How to Choose an SEO Agency in Derby and Derbyshire

If you're comparing SEO agencies in Derby or anywhere in Derbyshire, judge them on four things: proof of results for businesses like yours, who will do the work each month, how clearly they explain what they'll change on your site, and whether you keep ownership of your own accounts. Walk away from anyone who guarantees a number one ranking. Google's own advice on hiring an SEO states plainly that nobody can promise that.

A few years ago I audited a website that had been built about ten years earlier and never touched since. Nothing on it followed SEO best practice, and the business's Google listing needed sorting out too, so Google had very little to go on about who they were or what they did. The audit turned up a long list of fixes, on the site and off it. After a busy few months the site was up to standard, and from there we kept making changes week by week. Over the first year it went from no organic traffic to 10 to 15 clicks a day from Google. It was slow, the client knew from the start it wouldn't happen overnight, and they were happy with where it ended up.

This guide is for owners of small and medium businesses around Derby who are about to spend money on search engine optimisation (SEO), which is the work of getting your website found in Google's unpaid results. I run Hempsall Digital from South Normanton, so I'm one of the people you might end up comparing. I've written the guide I'd want a friend to read before signing anything, and that includes a section that might talk you out of hiring anyone.

Do you need an SEO agency at all?

Possibly not yet. Google's guidance says that if you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself, and it points people to its free SEO Starter Guide as the place to begin.

For a plumber in Belper or a salon in Ilkeston, much of the local groundwork is something you can do yourself:

• Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, with the right primary category, your real opening hours and proper photos.
• Ask happy customers for Google reviews, and reply to the ones you get.
• Give each main service its own page on your website, and say which towns you cover.
• Set up Google Search Console, Google's free tool that shows which searches your site appears for.

Hiring help makes more sense when you're in a competitive market, when you're about to rebuild your website, or when you've done the basics and stalled. On the rebuild point, Google's advice is that the earlier you bring an SEO in during a redesign, the better, so the new site is built to be found from the start.

If you want to see where your site stands before speaking to anyone, run it through our free site scanner.

What an SEO agency should be doing

"SEO" gets used to describe very different services, which is why two quotes can look wildly different. A proper engagement usually covers some mix of these:

• Technical SEO: making sure Google can crawl and load your site properly. That means page speed, mobile layout, broken links, duplicate pages and structured data (code that labels your business details for search engines).
• On-page and content: the words on your pages, your page titles and descriptions, and new pages or articles written to answer what your customers search for.
• Local SEO: your Google Business Profile, reviews, and consistent business details across directories. For most Derbyshire businesses serving a local area, this is where the quickest wins sit.
• Authority: earning links and mentions from other reputable websites, such as local press, suppliers, trade bodies and community sites.
• AI search: making sure tools like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity can find and cite your content.

When you get a quote, ask which of these it covers and which it doesn't. A cheap quote covering only one of them, sold as "full SEO", is the most common mismatch.

If you want to see how we cover these at Hempsall Digital, the SEO services page has the detail.

Eight questions to ask before you sign

1. Can you show me results for a business like mine?

Google suggests asking for examples of previous work and success stories, and then checking references by speaking to past clients directly. Ask for results with links to live websites, so you can see the business for yourself. A screenshot of a rising graph with the website name cropped out proves very little.

2. Who will do the work each month?

With a bigger agency, the person who sells to you is often not the person who works on your account. Ask for the name of whoever will handle your site, how experienced they are, and which parts of the work get outsourced. Then ask what happens if that person leaves.

3. What will you do in the first 90 days?

A good answer is specific to your business: an audit of your site, a list of fixes in priority order, and the searches they think you can realistically win. Google says a good SEO should be interested in your business and ask about your competitors, what makes you different, and how your customers currently find you. If they pitch a package before they've looked at your site, they're selling the same thing to everyone.

4. How will you report progress, and what will you measure?

Rankings alone are a weak measure. You want to see enquiries, calls, form fills and sales from organic search, alongside the searches you're appearing for. Ask to see a sample report. If it's forty pages of charts with no link to leads, that tells you what they think matters.

5. Will I own everything?

Your Google Analytics, Search Console and Google Business Profile should be set up under your email address, with the agency given access, never the other way around. Google Business Profile lets you add an agency as a manager who can edit your listing but can't remove you or delete the profile. The same applies to your website, domain and any content they write for you.

