Top 25 Most Visible SEO Agencies in the UK According to Searchmetrics

Most people in the industry know not to judge an SEO company by their own rankings but there are still a lot of clients out there that choose an SEO agency by searching on Google for "seo" or "seo agency". We thought it would be interesting to see exactly which SEO agencies had the most visibility according to the well known Searchmetrics tool.

Searchmetrics calculates a visibility score for all sites based on their ranking across a very broad range of keywords (they track millions) and the search volume for that keyword and is a much fairer comparison than just looking at a handful of generic keywords.

We've compiled the data below based on this weeks visibility (11th July 2013) and also added a comparison from 5th January 2012 to show how much things have changed in the past 18 months. There are a couple of important notes about the data:

• We take no responsibility for the accuracy of this data, the numbers are from searchmetrics (we wish they did a quarterly award like Hitwise)
• We merged branded3.com & blogstorm.co.uk last year so we added the visibility for both sites together for January 2012 to get a fair comparison
• Some SEO agencies have changed domains and/or rebranded in the past 18 months so we have taken that into account and used the old domain for the 2012 figure and the new one for the 2013 figure
• Some companies (like Bronco & davidnaylor.co.uk) have a blog and a main website (like we used to) so we have added those figures together
• If anything on this list is incorrect or somebody is missing please let us know in the comments and we will update the post

It's really great to see how alive the SEO industry is with lots of brand new companies doing really well in the rankings. Branded3 is the most visible on the list this week but we face stiff competition from agencies that have only been around a few months and are already seeing great rankings.

If there is a lot of interest in this we might update the list once a month or so. All feedback welcome.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 9:31am ON Wednesday, 10 July 2013

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

• Crazy to see that Distilled have dropped so significantly, considering they promote content marketing so heavily.

• Also I wonder if many of those new ones will still be there in 3 months!

• site-wide footer links on client websites and 0 comment blogs don't appear to be cutting it any more :o

• I was thinking exactly the same thing Butler!

• Proof spam still does work!

• Will be interesting too see how many are around in 12 months, or have a new name once more =)

• Well now, that's interesting. I haven't dug into the breakdown, but I can tell you that our organic *traffic* (which is more important to me than "visibility") is *up* by about 140% over the time period you reference.

  Eh. Whatever.

• See my stand-alone comment – I haven't dug into what the visibility breakdown has done, but our organic *traffic* is up strongly so I'm not too bothered.

• Hey – we switched TLD not long ago, hence the drop. Interestingly, very few of our top referring keywords (via ga) are in the search metrics data set (~10%), so the data's not representative. Finally, the seo keywords drove horribly crappy leads, so I'm quite relieved to not have that traffic. Our business is primarily generated by recommendations and speaking (incidentally I'm writing this after speaking at Mozcon, a conference in Seattle from Moz), and we're just as focused on the US market (from our offices in San Francisco) as we are on UK growth. We're up on revenue at around 110% YOY.

  Thanks Patrick!

• Nice and shocking at some point to see such big players like distilled, seogadet are accruing at the bottom of the list. Little confused whether stats are perfect or not, as Google is providing more and more complex personalized search results per user.

• It's fun to see every company mentioned commenting on this explaining their stuff – ego bait at its classic Patrick, you're bound to get at least 28 comments, likely even links from like half of them :) on a serious note though, surely it is difficult to come up with some plausible way of measuring an SEO company's size, reach, brand awareness or success so it takes us right to the opening paragraph of this post – it's far from search visibility alone.

• Fair enough. We used to use Sistrix and I always took the figures with a mountain sized pile of salt.

• I was thinking about it since last week.

  If I were a company looking for an SEO, would I trust one that isn't ranking well? Right?

  :)

• On the other hand, it may appear that the agency in question is spending all their time working on the clients rather than trying to rank themselves.