How Much Do UK Councils Spend on SEO and Digital Marketing?

Independent Data Report

Businesses are not the only ones being sold SEO and digital marketing services. So are local councils, using public money. Unlike most private companies, councils are legally required to publish exactly what they spend it on.

We pulled that data ourselves and searched ten English councils, close to 1.5 million individual payment records, for genuine, named payments to genuine, named agencies. We found £232,562.30 in confirmed spend across six councils, and nothing at all in the other four. Just as importantly, we’ve been strict about what that number actually contains: only a small slice of it is spend with pure SEO agencies. Most of it is wider digital marketing, social campaigns and full-service agency work, and this report is explicit about which is which. Everything is sourced from each council’s own published transparency data, with every dataset linked at the end.

How We Did This

Under the Local Government Transparency Code, English councils publish details of every payment over £500 made to suppliers (some, like Sheffield and Rochdale, go further and publish over £250), updated monthly or quarterly depending on the authority. This data is public and free to download, and in principle, searchable by anyone.

In practice, searching it properly is harder than it sounds. Council portals rarely let you filter by keyword. Files are published in inconsistent formats, from tidy CSVs to Excel workbooks with different column names in every authority. The largest run to tens of thousands of rows a month. We built a search across ten English councils, covering close to 1.5 million individual payment records, and checked every one against a list of terms covering SEO, PPC, social media and digital marketing, plus known agency names. Where a supplier name looked ambiguous, we checked what the company actually does before counting it, and we’ve excluded several large payments on exactly that basis (explained in full below).

Council	Data covers	Records checked
Camden	2010 to 2026 (full published history)	414,847
Sheffield	August 2025 to July 2026 (£250+ threshold)	339,786
Birmingham	April 2024 to May 2026 (full published window)	260,407
Rochdale	6 monthly files, Feb 2025 to Mar 2026 (£250+ threshold)	182,498
Leeds	January to June 2026	149,099
Westminster	April 2025 to March 2026 (full financial year)	79,152
Manchester	January to June 2026	67,204
Durham	6 non-consecutive months, 2025 to 2026	3,110
Nottinghamshire	3 non-consecutive months, 2025 to 2026	1,707
Bristol	May 2026	418
Total		1,498,228

Data pulled and checked in August 2026. Full source links for every dataset are listed at the end of this article.

What We Found

Across the ten councils, we confirmed £232,562.30 in payments to companies whose business is SEO, digital advertising, social media or digital-inclusive marketing. Six councils account for all of it: Sheffield, Rochdale, Westminster, Leeds, Camden and Birmingham. Manchester, Bristol, Durham and Nottinghamshire returned nothing that matched our search in the windows we checked.

That headline figure does not include two much larger payments we found and chose not to count: £232,656.28 from Birmingham to Purplex Marketing and £101,329.29 from Westminster to Conductor Marketing. Both looked like exactly what this report is about, until we checked what the money was actually for. We explain both exclusions in full below, because we think showing that working is the whole point of a report like this.

Sheffield: £123,319.56 in One Year

The largest confirmed total in our sample, from a full continuous year of data at the most generous publication threshold (£250 rather than £500). Three suppliers make it up. Diva Creative, a Sheffield agency specialising in behaviour-change marketing campaigns, was paid £79,146.48 across 10 payments, all logged against health programmes under marketing consultancy codes. Sojern, a global travel advertising platform that runs programmatic display, social and metasearch campaigns for destinations, received a single £30,000 payment coded to marketing consultants. And OML Media, a local social media management company, was paid £14,173.08 across 9 payments coded to advertising and internet services.

One Sheffield supplier we found and did not count: Quba, a Sheffield digital agency that does sell SEO and PPC, received £41,518.96, but every payment was coded by the council as website design. We counted only what the council’s own records support.

Rochdale: £47,694.99 in Six Months

Rochdale is unusual in publishing a purpose against every payment, which makes classification far less guesswork. STM Agency, a Manchester creative and digital agency whose STM Reach arm sells SEO, PPC and paid social, and which lists Rochdale Town Hall among its clients, was paid £44,444.99 in payments coded to marketing expenditure and publicity. We deliberately left out a further £7,000 or so of STM invoices coded to printing and reprographics. The Manc, the Manchester social media publisher with an audience of over two million, was paid £3,250 by the council’s Economy Directorate under marketing expenditure, which is consistent with sponsored social content promoting the borough.

Westminster: £37,200 in a Full Financial Year

Two suppliers. The Media People, a London media buying agency whose services include SEO, paid search and programmatic advertising, with a specialism in property marketing, was paid £33,700 across 3 payments through the council’s housing arm. And CAN Digital Solutions, about which much more below, was paid £3,500 under publicity, promotions and advertisement by the Public Protection and Licensing department.

