SEO strategy breakdown for ‘web design agency london’

How to rank top of Google for the keyword ‘web design agency London’.

When targeting a keyword in SEO, it’s essential to analyse the SEO strategies of the top ranking websites. This way we can determine exactly what is needed to take the number one position.

The keyword “web design agency London” targets a high-intent audience searching for web design services in one of the most competitive business hubs in the world.

The cost of a new website can be anything from £2,000 up to £100,000 or more, so with 1,000 monthly searches, this keyword has significant commercial value. Users searching this keyword have likely completed their research and are ready to hire a web design agency. There is no doubt that a website ranked in the top 3 positions will gain a steady stream of new clients through organic search.

So, what does it look like? As of December 2024, these are Google’s page one results:

Page one results

Website	Position	Landing Page
Kota	1	Home Page
The Web Kitchen	2	Home Page
Plug and Play Design	3	Home Page
Bond Media	4	Home Page
CB Website Design	5	Home Page
Net Dreams	6	Home Page
Web Design London	7	Home Page
Blue Whale Media	8	London Page
Artists Web	9	Home Page

The first thing that stands out, is with the exception of one result, they’re all home pages ranked on page one. This means it’s likely that all these companies are genuine web design agencies, based in London.

However, the presence of Blue Whale Media, who are actually based in Warrington, shows that you can rank on page one for ‘web design agency London’, without actually being based in London. They’ve achieved it by having a dedicated Web Design London landing page, which is a staple part of traditional SEO that clearly still works.

But to get under the hood of why these results are ordered this way, let’s do a simple comparison.

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Competitor comparison

A quick way to check see why Google has ordered results the way they have, is to compare the key metrics of the websites ranking on page one. This can shed light on how the algorithm views each website. The two biggest metrics Google looks for when determining a website’s authority, is volume of content and links.

Website	Pages Indexed	Referring Domains	Authority Score
kota.co.uk	208	857	33
thewebkitchen.co.uk	273	808	28
plugandplaydesign.co.uk	176	860	35
bondmedia.co.uk	124	371	25
cbwebsitedesign.co.uk	164	695	32
netdreams.co.uk	342	705	27
web-designlondon.co.uk	551	685	26
bluewhalemedia.co.uk	335	1500	31
artistsweb.co.uk	37	190	18
fitdesignldn.com	126	447	30

All the websites on page 1 for this keyword have a relatively low number of pages indexed. Most websites have a decent backlink profile, so backlinks appear to be an important metric in this sector.

KOTA has gained first position with the second highest Authority Score and the third largest number of Referring Domains. In terms of content volume, they are in fifth with just 208 pages.

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The brand

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Current SEO performance

KOTA is doing a good job with SEO and ranking exceptionally well in the web design agency sector, especially in London.

In total, the KOTA website ranks for 1,156 keywords, with 188 being on page one, and 73 in the top three. They are in first position nationally for ‘website design agency’, with 1300 monthly searches, and second for ‘web design agency’, with 2,900 searches.

They are first for ‘web design agency london’, digital agency london’, and ‘website agency london’ and more.

However, despite SEMRush claiming their organic visibility has a PPC equivalent of $16k per month, outside of web design agency their visibility is quite limited.

For example, alongside web design they offer branding services, but are ranking in 89th for the keyword ‘branding agency’, which has 1600 monthly searches. Similarly, ‘digital marketing agency London’ is ranked in 72nd position, which is another prominent service they offer.

So, they’re doing well for web design, but have a lot of work to do if they want to expand their reach.

Branded vs Non-Branded Traffic

According to SEMRush, KOTA has zero branded traffic. This seems odd for a branding agency, but six out of 10 of the websites on page one are displaying zero brand traffic, so they’re not alone.

Estimated Organic Traffic

According to SEMRush, KOTA’s keywords are pulling in around 4.5k monthly visitors. Looking at the history however, uncovers an anomaly.

Domain history

For a domain that’s been around since 2004, there seems to be surprising little activity prior to 2020.

If we look at the first entry on the Wayback Machine, we can see what is happening here:

Without further digging it’s difficult to say what happened here. Maybe Kings Oak Training Agency decided to pivot into web design around 2014. Or, maybe, an SEO purchased the expired domain and decided to use it’s history to gain an advantage on Google.

