As for Peter’s request to find a local SEO firm in London, there is no practical necessity for doing so. As is often the case, many small business owners simply prefer to work with a reputable local company, if one exists. There’s no measurable advantage to that, aside from the peace of mind that comes from supporting another business in your local community.

I hope this helps to answer your questions.
Alysson´s last blog ..Choosing The Website Audit That Is Best For YOUR Needs

Was interested in your response to Peter Brown. Can a seo audit not be completed online? Why should Peter’s designated seo audit company have to be located in London? The reason I say this, whilst I would ideally wish to have seo audits of one or more of my own websites, the idea of providing that task to a local company here in South Florida would be my personal definition of insanity from a small business viewpoint.
Any feedback on this perspective would be much appreciated – even if you should show my apprehensions to be curiously idiosyncratic – or worse!

Thanks,

Andy D

Here are a couple of tips, though:

1) if you approach a company about having an audit done and they begin immediately trying to sell you additional services, be leery. High pressure sales tactics are usually an indication of relatively poor service in my experience.

2) run a basic META tag analysis on the company’s website. You may have no idea what the analysis really means, but low relevancy scores and a lot of errors would be a pretty good indication that their understanding of basic on-site SEO might not be what it should be. And if they don’t understand and incorporate the basics into their own site, well…I don’t think I need to elaborate.

3) here in the US we have some consumer advocacy organizations (like The Better Business Bureau – or BBB). I’m sure something similar exists in the UK. I’d encourage you to check out any company you’re considering working with to audit or optimize your site.

I do know of some firms and individuals in the UK, but don’t know if they’re in London specifically. I’ll put some feelers out and get back to you if I find anyone.

If only more people would use a seo friendly “CMS” like Wordpress, they would be a lot better of. Normally the sites are quite simple.

But if you use a traditional SEO unfriendly CMS – you really need the adwise from the SEO audit.

One thing is for sure – if they don’t know the basics, they sure don’t understand the more technical and involved aspects of SEO!