Leeds: £10,500 in Six Months

All four confirmed Leeds payments, covering January to June 2026, went to CAN Digital Solutions and were logged under advertising. A fifth payment to the same company, £8,607.51, was logged under SEN Placements, special educational needs support, so we left it out of the total. Matching a company name isn’t enough on its own. You still have to check what the money was actually for.

Camden: £9,647.75 Since 2010

Camden publishes its full transaction history back to 2010, the longest window of any council in our sample. Across 16 years, we found five matching payments: £1,050 to The SEO Works in July 2019, £1,675 and £5,122.75 to OWA Digital in 2021 and 2022, and £1,800 to CAN Digital Solutions across 2023 and 2025.

Birmingham: £4,200 Confirmed

Bowler Hat, a Birmingham SEO agency, was paid £4,200 across 6 payments between July and October 2025, logged against the council’s Clean Air Zone programme. Birmingham’s data also contains the single largest payment we found anywhere, £232,656.28 to Purplex Marketing, which we’ve excluded from every total in this piece. The full reasoning is in its own section below.

Manchester, Bristol, Durham and Nottinghamshire: Nothing Confirmed

Four of the ten councils returned nothing that matched our search: six months of Manchester’s data, one month of Bristol’s, and the sampled months of Durham’s and Nottinghamshire’s. That’s not proof these councils spend nothing on SEO or digital marketing. It’s proof we couldn’t find it under the terms and company names we searched, in the windows we checked, which is a narrower claim and worth being precise about. One Manchester near-miss is instructive: a supplier called “Digital Advantage” totalling over £180,000 turned out, on inspection, to be payments for children’s home care and third-party placements, nothing to do with marketing. We excluded it rather than pad the total with a coincidental company name.

What Counts as SEO, and What Is Wider Digital Marketing

A single headline number would flatter this data. “Councils spent £232,562.30 on SEO” would be a misleading sentence, because most of that money did not go to SEO agencies. So instead of one number, here are three, and we’d encourage anyone citing this report to use the tier that matches their claim.

Tier	Suppliers	Total
Pure SEO agencies: companies whose core business is search engine optimisation	The SEO Works (Camden), OWA Digital (Camden), Bowler Hat (Birmingham)	£12,047.75
Digital advertising and social campaigns: paid digital media, programmatic and social, but not necessarily SEO	CAN Digital Solutions (Camden, Leeds, Westminster), Sojern (Sheffield), OML Media (Sheffield), The Manc (Rochdale)	£63,223.08
Full-service marketing agencies with digital arms: agencies that sell SEO/PPC/social among other services; the digital share of these invoices is unverifiable from council records	The Media People (Westminster), STM Agency (Rochdale), Diva Creative (Sheffield)	£157,291.47

The honest reading: confirmed spend with pure SEO agencies across ten councils and 1.5 million payment records is £12,047.75, a strikingly small number. The bigger money is in digital advertising, social campaigns and full-service agency relationships where SEO may or may not be part of the deliverable. That in itself says something about how councils buy this work: rarely as a standalone “SEO contract”, usually bundled inside something broader, which is exactly what makes it so hard to scrutinise.

The Vendor That Keeps Showing Up

If this report has a single strongest finding, it’s this. One supplier, CAN Digital Solutions Ltd, appeared in three of the ten councils we checked: Camden (£1,800 across two payments in 2023 and 2025), Leeds (£10,500 across four payments in the first half of 2026) and Westminster (£3,500 in March 2026). CAN Digital Solutions trades as the Council Advertising Network, and its own description of its business is almost uncannily on the nose. It manages, in its own words, “cost-effective, data-driven digital campaigns for local councils, NHS trusts and other public sector organisations.”

Finding the same specialist vendor in three unrelated councils, in a sample covering roughly 3% of English local authorities, is a far more useful data point than any single large payment. It suggests a real, replicable pattern in how public bodies buy digital campaigns, not a one-off relationship.

“A company built around selling to councils isn’t a red flag by itself. Everyone specialises in something. But the second the pitch becomes ‘the same package for every council’, that’s the same copy-paste approach I’d flag in a private-sector proposal. Being a public body doesn’t earn you less scrutiny, it should earn you more.”

Andy McLoughlin, Founder of Before You Invest

Which Suppliers Got Paid, and by Whom

Twelve supplier-council relationships across six councils account for the entire £232,562.30. CAN Digital Solutions is the only supplier appearing in more than one council’s books.

