the wrong order
Reviews, profile, pages and links all matter, and doing them out of sequence wastes months. Thirty minutes with us gives you the order, whether or not you hire anyone.
True SEO Consultants Ltd, Startup Stiwdio, University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN.
How do AI assistants pick a local firm in Cardiff?
AI assistants name the Cardiff firm whose identity is clearest across the open web, not the one that ranks highest.
They read structured data, reviews, directories, professional bodies and third-party mentions, then assemble a shortlist before the buyer sees a single blue link. Close to a third of UK Google searches now show an AI summary above the normal results, and more than half of UK adults say they see these summaries regularly. Three signals decide who gets named.
Entity clarity
Your name, address, phone number, categories and services agree everywhere a machine can read them. One contradiction is enough to drop you from the shortlist.
Corroboration
Other sources say the same thing about you. An assistant will not name a business it cannot verify twice from separate places.
Extractability
Your pages answer questions in complete sentences a model can lift whole, rather than burying the answer three paragraphs down.
A Cardiff business missing from that summary loses the enquiry without ever appearing in a report, which is why we treat it as a channel rather than a curiosity. Our work to rank on AI and LLM search rebuilds the entity layer that decides it, and the local detail sits in our guide to what AI assistants read about a Cardiff business.
What does it cost a Cardiff business to sit on page three?
Impressions without clicks. A page on the third results page is seen by search engines, counted in your reporting, and read by almost nobody.
The shape matters more than the exact numbers, and it is the same shape on every Cardiff term we have measured.
A term producing tens of thousands of impressions a year at position 30 will return a handful of clicks, because click-through rate collapses past the first page and collapses again past the second. Being visible on page three is functionally the same as not being there, except that it generates a monthly report that looks like progress.
This matters most for Cardiff firms who have been paying for SEO for a year and cannot say what changed. Impressions rising while clicks stay flat is not momentum. It is a page ranking for terms it cannot win, or winning terms nobody clicks. Both are fixable, and neither gets fixed by publishing more of the same.
What Cardiff buyers type, and what they actually want
The words a Cardiff buyer uses tell you which stage they are at. A page built for one phrasing misses the others, which is why most Cardiff sites capture a fraction of the demand available to them.
Longer, more specific searches carry the buyer who has already decided. They cost less to win and close faster.
Qualified intent beats the head term. Searches framed by size, amenity or question convert because the person has already decided what they need.
| What they search | Stage | What they are really asking | What wins them |
|---|---|---|---|
| seo cardiff | Early | Who is out there? | A clear shortlist position and a reason to click |
| seo agency cardiff | Considering | Who will do the work for me? | Proof of delivery and a named team |
| seo consultant cardiff | Considering | Who will tell me what to do? | A named expert with visible credentials |
| seo company cardiff | Considering | Is this a real registered business? | Company number, address, verifiable identity |
| seo expert cardiff | Vetting | Can they actually prove it? | Case detail and checkable results |
| seo services cardiff | Scoping | What exactly do I get? | A service list and a published price |
| seo agencies cardiff | Comparing | How do these firms differ? | A visible point of difference |
| seo training cardiff | Learning | Could I do this myself? | Mentoring, not a retainer pitch |
| ai seo cardiff | Emerging | Will ChatGPT name my business? | Entity clarity and structured data |
Two of these matter more than Cardiff owners expect. The consultant phrasings carry as much commercial weight as the agency ones, and the training demand is real enough that answering it earns trust from people who go on to hire anyway.
Cardiff SEO questions we get asked most
01Is True SEO an SEO agency in Cardiff or an SEO consultancy?
Both. True SEO Consultants Ltd is registered in Cardiff with full agency delivery across content, technical SEO, local SEO and link building, run with a consultancy structure where a senior consultant plans the strategy around your business model and KPIs before any task starts. You get the delivery of an agency with the judgement of a consultant, billed against agreed outcomes rather than hours.
02How much does an SEO agency in Cardiff charge?
