What Add People is built for
Add People describes itself as “the digital marketing agency built for ambitious SMEs”, with jargon kept to a minimum, and offers SEO, pay-per-click, social advertising, ecommerce, digital PR and link building, conversion rate optimisation and its own AI tools. Their site emphasises flexibility — “you only pay for what you need to hit your goals” — and a free consultation and quote with no pressure to take it.
That is a genuinely strong fit for a business that needs several channels working together and one supplier accountable for all of them: an ecommerce brand running ads and organic together, or a company that wants PPC turned on this month while SEO builds. Breadth is the product, and it is a real one.
What a local SEO specialist is built for
A local specialist covers far less ground. No PPC, no social advertising, no ecommerce. The whole discipline is getting a business found in its own area: the Google Business Profile, the map pack, reviews, citations, service and location pages, and the website work that supports them.
That narrowness is the point when your problem is local. A plumber in Luton, a clinic in Bath or a garage in Doncaster does not usually need six channels — they need to appear in the three results a nearby customer sees, and that is a specific body of work with its own failure modes: wrong primary categories, service-area listings set up as shopfronts, duplicates splitting reviews, and profiles nobody has finished.
The comparison that actually matters
- Breadth: a multi-channel agency covers PPC, social and ecommerce as well as SEO. A local specialist does not, and will tell you to go elsewhere for them.
- Depth on local: a specialist works on map-pack visibility, profile health and review routines as the main job, not as one line in a wider plan.
- Who does the work: ask both. In any agency, the person who sells is rarely the person who delivers — the question is whether you can speak to whoever does.
- Reporting: ask both for a month's deliverables and the number of enquiries produced. This separates good suppliers from bad far more reliably than size does.
- Pricing model: Add People publishes indicative starting prices on its site; we quote from a free audit instead, because a driving instructor and a multi-site dental group need very different work.
When to switch, and when not to
The reason to move to a specialist is a mismatch, not a grievance: you are paying for a broad package but the only thing you actually need is local visibility, and the local work is the part that gets least attention. That is a common and legitimate reason to change.
The reasons not to move are worth saying too. If the campaign is working, switching resets relationships and momentum for no gain. If you need PPC or social as well as SEO, a specialist genuinely cannot serve you and you would end up managing two suppliers. And if the real problem is that nobody answers the phone when enquiries arrive, no agency of any shape fixes that.
How we work, so you can compare directly
We do local SEO only, for UK businesses, on rolling monthly agreements with 30 days' notice. The work happens on assets registered to you — your Google Business Profile, your website, your citations — and they stay with you if you leave. Pricing is quoted from a free audit rather than published as a package rate.
We cannot guarantee a position on Google, and neither can anyone else, because results vary by searcher location and change constantly. What you should expect from us or from any alternative is a monthly list of what changed and how many enquiries it produced.