SEO and Local SEO in Dorset
We do search engine optimisation for independent businesses across Dorset and Somerset, from a studio on South Street in Sherborne. Technical SEO, local search, content and increasingly getting found inside AI answers. It takes three to six months before results are meaningful, we don't guarantee positions, and we'll tell you when your budget would do more elsewhere.
What's actually involved
SEO covers four fairly different jobs, and most businesses need a different mix of them.
Technical. Whether search engines can crawl the site, how fast it loads, whether the heading structure makes sense, whether pages are indexed at all. Unglamorous, usually the quickest wins, and frequently the reason a good site gets no traffic.
Local. Google Business Profile, reviews, and consistent business information across every directory that lists you. This is what determines whether you appear in the map results, and for a business serving one area it's usually the highest-return work available.
On-page and structure. Having a page for each thing you want to be found for, written properly, linked properly. One homepage cannot rank for every service in every town, which is the single most common structural problem we see.
Content. Answering the questions your buyers actually ask, in enough depth to be useful. Slow, compounding, and the part most agencies quietly skip because it's the most work.
Local search, and why geography is doing more than you think
There are two sets of results and they're ranked differently, which is why businesses are sometimes confused about where they do and don't appear.
The map results are heavily weighted by proximity to whoever is searching. Google confirms distance as a ranking factor, and industry surveys consistently put it as the single heaviest one. A Sherborne business has a real advantage for Sherborne searches and a real disadvantage for Bournemouth searches, and no amount of optimisation changes where your office is.
The blue links below the map work differently. They're driven by on-page content, site structure and links from other websites, which means wider county visibility is winnable there even when the map isn't.
The practical version for most Dorset businesses: target the map results in your own town and immediate neighbours, target organic results and AI answers for the wider county, and be sceptical of anyone promising map rankings across Dorset from a single location.
Being found in AI answers
A growing share of research now happens inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI overviews, often without anyone clicking through to a website. Being cited in those answers is related to traditional SEO but not identical to it.
What we do about it: structure pages so a direct answer sits near the top of each section, phrase headings as the questions people actually ask, add the structured data that tells an AI engine what your business is and where it operates, keep key pages current because recency matters more here than in normal search, and make sure the information about you is consistent everywhere it appears.
Nobody can promise citations in AI answers. What can be done is making a business easy to cite and consistent enough to be trusted, then measuring whether it's happening by testing real prompts month to month.
What we won't promise
Position one for anything. Nobody can guarantee rankings, and any agency that does is either misunderstanding how this works or hoping you don't.
A timeline for a specific keyword. We can tell you what's realistic and roughly how long similar work has taken. We can't tell you the week it happens.
That competitive head terms are winnable quickly. Some phrases are dominated by businesses with fifteen years of domain history and hundreds of links. We'll tell you which of your targets fall into that category before you pay for anyone to chase them.
Results in month one. Technical fixes can move things quickly. Everything else takes three to six months minimum before the picture is clear, and longer in competitive categories.
When SEO isn't the right spend
Three situations where we'd point you somewhere else.
You need customers this quarter. SEO doesn't work at that speed. Paid advertising does, and it's a better use of the same money if the timeline is short.
Your site is fundamentally broken or five years out of date. Optimising it is spending money on a foundation you're about to replace. Fix the website first.
Almost nobody searches for what you sell. Some products genuinely have very little search demand, and for those, social, trade and word of mouth will outperform search every time. We'd rather establish that in the first conversation than six months in.
What you get, and how you'll know it's working
Monthly reporting that shows movement rather than activity. Rankings for the terms that actually matter to you, traffic and where it came from, enquiries, and for local businesses the Google Business Profile numbers that show calls and direction requests.
We also test AI answer visibility manually, because no tool does it reliably yet. That means running the prompts a real customer would use and recording whether you get named.
What you won't get is a report full of numbers that go up while nothing else changes. Impressions rising is not the same as enquiries rising, and we'll show you both.
Why our own rankings are a fair test
We sell SEO, so it's reasonable to check whether we rank for it. Plenty of agencies sell search visibility while being invisible themselves.
We'd also be straight about the position we're in. This is a small studio in a small town competing against agencies in Bournemouth and Bristol with far more domain history, and the work on our own site is ongoing rather than finished. If you're assessing us, look at whether the approach makes sense and whether we're honest about timelines, not just at a single ranking on a single day.
See the work
Search, technical and local SEO for independent brands across Dorset, Somerset and further afield. View our work.