Our local SEO pack starts at 399 pounds a month and full-service monthly SEO starts at 699 pounds, with bespoke programmes quoted against scope. Cardiff market rates run from about 250 pounds a month for basic profile management to several thousand for multi-location or regulated sectors. Anything under 300 pounds a month rarely covers the content and technical work a competitive Cardiff term needs.
03How long before a Cardiff business sees SEO results?
Map pack movement typically appears within four to eight weeks and organic positions between month six and month twelve on competitive Cardiff terms. Early indicators, including impressions and average position, usually move inside the first twelve weeks even when clicks have not yet followed.
04Do you need a Cardiff office to rank in Cardiff?
You need a verified Cardiff address to appear in the Google map pack, and you do not need one to rank in the normal organic results. Service area businesses can hide the address and set accurate service areas, though pack visibility will be narrower than for a verified storefront.
05Which Cardiff areas does True SEO cover in person?
We cover Cardiff, Newport, Swansea, Caerphilly, Bridgend, Merthyr Tydfil, Penarth, Pontypridd, Barry and Cwmbran in person from our base on Adam Street, and the rest of the UK through remote digital onboarding and delivery.
06Can you get a Cardiff business named by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews?
Yes, and it is a different job from ranking. AI assistants name the business whose entity signals are clearest and most corroborated across the open web, which means consistent structured data, matching citations, recent reviews and pages that answer questions in extractable sentences.
07Should you hire a Cardiff agency or a national one?
Hire locally when the map pack is your main channel, and hire nationally when organic search is. A Cardiff dental practice lives or dies in the local pack, while a Cardiff software company selling UK-wide barely touches it. True SEO covers both positions, because the consultancy is Cardiff based and the delivery runs UK wide.
08How do you know whether Cardiff SEO is actually working?
Track enquiries, calls and direction requests rather than rankings alone, and compare them against the same period last year rather than last month. Local demand in Cardiff swings with term dates, rugby fixtures and the summer trade, so month on month comparisons mislead. Rankings still matter as a leading indicator, read as a distribution rather than a single number.
Three guides that go a level deeper
Everything runs from one strategy
The local work and the organic work pull in the same direction, because the same consultant plans both. Pick the one that matches where you are stuck.
Local and Multi-Location SEO
Profile, reviews, citations and area content handled as one programme.
Compete in every postcode you serveSEO Audit
Find what is capping your rankings, and the order to fix it in.
See what is blocking your rankTechnical and On-Page SEO
Speed, structure, schema and the faults a theme update leaves behind.
Fix what search engines cannot readMonthly SEO
Steady execution and a review that shows what changed commercially.
See the monthly programmeSemantic SEO and Topical Authority
Cover your subject completely so Google treats your site as the reference.
Own your subject in searchConsultancy and Mentoring
Keep the method in your own team instead of buying the delivery.
Learn the method one to oneSEO for Accountants
The densest Cardiff sector, and the one we have rebuilt most often.
Win the niche firstOptimised Web Design
A search-ready build for sites that cannot be optimised as they stand.
Build a site that can rankOff-Page and Link Building
Earned authority signals from real sources, never bought links.
Earn the mentions that countWant the plan without the retainer?
Our marketplace sells the consultancy work as one-off deliverables, for Cardiff businesses that have someone to execute but nobody to plan. You get the territory your site should own and the order to build it in, ready to hand to whoever writes your content.
Your Cardiff competitors are not better at SEO. They are just easier for Google to understand.
True SEO Consultants Ltd works from Startup Stiwdio, University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN, under company number 16563516. We meet Cardiff and South Wales clients in person, we run the same programmes for businesses across the UK through remote digital onboarding and delivery, and we onboard international clients the same way.
The consultancy is led by Mohammad A Mahmud, who has worked in search since 2010 and trained in Koray Tugberk Gubur’s semantic method, with co-director Julie Williams, a fractional CFO with more than thirty years of commercial experience who reviews every strategy against margin rather than traffic.
Ready to see where you actually stand in Cardiff? Our local and multi-location SEO programme rebuilds the profile, the reviews, the citations and the area content as one piece of work, and the first thirty minutes cost nothing.
