Wales market guide
SEO and digital marketing for businesses in Wales
SEO and digital marketing for businesses in Wales, built for a bilingual market with its own policy, where English-only keyword research falls short.
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Local businesses
Public sector, tourism and cross-border trade
The Welsh economy has a bigger public and third sector share than most of the UK: housing associations, health organisations, education providers and the suppliers who tender to them.
Tourism is concentrated on the coasts and in the national parks, selling almost entirely to people who are somewhere else when they decide.
Manufacturing still matters, especially in the south east and along the north coast: technical buyers, long cycles, and websites originally built as brochures.
Cardiff, Newport and Swansea hold most of the commercial density in the south, while north Wales looks towards Chester, Liverpool and the north west of England, a cross-border market a Wales-only strategy would ignore.
The market
One legal system, a different policy and a second language
Wales is small enough that a solid content programme stands out, and varied enough that one national plan rarely fits. The south east works like an English city region; the west and north don't.
Devolution is what UK marketers most often miss. Wales shares the England and Wales legal jurisdiction, but in housing, health, education and planning, policy often differs.
Welsh is used most in the north and west, and an English-only presence there costs you trust, not just traffic.
Obligation or choice
Whether to publish in Welsh depends on what you are
Welsh language standards attach to what an organisation is, not where it sits. Public bodies are covered, most private businesses aren't, and anyone tendering for public work gets asked either way.
Are you a public body or delivering public functions?
Yes: Welsh language standards apply — check the detail with your own advisers.
No: Nothing obliges you, so it's a commercial and trust decision, not a legal one.
Do you bid for public sector work in Wales?
Yes: Expect the question in procurement, next to accessibility, and expect to show evidence.
No: Weigh where your customers actually are — Welsh is used most in the north and west.
Can you keep both versions current, translated by a person?
Yes: Publish properly: human translation, separate URLs, correct tagging, both versions maintained.
No: English only beats a stale or machine-translated Welsh page, which reads as an insult.
Good fit
Who we can help most
Industries we help
- Hospitality & Food Service marketingHospitality marketing for restaurants, hotels and venues that fills the quiet nights and wins more bookings direct, not through commission apps.
- Home Services & Trades marketingHome services marketing for HVAC, roofing, plumbing, restoration and more. Show up on Google Maps nearby, answer fast and look like the safe choice.
- Dental Practices marketingMore new patients who show up, from the streets they live on. Then keep them. Keeping a patient costs far less than finding a new one.
- Retail & Ecommerce marketingRetail marketing for shops and online stores, planned around margin, stock and the marketplaces you sell through, so more sales leave more profit.
How people search
Two place names and two ways to write a query
How do people in Wales look for a business like yours? The answer changes what we fix first.
- Some demand is expressed in Welsh, in particular categories and areas. Volumes are small next to English, but so is the competition, and intent tends to be high.
- Dual place naming splits queries. Eryri and Snowdonia, Bannau Brycheiniog and the Brecon Beacons, Caerdydd and Cardiff are all in use, and content acknowledging both is findable from both.
- Cardiff takes a disproportionate share of commercial search volume, which tempts businesses elsewhere to target it and wonder why the enquiries don't convert. Swansea, Newport, Wrexham and the county areas need naming in their own right.
- Tourism demand is national and cross-border. Most of it starts in England, months ahead of the visit, and is settled by comparison and planning content, not a proximity search.
- Public sector buyers look for suppliers who can already show accessibility and Welsh language capability, not promise to get there later.
The rules
What the law says about your ads
- Welsh language standards apply to public bodies and some organisations delivering public functions, setting rules for how Welsh appears in services and communications. Most private businesses aren't covered, but bidding for public work means expecting the question.
- England and Wales share a legal jurisdiction, so courts, solicitors and their regulator are common ground. Housing, health, education, planning and parts of environmental law are made in Wales and can differ from the English position.
- Publishing in Welsh? Use human translation, separate URLs per language, correct language tagging and hreflang, and keep both versions current. A stale or machine-translated Welsh page reads as an insult.
- UK GDPR, PECR and the CAP Code apply in Wales as elsewhere, and Equality Act accessibility duties sit alongside the public sector rules for the bodies they cover.
Sources
Where these rules come from
These are the laws and regulators behind the rules above. Check the source before you act. This page isn’t legal advice.
- Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, the basis of the Welsh language standards
- Welsh Language Measure
- Source: legislation.gov.uk
- The Welsh Language Commissioner, who sets and enforces the standards
- Welsh Commissioner
- Source: Welsh Language Commissioner
Where to start
Services to start with
Web design & development
Our web design agency builds fast, accessible websites you own, planned for Google and for enquiries before design starts.
Content strategy
Content strategy services that give you a written plan: what to publish, which pages to fix, merge or remove, and which topics to skip.
Local SEO
Our local SEO services get you onto Google Maps and into "near me" searches. We fix your Business Profile, area pages and reviews, for one location or forty.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO makes sure Google can crawl, read and index your pages, and that your site is fast. We fix what blocks them so the rest of your SEO can pay off.
Working with us
Working with us online
Some tenders ask directly whether a supplier is local. We answer plainly: we serve organisations in Wales online.
We don't translate into Welsh ourselves. For a bilingual site, we build the architecture and work with a human translator you appoint, or help you find one, and we're clear about which parts we're responsible for.
Bilingual builds are planned as two maintained versions. The usual failure is Welsh pages that stop being updated and show nobody is looking after them.
Scheduling and reporting run in UK hours and in English unless you need otherwise, and we'll tell you when a Welsh-language specialist would handle a job better.
Questions
Common questions from Wales businesses
Do we legally have to publish in Welsh?
It depends on what your organisation is, not where it is. Welsh language standards apply to public bodies and some organisations delivering public functions; most private businesses aren't covered.
That's a question for your own legal advisers. If you tender for public sector work in Wales, you'll be asked, and having no answer is a weak spot.
Is a bilingual website twice the work forever?
Roughly twice the content work, yes. It doesn't double the build, the technical work or the reporting.
Scope is what matters. A bilingual core of services, contact and key pages, kept up to date, beats a full mirror that goes stale within a year.
Which place names should our content use?
Both, wherever both are in use. Eryri and Snowdonia, Bannau Brycheiniog and the Brecon Beacons are all searched, so pick one and you lose the other.
Lead with the name your audience uses most and mention the alternative in the same passage. The page stays findable either way without reading like a glossary.
Our UK site already covers Wales. What's different?
Usually the policy detail. UK pages tend to assume everything matches England, and in housing, health, education and planning it often doesn't.
For most businesses the fix is a handful of properly Welsh pages where the difference matters, not a duplicate site. Find the four pages that are wrong rather than rebuild forty that are fine.
We're in north Wales and sell mostly into England. Does that change anything?
It changes the geography, not the principle. North Wales trades heavily across the border, and a plan built only around Welsh place names would miss much of your market.
Target the towns and cities your customers are in, on both sides of the border, and treat Welsh language provision as a separate call driven by your audience.
See where your website stands
Start with the free checkup. It shows what to fix first on your website, with no sign-up. Want to know who wins the searches that matter in Wales? Book a call with our specialists.
Prefer to talk it over? Book a free call
References
Sources for SEO and digital marketing wales
The official documents and research this page is based on. Platform rules change, so check the source before you act on a detail.
Related
More on marketing in Wales
Elsewhere in United Kingdom
Last updated · Published by Zubair Afzal, responsible editor