The practice of buying expired domains involves acquiring domain names that were previously registered and used but have since lapsed and become available for purchase. These domains often come with a history of backlinks, traffic, and authority that were built up during their previous ownership. SEO professionals purchase such domains to leverage their existing “link equity” (the SEO value of their backlink profile) and gain an advantage in search engine rankings.

It’s not clear what the startup history of KOTA is when looking through their website. There is a section celebrating 10 years of trading, 2013 – 2023, so they were formed before kota.co.uk expired.

It appears their original domain was kotacreative.co.uk. Kota is actually a city in India, so maybe this was the inspiration behind the name. They probably wanted kota.co.uk but it wasn’t available, but then, in 2014 it expired. It seems to have been parked until 2018, and by 2019 was officially the KOTA we see today.

It’s unlikely that the domain kota.co.uk had much authority when they bought it, because it was just a simple website that had been unchanged for 10 years. However, age is definitely a Google trust signal, so having a domain with a history going back to 2004 will be helping their SEO.

It may not be a coincidence, that not long after they started using the domain, their organic visibility increased.

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Website assessment

KOTA has a great website with all the bells and whistles you would expect from a high-end web design agency.

The home page opens with a bold brand message above the fold, ‘Rebel against boring’. It is accompanied by a brief introduction, and trust signals such as the Digital Agency Network and AWWWARDS.

More brand messaging follows, with their ‘three things in mind’ being Beauty, Thought and Impact.

KOTA has put a lot of effort into their brand messaging, which can be seen on other pages highlighting their culture, values and beliefs.

Services

Scrolling down, they animate through their core services, Web Development, Branding and Digital Marketing. These are accompanied by internal links through to other services like copywriting, strategy and motion graphics.

They have around 13 services pages in total, mainly related to branding and web development.

Case Studies

An Our Work section highlights their case studies. This showcases design and animation and it’s clear they’re designers at the very top of their game.

They have around 50 pages of case studies showcasing their work. This is all very high-end and promotes their business excellently.

They also have an ‘Our Results’ section, with data such as ‘70.8% increase in engagement’ and ‘83.14% increase in sales’. This is an excellent addition, as it provides tangible improvement for their clients and shows they aren’t just focused on how a website looks, but also how it performs.

An ‘Our Partners’ section has impressive brand logos such as Jamie Oliver, the British Red Cross, Matchroom, Diageo and more. This provides a huge trust signal both for potential prospects and for Google.

Blog

They have a Latest Article section with links through to latest blog posts. Their blog has around 125 posts, which is around 60% of the website. There are posts offering advice and tips, but most of it seems to be news and information about the company.

FAQs

They have an FAQ section, with helpful answers to typical customer questions. This is a great addition as it provides transparent information on their services and pricing structure. However, it is missing FAQ schema markup.

Footer

The footer has links to social media and target different sectors as well as a newsletter CTA. They have a link to their Privacy Policy, but no real E-E-A-T elements, such as office address, telephone number and company details.

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Technical SEO

Technical SEO is essential because it ensures a website is optimised for search engines to crawl, index, and rank it effectively. Factors like site speed, mobile-friendliness, structured data, and URL structure, can enhance user experience and help search engines understand the content better.

Page Experience

Google introduced Page Experience as a ranking factor in June 2021 as part of a broader algorithm update. Initially applied to mobile search, it incorporated signals like Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, and safe browsing. By February 2022, Google expanded Page Experience to include desktop search as well. While not the most significant ranking factor, it plays a crucial role in improving user experience and can give optimised websites a competitive edge.

The website performs well for Page Experience. It has an Largest Contentful Paint of 1.8 second, which is below the 2.5 seconds recommended by Google. It’s First Contentful Paint and Time to First Byte are also good and below the recommended thresholds. The only element it’s fail on is the Interaction to Next Paint (INP). The INP metric assesses responsiveness throughout the page lifecycle. KOTA has an INP of 421 milliseconds and Google states that an INP above 200 milliseconds and below or at 500 milliseconds means a page’s responsiveness needs improvement.

Site Issues

The technicality of their website overall is good. There are some broken links and other minor issues, but nothing that would majorly effect ranking positions, or that couldn’t be fixed relatively quickly.

On-Page SEO

Not surprisingly, their on page SEO is their weakest point. Nothing spoils a nice design more than keywords stuffed in headings and content. It hasn’t impacted the SEO on their home page, because clearly they are ranking in first position for ‘web design agency London’, however, it may be an indication into why they are struggling with overall organic visibility.