6. What's the contract length and notice period?

SEO takes months, so a minimum term is reasonable. What you want to avoid is a long lock-in with no break clause. Ask what the notice period is, what happens to work in progress if you leave, and what they hand over at the end.

7. How do you approach AI search?

Most agencies now sell some version of this, often under the labels AEO (answer engine optimisation) or GEO (generative engine optimisation). Google's hiring advice now asks whether an SEO's AI recommendations match Google's official guidance on optimising for generative AI. A sensible answer starts with solid SEO, because AI tools draw heavily on pages that already rank well, and then covers clear, well-structured content and making sure AI crawlers aren't blocked from your site. Be wary of anyone selling a secret AI formula.

We go into more detail on this in our AI search visibility service.

8. Whose rules do you follow?

Ask whether they follow Google Search Essentials and whether they back up their recommendations with Google's own documentation. Google suggests asking both. An honest SEO will be comfortable showing you where their advice comes from.

Red flags to walk away from

Most of these come straight from Google's own list of warnings.

Guaranteed rankings. No one can guarantee a top spot on Google. Google also warns against anyone claiming a "special relationship" with it or offering "priority submission". Neither exists.

Unsolicited emails. If an agency emails out of the blue saying your site "isn't listed in the major search engines", delete it. Google says it receives these emails itself.

Secrecy about what they're changing. You're responsible for what any company does to your website. If an SEO won't explain their changes, or produces misleading content on your behalf, your site can be demoted or removed from Google's results entirely. Ask for a log of every change.

Link schemes. Buying links or joining link networks breaks Google's spam policies. Google also says you should never have to link to your SEO from your own site.

Wanting full control before they've earned it. If an agency offers an audit, Google's advice is to give read-only access to Search Console at that stage. In practice, that means adding them as a restricted user, which lets them view most of your data without changing settings.

Location pages with the town name swapped. Search "SEO Derby" and look at who's behind the results. Some are national agencies running near-identical pages for hundreds of towns. Where an agency is based matters less than whether they know your market, but a page that's the same as its Nottingham and Leicester versions with one word changed shows you how they'd build pages for you.

How much does SEO cost?

The most widely quoted benchmark is Ahrefs' survey of 439 SEO providers. It's global and priced in US dollars, so treat it as a rough guide. The headline figures:

• The average monthly retainer across everyone surveyed was $2,917.
• Local SEO averaged $1,557 a month.
• Freelancers averaged around $1,349 a month and agencies around $3,209.
• The most common single price band was $500 to $1,000 a month, charged by 23% of providers.

The spread is wide because the work is different. At the lower end you're buying a few hours a month. Before comparing prices, ask each provider for a scope that separates their fee from content writing, development work and tools, so you can compare like with like.

For a figure in pounds: SEO retainers at Hempsall Digital start at £250 a month. I also do one-off audits for businesses that would rather have a prioritised list of fixes and handle the work themselves.

How long before you see results?

Longer than most people expect. In Ahrefs' 2025 study of newly published pages, only 1.74% reached Google's top 10 within a year. Counting only English pages with real content, the figure was 6.11%. The pages already sitting in the top 10 are old: 72.9% of them are more than three years old, and the average number one result is five years old.

Ahrefs also found that pages which hadn't reached the top 10 after about six months rarely got there without being updated. Ask any agency how often they go back and update the pages they've already published.

That doesn't mean waiting a year in silence. Early progress shows up in Search Console as impressions (the number of times your site appears in results) before it turns into clicks. Ask any agency how they'll show you that progress in the first few months.

The site I mentioned at the top followed that pattern. Months of fixes came before much changed in the numbers, then growth was steady, reaching 10 to 15 clicks a day by the end of the first year.

A quick checklist

• They've asked about your business, competitors and customers before quoting
• They've shown results for similar businesses, with live websites you can check
• You know the name of the person doing the work
• The quote lists what's included and what isn't
• Your analytics, Search Console and Business Profile stay in your name
• The contract has a clear notice period
• They cite Google's own documentation for their recommendations
• No ranking guarantees, no link buying, no secrecy

Frequently asked questions