Top UK seo companies
Patrick Altoft over at Blogstorm blogged earlier today about the NMA Annual Marketing Services Guide detailing the turnover and staff levels of 36 UK search agencies, so I headed over to the site and found what % breakdown was from SEO. As Patrick mentioned there are quite a few companies missing including Bronco.
The first column is the rank in order of SEO turnover, and the second column is the rank in terms of overall turnover.
| Company | Income from SEM | Staff | Income from SEO | Income from PPC | Income from other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bigmouthmedia | £12,628,070 | 105 | £7,324,280.60 | £4,167,263.10 | £1,136,526.30 |
| Forward3D | £5,539,607 | 55 | £276,980.35 | £4,985,646.30 | £276,980.35 |
| Jellyfish | £4,808,747 | 61 | £0.00 | £4,808,747.00 | £0.00 |
| Latitude | £4,986,430 | 93 | £1,545,793.30 | £3,141,450.90 | £299,185.80 |
| Greenlight | £6,633,939 | 98 | £4,113,042.18 | £2,520,896.82 | £0.00 |
| iCrossing | £7,368,977 | 100 | £4,052,937.35 | £2,210,693.10 | £1,105,346.55 |
| Unique Digital | £3,690,000 | 35 | £184,500.00 | £922,500.00 | £2,583,000.00 |
| Steak | £2,375,190 | 72 | £475,038.00 | £878,820.30 | £1,021,331.70 |
| VCCP Search | £1,163,462 | 14 | £290,865.50 | £698,077.20 | £174,519.30 |
| Propellernet | £2,268,210 | 20 | £1,587,747.00 | £680,463.00 | £0.00 |
| Agenda21 | £1,697,466 | 28 | £186,721.26 | £662,011.74 | £848,733.00 |
| Stickyeyes | £2,861,759 | 55 | £2,203,554.43 | £658,204.57 | £0.00 |
| Golley Slater Group | £2,108,048 | 255 | £210,804.80 | £632,414.40 | £1,264,828.80 |
| Summit Media | £1,484,902 | 68 | £222,735.30 | £593,960.80 | £668,205.90 |
| Equi-Media | £1,690,083 | 50 | £253,512.45 | £591,529.05 | £845,041.50 |
| I Spy Marketing | £1,537,388 | 35 | £538,085.80 | £538,085.80 | £461,216.40 |
| DBD Media | £779,522 | 12 | £272,832.70 | £506,689.30 | £0.00 |
| Artemis8 | £482,000 | 20 | £48,200.00 | £433,800.00 | £0.00 |
| Euston Digital | £489,539 | 9 | £24,476.95 | £406,317.37 | £58,744.68 |
| Harvest Digital | £1,153,479 | 33 | £115,347.90 | £403,717.65 | £634,413.45 |
| Sitelynx | £866,627 | 18 | £433,313.50 | £346,650.80 | £86,662.70 |
| SiteVisibility | £1,140,000 | 18 | £798,000.00 | £342,000.00 | £0.00 |
| Positive Digital | £958,888 | 19 | £287,666.40 | £287,666.40 | £383,555.20 |
| Guava | £953,209 | 46 | £400,347.78 | £257,366.43 | £295,494.79 |
| Tug | £461,636 | 12 | £230,818.00 | £230,818.00 | £0.00 |
| Lakestar Media | £598,393 | 27 | £155,582.18 | £197,469.69 | £245,341.13 |
| Leapfrogg Digital Marketing | £606,358 | 13 | £424,450.60 | £181,907.40 | £0.00 |
| Strange | £221,722 | 22 | £22,172.20 | £133,033.20 | £66,516.60 |
| Coast Digital | £745,680 | 27 | £111,852.00 | £111,852.00 | £521,976.00 |
| Further Search Marketing | £758,520 | 18 | £561,304.80 | £75,852.00 | £121,363.20 |
| SEOptimise | £308,848 | 7 | £216,193.60 | £46,327.20 | £46,327.20 |
| Vivid Lime | £209,690 | 25 | £20,969.00 | £31,453.50 | £157,267.50 |
| Web Marketing Group | £182,000 | 63 | £118,300.00 | £9,100.00 | £54,600.00 |
| iVantage | £30,139 | 8 | £6,027.80 | £9,041.70 | £15,069.50 |
| Tamar | £2,488,272 | 31 | £1,741,790.40 | £0.00 | £746,481.60 |
Edited at 17:08: made columns sortable (click the heading)
23 Comments
Jonathan Beeston - http://searchbeest.com
Good work Dave. A simple subtraction will get me to the number I’m interested in!
