If you’re a business owner in Southampton and you’re not getting the enquiries you should be from search — whether that’s Google, Google Maps, or the growing number of people asking ChatGPT and AI assistants for local recommendations — you’re in the right place.
The way people find local businesses has changed. Google now puts AI-generated answers above the traditional results. Customers ask Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT for recommendations instead of searching at all. And the local businesses that are set up for this new reality are the ones getting the calls. The ones that aren’t are wondering where their enquiries went.
My name is Sean Mullins. I’ve been helping businesses get found online since 2005 — before most people in Southampton had even heard the term SEO. I run SEO Strategy Ltd as a one-consultant operation: the person you talk to is the same person doing the work. No account managers, no junior staff, no templated audits. I’ve ranked businesses across Southampton in everything from plumbing and dog walking to law firms and enterprise software companies. I’ll tell you honestly whether I think I can help, and if I can’t, I’ll tell you that too.
How to Get Your Southampton Business Found Online
Before we talk about what a consultant can do, let me give you something genuinely useful. Whether you hire me or not, these are the foundations that every local business in Southampton needs to get right. If you do nothing else, do these.
Claim and Complete Your Google Business Profile
If you haven’t claimed your Google Business Profile (the listing that shows up in Google Maps and the local results), stop reading and go do that now at business.google.com. It’s free, and it’s the single most important thing you can do for local visibility.
Once you’ve claimed it, actually complete it. Every field. Your business name (exactly as it appears on your signage — don’t stuff keywords in), your address, phone number, website, opening hours, the categories that describe what you do. Add real photos — not stock images, actual photos of your business, your team, your work. Write a proper description. Set your service area if you go to customers rather than them coming to you.
Then keep it active. Post updates regularly — Google notices when a listing is alive versus abandoned. Answer questions that come in. This isn’t a “set it and forget it” task.
Make Sure Your Details Are Consistent Everywhere
Here’s something most business owners don’t think about: not everyone uses Google to find your business. Some people use Apple Maps (every iPhone user who asks Siri). Some use Bing (which powers Cortana, Alexa, and DuckDuckGo). Others check Yell.com or Thomson Local. And increasingly, people ask AI assistants that pull from multiple sources.
If your phone number on Google is different from the one on Yell, or your address on Apple Maps is your old premises, that’s confusing for customers and it’s confusing for search engines. They lose confidence in your listing when the details don’t match up.
Go and check your details on these — it takes an hour and it’s free:
Google Business Profile — business.google.com
Bing Places for Business — bingplaces.com
Apple Maps — mapsconnect.apple.com
Yell.com — still one of the most authoritative UK business directories
Thomson Local — thomsonlocal.com — you might remember the blue book by the phone; they’re still going, still free to list on
Facebook — even if you don’t use it for marketing, make sure your business details are correct
Same name, same address, same phone number, same website URL. Everywhere. It sounds simple because it is — but I audit businesses every week where this hasn’t been done, and it’s silently costing them visibility.
Get Your Website Basics Right
You don’t need an expensive website. You do need one that tells Google — and your customers — what you do and where you do it. The minimum:
One page per service you offer. If you’re a plumber who does boiler installations, emergency callouts, and bathroom fitting, those should be separate pages, not one page that tries to cover everything. Each page should mention Southampton (or whatever areas you serve) naturally in the text.
Your location in the page title. “Boiler Installation Southampton | Smith Plumbing” tells Google exactly what the page is about and where you operate. “Our Services” tells Google nothing.
Don’t bury your contact details. Phone number visible on every page. Contact form that works. Address in the footer. Make it as easy as possible for someone to get in touch — every extra click you make them do is a potential customer lost.
Make sure it loads quickly on a phone. Most of your local customers will find you on their mobile. If your site takes five seconds to load because it’s full of unoptimised images or unnecessary plugins, they’ll hit the back button and go to your competitor. Test yours at pagespeed.web.dev — it’s free and it’ll tell you exactly what’s slowing it down.
Reviews: Get Them, Respond to Them
Google reviews are one of the strongest signals for local rankings, and they’re the first thing most customers look at before deciding to contact you. Don’t be shy about asking for them. If you’ve done a good job for someone, ask. Most people are happy to help — they just don’t think to do it without a prompt.
Just as importantly, respond to every review. Thank the positive ones specifically (not a generic “thanks for your review”). Address negative ones professionally and constructively. Google watches this. Customers watch this even more closely. How you handle a bad review tells potential customers more about your business than ten five-star ones.
Create Content That Helps Your Local Audience
You know your trade better than anyone. Share that knowledge. A Southampton electrician writing a straightforward guide to “What to Do When Your Fuse Board Trips” is creating content that helps real people and signals to Google that you’re a genuine expert in your field. It doesn’t need to be long or fancy — just genuinely useful.
Blog posts, FAQs, guides to common problems in your trade — this is content that attracts visitors who are actively looking for help, and a percentage of those visitors will become customers. It also gives AI tools like ChatGPT something to reference when someone asks for recommendations in your area.
When the Basics Aren’t Enough
Everything above is free, it’s practical, and any business owner can do it. For some businesses — particularly those in less competitive sectors or smaller areas — that might be all you need. Genuinely. I’d rather you did these things well than paid anyone for SEO before the foundations are in place.