What We Found and Deliberately Excluded

Two payments we found were each larger than several of our confirmed councils combined. Neither is in any total in this piece, and the reasoning matters more than the numbers.

We also left out Quba’s £41,518.96 in Sheffield (coded as website design), around £7,000 of STM Agency invoices in Rochdale coded to printing, an £8,607.51 CAN Digital Solutions payment in Leeds coded to SEN placements, and Manchester’s £180,000 “Digital Advantage” coincidence. Every one of these would have made the headline bigger. None of them would have made it more honest.

The Numbers at a Glance

Council	Time period	Confirmed spend	Records checked
Sheffield	Aug 2025 to Jul 2026	£123,319.56	339,786
Rochdale	6 months, Feb 2025 to Mar 2026	£47,694.99	182,498
Westminster	Apr 2025 to Mar 2026	£37,200.00	79,152
Leeds	Jan to Jun 2026	£10,500.00	149,099
Camden	2010 to 2026	£9,647.75	414,847
Birmingham*	Jul to Oct 2025	£4,200.00	260,407
Manchester	Jan to Jun 2026	£0 confirmed	67,204
Bristol	May 2026	£0 confirmed	418
Durham	6 months sampled	£0 confirmed	3,110
Nottinghamshire	3 months sampled	£0 confirmed	1,707
Total		£232,562.30	1,498,228

*Excludes £232,656.28 paid to Purplex Marketing via Shelforce. Westminster excludes £101,329.29 paid to Conductor Marketing. See “What We Found and Deliberately Excluded” above.

What This Says About the UK SEO Industry

A few things stood out while we were working through close to 1.5 million rows of council spending, worth pulling out on their own, separate from the headline figures.

A specialist public-sector niche already exists

CAN Digital Solutions, trading as the Council Advertising Network, is not a generalist agency that happened to pick up council work. Its entire proposition is built around selling digital campaigns specifically to councils, NHS trusts and other public bodies, and it appeared in three of the ten councils we checked. That is a strong hint this is a genuine, established niche with its own sales relationships and procurement playbook built around how public bodies buy.

Almost nobody buys “SEO” as a line item

Across 1.5 million payments, confirmed spend with pure SEO agencies came to £12,047.75. The rest of what we found was digital advertising platforms, social media publishers and full-service agencies where SEO sits somewhere inside a broader retainer. If you’re trying to work out what the public sector pays for SEO specifically, the honest answer is that the category barely exists as a distinct purchase. It’s bundled, which means it’s invisible, which means it’s unscrutinised.

Public procurement frameworks make repeat business easier to win, not harder to scrutinise

Councils increasingly buy marketing and communications services through pre-approved frameworks, arrangements like ESPO or regional equivalents, that let an authority appoint a supplier without running a fresh competitive tender each time. Frameworks exist for good reasons. They reduce procurement overhead and give councils some assurance a supplier has been vetted. But they also mean a single agency that gets onto the right framework can pick up repeat business across many public bodies with comparatively light scrutiny on each individual contract, which is a plausible part of how a specialist like CAN Digital Solutions ends up in three different councils’ books.

Even legally-mandated transparency does not mean standardised categorisation

Every council in our sample complies with the Local Government Transparency Code. Only Rochdale publishes a purpose against each payment. Everywhere else, Purplex’s payments sit inside a joinery trading account, Bowler Hat’s inside a Clean Air Zone programme, The Media People’s inside a housing budget. There is no “digital marketing” category to filter by, because the transparency requirement is about publishing payments, not about publishing them in a form that is genuinely searchable by subject. It is the same structural problem private buyers face with agency invoices: the money is accounted for, but not in a way that tells you what you actually got for it. Just at public-sector scale.

What We’d Predict Happens Next

Based on what this data shows, and where both public procurement and search are heading, a few predictions:

• More scrutiny, not less. Data journalism tools are getting better at exactly this kind of cross-referencing, and local reporters are increasingly comfortable querying transparency data rather than just filing FOI requests. Expect more stories like this one, from more outlets, over the next few years.
• The public-sector specialist niche will keep growing. A supplier built specifically around how councils procure has a structural advantage over generalist agencies bidding opportunistically. Expect more agencies to position themselves explicitly around public-sector frameworks, following the model CAN Digital Solutions has already established.
• GEO and AI-visibility line items will start appearing in council contracts, with the same lack of scrutiny. As “AI search visibility” becomes something agencies pitch to private clients, it is a reasonable bet the same pitch reaches public-sector marketing budgets too. Given how hard it already is to isolate conventional SEO inside these datasets, an emerging, harder-to-define service like GEO will be even less visible in transparency data than the spend we found here.
• Categorisation will improve slowly, if at all. Rochdale proves it’s possible: a simple purpose column made our job there ten times easier. There is no legal requirement pushing other councils to follow, so we would not expect it to happen quickly. The next person who wants to answer this question properly will likely have to do what we did: download the files and check them by hand.