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Relevance

When creating an SEO strategy, we should analyse the relevance of competitors, and set a goal to make our website the most relevant result.

Relevance is probably the biggest metric Google looks for when ranking a website, because it wants to provide users with the most relevant search results.

Indexed Pages

KOTA has approximately 208 pages indexed on Google.* This ranks it fifth compared with competitors on page one in terms of content volume. It has approximately 160,407 words, making an average page word count of 771, again, fifth among its competitors.

Keyword Usage in Titles

• 6.35% of indexed pages contain variations of “web design” in the title (7th)
• 2.72% contain ‘agency’ in the title (4th)
• 3.81% contain ‘London’ in the title (2nd)

KOTA has a decent keyword density across page titles, however they are around the middle range of websites ranked on page one. They do have the second highest density for London, so this will be helping their relevance for London.

Keyword Usage Across Headings and Text

Only 1.29% of pages include the keywords either in headings of body text. This places KOTA 8th among competitors for content relevant to the keywords.

This tells us that KOTA’s website is definitely relevant to the search term ‘web design agency London’, but it’s not the most relevant. Looking at the numbers, their competitor, web-designlondon.co.uk is the most relevant, which is helped by their almost exact match domain. However, relevance alone won’t win you that first position. Trust and authority play a major role too.

*There was a time when a simple site search on Google (site:kota.co.uk) would tell you exactly how many pages are indexed, but this functionality has been removed or restricted. Search operators like intitle: and inurl: have also been restricted, so it’s getting more difficult for an SEO to assess competitor indexed pages. However, we can still build custom tools using Google’s API, and other tools like Screaming Frog can crawl a website and tell us how often keywords are used through headings and within the body content.

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Content strategy

All websites on page one for this keyword have a relatively low volume of content. It’s not unusual to see websites with thousands pages competing on page one, but all of these websites have less than a thousand pages, and most have less than 500. KOTA has 208 pages from what we can see, so the quality of content will be playing a big role.

KOT has four types of content.

• Company pages – pages about the company, values, culture etc. (approx 2%)
• Service pages – core services like web development, branding etc (approx 6.73%)
• Case studies – case studies of work completed (approx 24%)
• Blog – blog posts providing news and advice (approx 61%)

Almost a quarter of the website is dedicated to case studies, which is a huge trust signal and provides excellent unique content.

You would expect case studies to be the most helpful form of content for a web design agency, because it shows users and potential customers the work they produce.

Google also counts case studies as a big part of E-E-A-T, as it accounts for the Experience part of Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust. With this in mind, it’s work looking at how the page one results compare in terms of case studies:

Website	Case Studies	% of Website
kota.co.uk	50	24.04%
thewebkitchen.co.uk	110	40.29%
plugandplaydesign.co.uk	56	31.82%
bondmedia.co.uk	82	66.13%
cbwebsitedesign.co.uk	67	40.85%
netdreams.co.uk	211	61.70%
web-designlondon.co.uk	31	5.63%
bluewhalemedia.co.uk	137	40.90%
artistsweb.co.uk	12	32.43%
fitdesignldn.com	31	24.60%

KOTA is in seventh position for number of case studies and ninth for the percentage of their website dedicated to case studies. This means that case studies, although important, are not the main factor here because we know that KOTA are ranked first.

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E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness)

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. It’s a concept Google uses to evaluate the quality of content, particularly for pages that impact important decisions, like health, finance, or legal topics (YMYL – Your Money, Your Life).

• Experience: Demonstrates first-hand knowledge or involvement in a subject.
• Expertise: Shows professional or subject-matter expertise.
• Authority: Indicates recognition and credibility in the field.
• Trustworthiness: Reflects reliability, accuracy, and transparency.

In most competitive professional fields, establishing strong E-E-A-T signals is essential for ranking well and building trust with both users and Google.

Content Quality Signals

Identifying terms like research, study, data, and evidence within paragraphs can help assess how well content is supported by factual information. Signals that indicate content is based on solid research methodology rather than mere opinion, demonstrates a commitment to providing well-researched, authoritative information to users.

KOTA is strong in this area with 1.45% of content containing quality signals, second only to Plug and Play at 1.35%. This is significantly above the average, with most competitors showing between 0.65-0.85%.