But there are situations where DIY hits a ceiling:
Your sector is dominated by aggregator sites. If you’re a tradesperson in Southampton, you’re not just competing against other plumbers — you’re competing against Checkatrade, Bark, MyBuilder, and Rated People, all of which have massive domain authority and spend millions on SEO. Breaking through to genuine Map Pack visibility against that requires more than good basics.
There are technical problems you can’t see. Your site might have issues that are invisible to you but obvious to Google: crawl errors, duplicate content, broken links, slow server response, missing schema markup. These are the things that keep a perfectly good website from ranking — and they require specialist tools and knowledge to diagnose.
You’ve done the basics and plateaued. You’re on page two, but can’t seem to break through to page one. You’re getting some calls from Google, but not as many as you should be. The gap between “good enough” and “genuinely competitive” is where strategic SEO makes the difference.
You want to be found in AI search, not just Google. This is the newest challenge, and it’s the one almost nobody is helping local businesses with yet.
The Way People Find Local Businesses Is Changing
Here’s something I want every Southampton business owner to understand, because it’s going to affect every one of you:
A growing number of your potential customers will never type into Google at all. They’ll ask ChatGPT, “Who’s a good plumber in Southampton?” They’ll ask Perplexity, “What solicitor should I use for a drink driving charge in Hampshire?” They’ll ask Siri or Alexa, and get an answer pulled from Bing and Apple Maps rather than Google.
And Google itself has changed. For many searches now, Google puts an AI-generated answer right at the top of the page — above all the traditional results. That answer cites specific businesses and websites. If you’re not one of them, you’re below the fold before the page even loads.
This isn’t a future prediction. It’s happening right now. Search volume for terms like “GEO agency” (Generative Engine Optimisation — the practice of getting businesses cited by AI systems) has grown over 1,300% in the past year. The businesses that figure this out early have a genuine competitive advantage.
The good news? The foundations are the same things we’ve already talked about: consistent business details everywhere, genuine expertise demonstrated through helpful content, strong reviews, and proper structured data that tells AI systems exactly what your business does and where it operates. The businesses with the strongest fundamentals are the ones AI tools cite most confidently.
The three disciplines driving this shift have their own names in the industry — Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), AI Overview Optimisation (AIO), and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — but the labels matter far less than the outcome: making sure your business is the one that gets recommended, whether someone searches Google, asks ChatGPT, or queries Siri. We’re one of the only consultancies in the UK, let alone Southampton, that offers this as a dedicated service. Learn more about our AI optimisation services →
Sectors We’ve Ranked in Southampton
We’ve delivered Map Pack and local organic rankings for Southampton businesses across a genuine range of sectors. Not theoretical “we could do it” — actually done it, with measurable results:
SEO consultancy: Yes, we rank for “SEO agency Southampton” ourselves. This is the most competitive local term possible — every SEO company in the city is trying to rank for it. We’ve consistently held top positions, which is about as close to a real-world exam as local SEO gets.
Plumbing and trades: Competing against Checkatrade, Bark, MyBuilder, and Rated People for Map Pack visibility. These platforms have enormous domain authority. Getting an independent tradesperson above them requires precise GBP optimisation, targeted citation building, and a review strategy that outweighs the authority of national platforms.
Accountancy and financial services: A saturated field where dozens of similar practices compete for the same keywords. Differentiation comes through content strategy and local authority signals rather than just technical optimisation.
Dog walking and pet care: Battling platforms like Rover and Pawshake alongside local competitors. Review velocity and GBP activity make a significant difference in this sector.
Commercial cleaning and facilities: B2B local SEO where the buyer journey is longer and the keywords are more specific. Content that demonstrates expertise in specific environments (offices, medical facilities, schools) outperforms generic service pages.
Law firms: We work with solicitors on both local and national SEO, including specialist areas like motoring law. Legal SEO has unique challenges around E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) that generic agencies often don’t understand.
Enterprise software: Our work with B2B software companies has generated over 200 enterprise leads and contributed to more than £2M in pipeline — demonstrating that the same strategic principles that rank a local plumber can scale to international markets.
We’ve been getting Southampton businesses to page 1 since 2012. The Hair Lounge Totton, Daves Taxis, Dog Walker Southampton, RP Heating Solutions — all local businesses we’ve built websites for that continue to rank years after launch. Some of the sites we built over a decade ago still hold their page 1 positions today. See the full results on our local business SEO page.
How We Work
I’m not an agency. There’s no account manager, no junior doing the actual work while the senior consultant moves on to the next sales call. When you work with SEO Strategy, you work with me directly. That means:
The same person does the strategy and the implementation. I don’t hand you a PDF of recommendations and wish you luck. I build the solutions myself — technical fixes, WordPress development, schema markup, custom tools, content frameworks. The thinking and the doing come from the same person, which means nothing gets lost in translation.
Honest about what you actually need. If your Google Business Profile isn’t properly set up, I’m not going to sell you a £2,000/month retainer. I’ll tell you to fix the basics first. If I don’t think SEO is the right investment for your business right now, I’ll say that. I’d rather turn away work than take money I can’t justify.
Flexible engagement models. Some clients need a one-off audit to identify what’s holding them back. Some need ongoing monthly support. Some need a specific project — a migration, a new website build with SEO baked in, an AI visibility strategy. We structure the engagement around what you actually need, not around what generates the most recurring revenue for us.
Want to see if we’d be a good fit? Book a free 30-minute consultation → No obligation, no hard sell. We’ll talk about your business, what you’re trying to achieve, and whether I can genuinely help.
Because at the end of the day, there’s no point of a pretty website if no one can find it.