SEO in Aberdeen for Small Businesses & SME's.
Keyword pages and blog content, written by hand, built to bring the right people to your site. No jargon, no monthly reports full of numbers that mean nothing.
Most SEO is sold badly
You have probably had the emails. Someone has noticed your site is not ranking, they can fix it, and there is a package starting at a suspiciously round number.
What follows is usually a monthly report showing a graph going up, a list of keywords you have never heard anyone say out loud, and a handful of blog posts written by someone who has never met you. Six months in, nothing has changed except your bank balance.
SEO is not complicated to explain. Google is trying to give people the most useful answer to what they typed. Your job is to be that answer, on a page that loads quickly and is clearly about the thing they asked.
That is genuinely most of it. The rest is patience and doing the work properly, which is the part nobody wants to sell because it is slow.
Investing in Gillian's blog services is one of the best things I've done!
This graph shows results from just one blog post, and only traffic from Google searches. It doesn’t include visits from any other traffic source or people browsing your site. Just pure, organic search traffic from one piece of content.
One blog post. Over 59,000 impressions. Visible growth from day one. Imagine what consistent content could do for your business.
Keyword pages get you found for what you sell. Blog content gets you found for everything people ask before they are ready to buy, and it is what convinces Google that your site is a credible source on the subject rather than a five-page brochure.
Cost guides. Comparisons. The questions you answer on the phone twice a week. Written properly, each one earns its place, links back to the pages that sell, and keeps working for years.
A bookkeeper who publishes a clear guide to what a small business can claim as an expense will be found by people who are not yet looking for a bookkeeper. Some of them will be, three months later, and they will already know who you are.
Blog content that builds authority
A page for each thing you do, in each place you do it, written for how people actually search rather than how you describe your services internally.
A joiner in Aberdeen does not have one page called Services. They have a page for kitchen fitting, a page for loft conversions, a page for the towns they cover. Each one targets a specific search, answers it properly, and gives that person somewhere to land that is unmistakably about their problem.
This is the part that brings in enquiries. It is also the part most small business sites are missing entirely, because building it takes real work and a template will not do it for you.
Keyword pages
Two things, done well, rather than a long list done thinly.
What I actually do
Written by hand, by the person you hired
Everything is written by me. Not outsourced, not generated and lightly tidied, not handed to a junior with a keyword list.
That matters more than it used to. Google has spent two years getting better at spotting content written to fill a gap rather than to help anyone, and the sites that leaned on volume have been hit hardest. The remaining advantage belongs to businesses whose content is written by someone who knows the subject and can write.
It also means the content sounds like you, which is the difference between a blog that reads as marketing and one that reads as expertise.
What I don't do
Worth saying plainly, so you can rule me out quickly if you need something else.
I do not buy links or build them through directories and guest post schemes. It works until it does not, and the recovery is worse than never having started.
I do not guarantee positions. Nobody can, and anyone who does is either inexperienced or hoping you will not check. I will tell you what is realistic for your market and your timescale, before you spend anything.
I am not a technical SEO agency. If your problem is a broken migration, a crawl budget issue on a site with fifty thousand pages, or an ecommerce platform doing something strange, you need a specialist and I will say so.
And I do not send monthly reports designed to look like value. You will get plain updates about what was published, what is moving, and what I would do next.
Who this suits
Small businesses and SMEs across Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire who sell something specific, to people who are actively looking for it, and who can wait a few months for the payoff.
It works particularly well for trades, clinics, professional services and technical consultancies, because the searches are specific and the value of a single new client is high enough that a handful of enquiries pays for the whole thing.
It works less well if you sell something nobody searches for, or if your market is small enough that you already know everyone in it. In that case your money is better spent elsewhere and I will say so on the first call.
How long it takes
Longer than you want. Usually three to six months before you see meaningful movement, sometimes longer in a competitive field.
What happens sooner is smaller and still useful. Pages start appearing for very specific searches within weeks. Search Console starts showing you what people are actually typing to find you, which is often not what you assumed. Those early signals tell us what to build next.
If you need enquiries this month, SEO is the wrong tool and I will tell you that rather than take the work.
How it works
01. Research
I find out what people in your market are actually searching, what your competitors rank for, and where the realistic openings are. You get this as a plain list of pages worth building, in priority order, with the reasoning.
02. Foundations
Page titles, descriptions, heading structure, internal links, page speed and your Google Business Profile. The unglamorous groundwork that has to be right before content can do anything.
03. Build the pages
Keyword pages first, because they convert. Then blog content on a steady schedule, each piece linking back to the pages that sell.
04. Watch and adjust
Search Console tells us what is working. We build more of that and stop doing the things that are not.
What it costs
I work in fixed-price blocks rather than open-ended monthly fees.
We start with research and foundations, which gives you the plan and gets the technical basics right. From there, pages and content are quoted in agreed batches so you always know what you are getting and what it costs.
If you want to keep going after that, ongoing content can be arranged monthly. Plenty of clients do one block, see what it does, and decide from there. That is a reasonable way to buy something that takes months to prove itself.
FAQ:
Local agencies typically charge monthly retainers running from a few hundred pounds into four figures. I work in fixed-price blocks instead, starting with research and foundations, so you can see what you are buying before committing to anything ongoing.
Usually three to six months for meaningful movement, sometimes longer in a competitive market. You will see smaller signals sooner, including specific searches you start appearing for within a few weeks.
No, and neither can anyone else. Google does not sell positions and does not publish its ranking system. What I can do is tell you honestly what is realistic for your market before you spend anything.
Often, yes. Most small business sites are built to look right rather than to be found, which means they have a handful of pages and none of them target how people actually search. That is usually the gap.
Local SEO is the part that gets you found by people nearby, which for most Aberdeen businesses is the part that matters. It leans heavily on your Google Business Profile, reviews, and pages built around the places and services you cover.
I do. I will need to talk to you to get the substance right, but the writing is mine. That is the whole point of hiring a copywriter to do this rather than an SEO agency.
I can usually work with what you have. If the site is so slow or badly structured that content will not fix it, I will tell you that before you spend money on content that cannot perform. We can also provide website design along-side SEO pacakges.
No. Local SEO is where I am most useful to businesses here, but I work with clients globally.
Let's talk about getting found
If your site looks fine but nobody is finding it, that is a content problem more often than a design one, and it is fixable.
Tell me what you do and who you want to reach. I will tell you whether SEO is worth your money, and if it is not, I will say so.
I will be in touch shortly
Thank You
Whether you've got a couple of ideas, or you haven’t got a clue where to begin, at Gillian Sarah, I can give you support at every single step.
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