Ben Potter - http://www.leapfrogg.co.uk
Hey Dave, I think you highlight what I have always felt is a bit of a flaw with the method by which agencies are ranked; the fact it is on turnover. Vast sums of PPC click costs pass through many of the agencies listed above, which in turn artificially inflates their turnover figures…in some cases significantly. As far as I can recall when completing the form, NMA do not make it mandatory to reveal the split in revenue between media costs (such as PPC click charges) and actual agency fees for work delivered, consultancy, etc. Personally, I think this should be the case to give a more accurate picture of agency performance.
Allan Stewart - http://www.fireflyseo.com
To quote Dave’s mate Theo Pathetis, Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity.
Tim Bugnall
How come Epiphany arent on here Dave?
Sadie - http://www.shakeinteractive.com
You kinda missed out Shake Interactive….
Jonathan Beeston - http://searchbeest.com
@Ben These figures are based on income, not turnover. That changed last year I think. If you go back to the 2008 table you’ll see The Search Works at the top doing nearly £90m in turnover.
Ben Potter - http://www.leapfrogg.co.uk
@Jonathan thanks for the clarification. It is a change I had not noticed as our income/revenue is 100% fees for work delivered!
Amati - http://www.amatistudios.co.uk
Thanks for this, very interesting and revealing things. If nothing else I always like a good look cat company’s revenue streams!
Peter Young - http://www.holisticsearch.co.uk
I can’t help feeling the system is somewhat flawed given it doesnt take into account agencies with significant search teams which may not focus primarily on search as a whole ie Mediaedge, Mediavest, Brilliant etc
Perhaps the title a bit misleading as well eh Dave – particularly given the signficant volume of revenue from SEO for Jellyfish 🙂
Jonathan Beeston - http://searchbeest.com
I think your numbers are flawed Dave. The income figure is from search only, so you can’t deduce in the income from other activities.
So take Unique, for example, 25% comes from PPC, 5% from SEO. Therefore 25/30 of there stated income comes from PPC, £3,075,000, and 5/30 comes from SEO, £615,000.
For those of you complaining the list is incomplete, then next year just call NMA and they’ll send you an entry form…
Elle - http://thinklaptops.net/
I think this is just speculation because good companies will not want to glow.
Shane Quigley - http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk
Hi Dave,
Any reason you left us out the list? I’m getting paranoid? 🙂
Andrew@BloggingGuide - http://webuildyourblog.com
Congratulations to all who made it on the list. And if it’s flawed, I hope it gets fixed.
Steve Johnston - http://www.searchjohnston.co.uk
Hey Dave, add a column that divides their total turnover by the number of employees. That should prove an interesting comparison.
Rampage - http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org
Some of those numbers are just not impressive, imo.
How can you possibly only have £30k profit if you have 8 staff? Or £180k with 60 staff? If you can only make £3000 profit per year per staff member, I think its time to call it a day in seo 🙂
Scott Tehrani - http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk/
Hey,
We’ve contacted NMA these numbers are not correct!
The WebMarketing Group Number =
June 2009 – £2,759,868
June 2008 – £2,150,628
It’s all at companies house……..
We have 63 employees across 4 sites Harrogate, Leeds, Sheffield and Peterbrough.
Dave – could you update your tables?
Thanks.
Rampage - http://www.searchengineoptimisation.org
Hehe, I didn’t see how it would have been possible to make so little with so many employees.
Scott Tehrani - http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk/
Haha yeah…….otherwise we’d all be off applying to be road sweepers! (no offense).
Jim Jinright - http://jimjinright.info
It would be interesting to contrast the U.S. firms with the U.K. firms to get a big picture view. I have many clients that operate both in the U.K. and the U.S. so understanding who ranks in the world of SEO would be quite interesting.
Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za
Thanks for the list, really interesting to look through their websites and see how and what they do 🙂
Henry Gilbert - http://www.alliancetec.com
Hi, could you write an article on the top 10 UK SEO freelancers. And could you kindly consider adding me to the list?
You know, I try very hard to be the best. I don’t know what metric you would use though. But honestly my own metric is using bronco.co.uk SEO results as my benchmark.
Well done on the ‘xxxxxxx’ keyword – first page result for http://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk
Is it still there? It was at the time.
I never managed 1 keyword, my record is 2 keywords for a Page 1 result.
Still SEO results is not the end-game, but tripling client’s profit & success (that’s what I am pretty good at)
Watch out for my next SEO project a ‘xxxxxxxxxxxxxx’ that should compete head-to-head with http://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk (which I believe you are also behind?) .. Ahh .. I am going to enjoy that 🙂
edit by Dave Naylor : dude not cool to mention possible clients etc and yes I was “behind” the second one 🙂 have fun
SEO Shredder - Dom Zimmerman
Hi Dave, great post – very interesting in here and sorely needed for the UK market.
PPCharlie - http://revaxmedia.com
Do you have a latest version? would be very interesting to see how much people like Koozai turn over.