Around three years ago (Apr 2, 2012) I published an incredibly well received list of the leading SEOs in the UK – in my opinion. I put in place a bit of a methodology, but you could hardly say it was a scientific survey!
The first thing I did was to discount exact match domains which included keywords – a few years ago it was much easier to rank for a search phrase with an exact match term and although times have changed, and it’s now tougher to do the same thing, for the sake of this list I will continue to discount websites on exact match domains.
I’ll continue to weight websites where a subpage ranks over the website’s homepage this is because it’s generally easier to make the homepage of a website rank and I want some proof they can do what they say they can!
I created the list based on a number of different areas of SEO, namely: SEO consultancies, Freelance SEOs, Freelance SEO Consultants, SEO Copywriters, SEO Programmers etc I’m going to stick with these broad areas, whilst adding SEO Content Marketing – since I last produced this list, content marketing has become dominant, with many SEOs to a lesser or greater extent operating more and more from a content marketing perspective.
This is based on searches on Google.co.uk and I’ve also added weighting based on the complexity of ranking in that niche of SEO related searches.
I’m not saying this is a list of the undeniably best SEOs in the land, without carrying out a full audit of their work, getting references from their clients, speaking with each of them one to one it would be pretty impossible to even get close to that, however this is about the visibility of websites in the SEO sphere, with the belief that an seo company, freelance seo consultant, seo auditor etc who knows what they’re doing should be able to get their own website to outrank their competitors – at least for their chosen area of search engine optimising!
20 Leading SEOs in the UK
The 20 leading SEOs I’ve chosen here – displayed in alphabetical order:
alex-moss.co.uk- www.benedict.co.uk
- www.ben-norman.co.uk
- ghostmarketing.co.uk
- graemewinchester.co.uk
- simond62.sg-host.com
- www.kendallcopywriting.co.uk
- krystianszastok.co.uk
- www.martinwoods.me.uk
- www.mattbeswick.co.uk
- www.matthewbarby.com
- omoii.com
- www.paulhoda.co.uk
- raydigitalmarketing.com
- salsifycreative.com
- www.seo-doctor.co.uk
- www.seomark.co.uk
- www.seosurgeon.co.uk
- www.turnerink.co.uk
- www.wesmcdermott.co.uk
After carrying out the same process this year I was shocked to see quite how much the market has changed, whilst being pleased to see some of the usual suspects still in the game. Probably the most shocking though is having to reduce the list from the top 3o to the top 20, I’ve done this because of the way Google’s results have changed, for example when searching for SEO as a generic term, there are much less results for people offering SEO as a service and a hell of a lot more knowledge based results.
I’m also a little bit disappointed by the lack of numbers of freelancers and consultants out there with their own websites offering content marketing services.
I’m really pleased that GrowTraffic is still in this list! If I’d carried out this research for most of 2013 it wouldn’t have been as the website dropping down to page 4 and it took a fair amount of work to get it back to being a more dominant website in the rankings for terms such as freelance seo consultant.
I’d love to know if there are names here you think shouldn’t be – or names/websites that you think should be here and what you think the methodology for building such a list should be. Perhaps it’s create a website that does this kind of listing of SEOs automatically?