Academic and Professional Credentials

Mentions of formal academic and professional qualifications within paragraphs can help establish the formal educational background and professional qualifications of the content creators or team members. This directly supports expertise claims and helps users trust the source of information. KOTA shows strong implementation here with 2.63% of their word count containing these signals, placing them in the top 3 among competitors. Only Net Dreams (3.37%) and CB Website Design (2.59%) show similar or higher levels of academic credential signals

Academic and Research Links

Outbound links to educational institutions and research organisations help demonstrate commitment to scholarly research and connections to authoritative sources. KOTA shows minimal implementation here at 0.01% of content, which is actually typical for the industry. Web Kitchen (0.12%) and Plug and Play (0.10%) lead in this area, while most others show similar or lower numbers.

Professional Association Signals

Connections to professional bodies and industry organisations demonstrate active participation in professional communities and adherence to industry standards, helping establish authority within specific fields. KOTA shows the highest implementation at 0.19% of content, well above the average of 0.08%. The next closest competitor is CB Website Design at 0.20%, while most others fall below 0.10%.

Authority & Trust Signals

Phrases like “featured in,” “award-winning,” and various forms of recognition or accreditation helps build trust with users and demonstrates industry standing. KOTA maintains a strong 0.18% presence of these signals. This puts them in line with Plug and Play (0.18%) but behind CB Website Design (0.27%) and Net Dreams (0.34%).

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Schema Markup

Person Schema: KOTA implements Person Schema on 57.69% of pages, placing them in the middle range. Web Kitchen leads with 88.64%, and Net Dreams shows 73.68% coverage. This suggests room for improvement in structured data about individuals.

Review Schema Types: KOTA shows no implementation of Review Schema Types (0%), which is actually common among competitors. Only Web Design London (53.72%), CB Website Design (99.39%), and Blue Whale (2.39%) have implemented this type of schema.

Organisation Schema: KOTAs Organisation Schema coverage is strong at 96.63% of pages, though this places them in the middle range. Plug and Play leads with 194.32% (multiple schemas per page), and Net Dreams shows 161.11% coverage.

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Off-Page SEO and link building

Backlinks act as endorsements from other websites and signal to search engines that content is valuable, credible, and worthy of ranking highly. High-quality backlinks, especially from relevant and authoritative sources, can significantly boost a website’s visibility in search results.

So far, KOTA hasn’t demonstrated anything that warrants their top position status compared to their competitors. Examining their backlink profile may throw some light into why Google has placed them first.

Current Backlink Profile

• Authority Score: 33
• Backlinks: 18k
• Referring Domains: 868

KOTA are ranked second for Authority Score and third for Referring Domains among the competitors ranking on page one. Blue Whale Media has the most referring domains by a long way at 1500, and Plug and Play Design has the highest Authority Score at 35.

There are a many nuances to backlinks and quantity is just part of the overall story. Quality plays a huge role in the strength of a backlink profile, as does the relevance of the websites linking.

It’s clear that the websites with the strongest backlink profiles are KOTA, Plug and Play Design and Blue Whale Media, so it’s worth examining their backlinks and seeing what sets them apart.

KOTA

Looking through the domains linking to KOTA, we can see they have a strong profile. They have high-authority, industry-specific backlinks from domains like HubSpot, Rock Content, Kinsta and Design Rush. They have a large number of backlinks from agency sites like Digital Agency Network and Clutch. They have a strong presence on design award platforms, specifically Awwwards where they have 2,220 backlinks.

Plug and Play Design

Plug and Play Design has a good mix of high-authority backlinks including Joomla, CSS Tricks and Moz. They are also featured on Awwwards, but with less links than KOTA. They have fewer total backlinks overall, but from generally higher quality sources.

Blue Whale Media

Blue Whale Media has lower domain authority on average compared to the others. They have a larger number of local and regional UK-based backlinks, many of which are from smaller business directories and listing sites. They have a higher quantity of directory links, which makes their profile potentially appear spammy. Although they have the most referring domains of all the websites ranking on page one, they have a diluted profile with a high percentage of low value, potentially toxic links.

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Social media

While Google doesn’t admit that social media activity is a direct ranking factor, it plays an essential role by amplifying brand visibility, increasing engagement, and driving traffic to a website.

KOTO

Facebook

• Followers: 1,000
• Activity: Approximately 9 posts per month
• Content Focus: Primarily behind-the-scenes, company news and promotional posts.

KOTO are quite active on Facebook and post approximately 9 times per month. Their posts have low engagement however, and although they appear to have a strategy, it could be stronger.