Why This Is a Floor, Not a Ceiling

A few honest caveats on the £232,562.30 figure, because a number like this is easy to misread as the full picture:

• The three-tier split matters more than the total. Only £12,047.75 is confirmed pure-SEO spend. The £157,291.47 full-service tier is real payments to real agencies with digital arms, but council records don’t say how much of each invoice was digital work. Anyone quoting this report should say which tier they mean.
• We excluded the two largest contracts we found, on purpose. Purplex (£232,656.28) and Conductor (£101,329.29) both sit inside housing or trading-arm accounts and neither is verifiably digital marketing. Reasonable people could disagree with those calls, which is exactly why we’ve shown the working rather than applying it quietly.
• Keyword and name-based search will always undercount. Much SEO and digital marketing work gets bundled into broader “website”, “communications” or “marketing” contracts, paid to agencies whose company name gives no clue what they actually do.
• Publication thresholds and windows differ. Sheffield and Rochdale publish from £250, everyone else from £500, and anything smaller doesn’t appear at all. Camden’s figure covers 16 years, Sheffield’s and Westminster’s one year each, Rochdale’s six months, Durham’s and Nottinghamshire’s a handful of sampled months. These are not like-for-like annual figures.
• Procurement card spending is excluded. Most councils report card transactions separately from supplier invoices, and we did not include those reports here.
• We checked ten councils out of over 300 in England alone. This is a sample, not a census. We’ve deliberately not extrapolated a national total from it, because our ten councils behave too differently from each other for any multiplication to be honest.

What This Means If You’re Buying SEO Yourself

Councils operate under some of the strictest spending transparency rules of any buyer in the country, and even then, working out what they actually pay for SEO and digital marketing took us a genuine data investigation across 1.5 million records, and still left a whole tier of spend we can’t fully decompose. Most private businesses have none of that visibility into their own spending, let alone anyone else’s.

“It says something that a council has to publish every payment over £500, but most business owners couldn’t tell you what their own agency actually delivered last month. If public money gets that level of scrutiny, you spending your own cash should expect at least the same.”

Andy McLoughlin, Founder of Before You Invest

The pattern we kept hitting in this data, marketing spend bundled into broader invoices where you can’t tell what was actually delivered, is exactly the pattern to watch for in your own agency relationship. What exactly is being delivered, is there evidence it works, and does the fee match the scope? Our guide on SEO proposal red flags and our guide on how to choose an SEO agency cover exactly what to check before you sign. It’s the same due diligence a council should be applying to public money.

If you want to go further, a few of our other guides are directly relevant to what this data uncovered. If a proposal’s pricing feels as opaque as some of these invoices did, our guide on how much SEO should cost gives you a benchmark. Before you sign anything, our 10 questions to ask an SEO agency will surface most of what a council’s own procurement process should have asked. And if you’re still deciding between an agency, a freelancer or hiring in-house, our comparison of SEO agency vs freelancer vs in-house SEO lays out the trade-offs.

One prediction above is worth acting on now, rather than waiting for it to show up in next year’s transparency data. If your current or prospective agency starts pitching “GEO”, “AEO” or AI-visibility work alongside traditional SEO, make sure you understand what you’re actually being sold before you agree a fee. Our plain-English glossary on what GEO, AEO and AIO actually mean and our deeper look at whether your agency can actually prove AI visibility results will help you ask the right questions. The same questions this piece asks of council spending data, just before the invoice lands rather than years afterward.

Sources

All figures in this article come directly from each council’s own published transparency data, current as of August 2026:

• Camden Council Spend Over £500, Camden Open Data Portal
• Council spend over £250, Sheffield City Council, via Data Mill North
• Payments to Suppliers over £500, Birmingham City Observatory
• Council Spending, Rochdale Borough Council, via data.gov.uk
• Spending over £500, Leeds City Council, via Data Mill North
• Expenditure over £500, Westminster City Council
• Expenditure exceeding £500, Manchester City Council Open Data
• Payments to suppliers with a value over £500, Bristol City Council, via data.gov.uk
• Spend over £500 transparency data, Durham County Council
• Council spending information, spend over £500, Nottinghamshire County Council

Data journalists, local reporters or councils named in this piece: get in touch via our contact page if you’d like the full underlying dataset or want to verify any figure.