UK search engine optimisation: In theory, optimising a site for the search engines in the UK is the same as optimising one anywhere else in the world. After all, the algorithms used by the search engines are the same regardless of which country you’re based in. And to a reasonable extent, this is true.
With UK search engine optimisation, there’s a fair amount of evidence that having a .co.uk domain can help slightly as this helps the search engines to realise that you are indeed UK based or at least aiming at our country.
The jury is out as to whether or not you need to have your domain hosted in the UK for a search engine optimisation advantage. Google and the other search engines are generally smart enough to realise that website hosting can be anywhere in the world, so it is generally thought that basing your servers in the UK is unlikely to give you much, if any, boost in rankings. But it can affect the speed of your site for UK based customers, depending on the website hosting service that you are using and whether they do actually host their sites in the UK.
After those considerations, you need to take into account UK versus US spellings of words. Which is why we’ve used optimisation rather than optimization. Even with the ever increasing Americanisation of spellings (especially with programs like Word often defaulting to US English), most Brits will use the British spelling to search. Google and the other search engines realise that the two spellings represent the same word but they also know where you are based and will take account of that in delivering their search results.
One other advantage to using a UK search engine optimisation service is that you don’t have to worry about time differences. You can be reasonably certain that the firm you are using will be available during UK working and waking hours, rather than having to turn yourself into a night owl just to be able to deal with a firm based elsewhere in the world.