X (Twitter)

• Followers: 1095 (following 1899)
• Activity: 3 tweets per month
• Content Focus: Behind-the-scenes and news.

Their strategy on X is similar to Facebook but with less frequency. They’re keeping it ticking over, but again have low engagement.

LinkedIn

• Followers: 7k
• Activity: Frequent updates with the same mix of content types as Facebook.
• Content Focus: Behind-the-scenes, company news, promotional content

They are more active on LinkedIn. They have a good number of posts with varied content, but still have low engagement.

Instagram

• Followers: 4969 (following 257)
• Activity: 2-3 reels per month and approximately 9 posts per month
• Content Focus: Behind-the-scenes, company news, promotional content

They are active on Instagram, but again have relatively low engagement and posting the same content as their other channels.

Summary

KOTO are quite active across social media, but it appears they don’t have a clear strategy tailored for each platform. The same content is created, and then shared across all social media platforms, which isn”t unusual, but means they are not connecting with the nuances of each user base. This may be the reason why, despite regular posting, they have relatively low engagement across all channels.

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The Web Kitchen

Facebook

• Followers: 1,000
• Activity: Only two posts in 2024
• Content Focus: Company announcements.

The Web Kitchen has a Facebook page, but it appears to be abandoned. They have a handful of posts over the past few years, but apart from this, Facebook is not being updated at all.

X (Twitter)

• Followers: 816
• Activity: Not posted since 2023
• Content Focus: Company announcements.

Again, X appears to have been completely abandoned.

LinkedIn

• Followers: 1,000
• Activity: Only two posts, so not active.
• Content Focus: Company announcements.

They may be active behind the scene on LinkedIn, but they aren’t adding content or building engagement at all, with only two posts to their name.

Instagram

• Followers: 595
• Activity: Only 1 reel and 4 posts in 2024
• Content Focus: Company announcements.

Again, they have an Instagram but appear to have abandoned it.

Summary

Although the Web Kitchen have social media pages, they appear to be completely neglecting them. This is not advisable from a customer perspective, or if they are trying to accumulate social signals for SEO.

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Plug and Play

Facebook

• Followers: 502
• Activity: Only two posts in 2024
• Content Focus: Company announcements.

Plug and Play has a Facebook page, but this also appears to be abandoned. They have one post in the last two years and haven’t had any regular activity since 2021.

LinkedIn

• Followers: 6k
• Activity: Approx two posts per month.
• Content Focus: Company announcements.

They are more active on LinkedIn and appear to be posting monthly. However, they have very little engagement and no clear strategy.

Instagram

• Followers: 696
• Activity: 5 reels in 2024 and sporadic posts of one per month, or less.
• Content Focus: Company announcements.

They are updating Instagram, albeit rarely, and have very low engagement.

Summary

Plug and Play, like The Web Kitchen appear to have almost abandoned their social media pages. They’re most active on LinkedIn, but missing a huge opportunity to promote themselves and grow their audience.

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Does social media really make a difference in SEO?

In Bing’s Webmaster Tools, they state that they do indeed consider social media a ranking factor:

“Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results. The most obvious part it plays is via influence. If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals. These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.“

Google may not admit this, but that doesn’t mean that it too doesn’t take social signals into account when ranking websites.

Social media accounts with active engagement help establish authority and credibility in the eyes of users, so you would think it plays a role in E-E-A-T. Also, when a user visit a website via social media, they may be more likely to engage with the content.

Google has never explicitly confirmed that website engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, or click-through rate (CTR) are direct ranking factors. However, if their goal is to provide the best search results, then you would think they would have to take these metrics into account.

It’s all smoke and mirrors with Google, and all we can do as SEOs, is analyse, test and measure the results that we see with our own eyes.

In the case of KOTA, it looks as though their social signals may be the reason why they have just pipped that first position.

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Areas for improvement

There is definitely room for improvement for KOTA. If the reason why they’re beating Plug and Play and The Web Kitchen is because they have both abandoned their social media profiles, then KOTA’s first position is quite precarious.

I would advise KOTA not to have all their eggs in the web design basket. They’ve done great in cornering this niche, but branding, copywriting and digital marketing are all lucrative services that could be improved in terms of visibility.

They could easily put together a content strategy and add more volume to their website. Targeting audience pain points and keyword research, they could create helpful content that will build authority for the domain and increase long tail visibility for keywords related to all of their services.

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