Best Craft CMS SEO Experts in 2026-2027

Disclosure: eSEOspace publishes this blog and ranks itself first. Every other entry was researched independently and links to its own site.

Craft CMS is a developer's platform. There is no page builder pushing bloated markup, no plugin marketplace where five competing SEO tools fight over your meta tags, and no default theme guessing at your content model. You get fields, sections and Twig templates, and you build exactly what you specify.

That freedom cuts both ways for search. A well-architected Craft site can be faster, cleaner and more semantically precise than almost anything else on the market. A badly architected one can ship without a sitemap, without canonical logic, without structured data, and without anyone noticing for a year, because Craft will not add those things for you.

So the useful question is not "who builds Craft sites." Hundreds of agencies do. The question is who actually owns organic performance on a Craft build: the redirects during migration, the entry-level metadata model, the hreflang setup on multi-site installs, the Core Web Vitals budget, the structured data, and the content strategy that follows.

Below are eight firms that demonstrably do search work on Craft-powered sites. Some are Craft development shops with a real marketing division. Some are search agencies that treat Craft as a platform specialism. They are not interchangeable, and the differences matter more than the ranking order.

How we evaluated these Craft CMS SEO experts

We only included firms where we could verify, from their own site or their Craft partner profile, that search work is part of what they sell. A Craft development page with the word "SEO-friendly" in it did not qualify.

The criteria:

Demonstrable Craft specialism. Craft Verified Partner status, a dedicated Craft service page, or a named Craft portfolio. Agencies that list Craft among fifteen other platforms were excluded.

A real search practice. Technical SEO at minimum. Ideally content strategy, keyword work and reporting as well. We noted where SEO is genuinely a standalone service and where it is bundled into the build.

Migration and technical depth. Redirect handling, sitemap and canonical logic, structured data, page speed, and where applicable hreflang and multi-site configuration.

Evidence over adjectives. Named clients, named case studies, published service detail. We deliberately avoided repeating self-reported statistics we could not independently confirm, which is why you will not see award claims or review scores stated as fact below.

Honest fit. Every entry includes a worst-fit note. No agency on this list is right for every project, and pretending otherwise wastes your time.

We did not rank by revenue, headcount or awards. Several of these firms do not publish any of those numbers, and we are not going to guess.

Comparison table

1. eSEOspace

Founded in 2019, eSEOspace is a search and web agency built around a simple premise: the people writing your content, the people changing your templates and the people reading your analytics should not work for three different companies.

That structure matters more on Craft than on most platforms. When a technical SEO recommendation requires a Twig template change, a new field on an entry type, or a restructured section, the fix either happens in a sprint or it sits in a backlog for a quarter. Agencies that only advise tend to produce the second outcome.

Our practice covers organic SEO, technical audits and remediation, content marketing, local SEO for multi-location businesses, ecommerce SEO, and AI search visibility work for clients whose buyers now start in an answer engine rather than a results page. We also do design, development and analytics implementation, so recommendations get shipped rather than filed.

On a Craft engagement the work typically looks like this: audit the existing content model and how it maps to URLs, fix or build the sitemap and canonical logic, establish structured data that reflects the actual entry types rather than a generic template, set the performance budget, then move into keyword strategy and content production against it. Where a migration is involved, the redirect map is built before anything is decommissioned, not after.

We are candid about scope. We work across platforms, and we are not a Craft-only shop. If you want an agency whose entire identity is Craft and whose portfolio is nothing but Craft builds, several firms below fit that description better.

Worst fit: clients who want a one-off audit PDF and no ongoing relationship, or who need a from-scratch enterprise Craft Commerce build with no search component. Our value shows up over months of compounding work, not in a single deliverable. If you want to talk through whether that model suits you, book a call.

2. Brilliance (Brilliance Northwest LLC)

Brilliance is a Portland, Oregon agency that treats Craft development and SEO as one offering rather than two departments passing tickets. Their Craft partner profile leads with Craft CMS web development and SEO for Craft-powered websites, and they hold both Craft Verified Partner and Craft Commerce Verified Partner status.

The SEO side is broader than the technical-only work most Craft shops offer: technical SEO, content strategy, link building, and local SEO including Google Business Profile management. They state they are a certified Semrush Agency Partner.

Their named work spans The Associated Press, Bob's Red Mill, TrucklendersUSA, American Trails and PacRes Mortgage, with Friends of the Children, Montavilla Sewing Centers and Portland Therapy Center on their Craft partner profile. That mix of national brands and Portland-area organisations is telling. They are genuinely comfortable at both scales.

If you are a US business where local visibility drives revenue and you also need a Craft or Craft Commerce build maintained, Brilliance is one of very few firms on this list that covers both without a subcontractor.

Worst fit: European or UK-based organisations needing local search expertise in their own market, and anyone wanting a large delivery team. This is a small-team operation, which is a strength for continuity and a constraint on parallel workstreams.

3. Unbranded Digital

Unbranded Digital is the inverse of most agencies here. They are a UK search agency that publishes a dedicated Craft CMS SEO service page, meaning SEO is the product and Craft is the platform specialism, rather than SEO being an add-on to a development retainer.

The service detail is specific in a way that is hard to fake: technical SEO audits, indexing and redirect handling, keyword strategy, page speed work, schema markup, content optimisation, and international SEO with hreflang configuration. That last item is genuinely rare. Multi-site Craft installs are common in European businesses and hreflang errors quietly cost them traffic for years.

They are based in Bradford, UK, and named client testimonials on the Craft SEO page include Industrial Resin Flooring, LED Lighthouse and Neurobox.

Choose them if a competent development partner already owns your Craft build and you want search handled by specialists who understand Craft's templating, URL and metadata model rather than treating your site as a black box.

Worst fit: anyone who needs the Craft build itself, a redesign, or a platform migration executed. They did not appear in the Craft partner directory listings we opened, so if formal Verified Partner status is a procurement requirement, confirm it directly with them.

4. DBS Interactive

DBS Interactive is a B2B web design and digital marketing agency out of Louisville, Kentucky, with additional offices listed in Orlando, Nashville and Cincinnati. Craft CMS development is a named specialism, and it runs alongside a full SEO practice covering organic, technical and voice search.

The differentiator is their position on AI search. Their Craft partner profile is explicit that they build Craft sites optimised for discoverability across both traditional search engines and AI answer engines including ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Among Craft partners, that is one of the clearest stated positions on generative search we found, and it is a question worth asking every agency on this list.

Their named client roster leans enterprise and industrial: Big Ass Fans, Papa John's, Schneider Electric, Kao Collins, Zeon SMI, Springstone, Mighty Small Homes and BrightSpring. Craft-specific work is shown for Mighty Small Homes, Zeon Specialty Materials, EOSYS and Blue Diamond Attachments.

Good fit for B2B, manufacturing and healthcare organisations that need lead-generation-driven SEO plus emerging AI visibility, and that may have accessibility or compliance requirements attached.

Worst fit: small businesses and startups. This is a multi-office agency serving recognisable brands, and the engagement model reflects that. Craft is also one specialism among several rather than the house platform.

5. webdna

webdna is a Nottingham agency built around Craft, describing itself as the UK's only Craft Commerce Verified agency. It holds both Verified Partner and Commerce Verified Partner status.

What separates it from other Craft development shops is a genuine marketing division: strategy, content marketing, SEO services, paid media, email and organic social, sitting alongside Craft development, hosting and plugin work. For an ecommerce operator that means the person optimising product taxonomy and the person building the Commerce templates report to the same place.

The client list is substantial and varied: Vodafone, Welsh Rugby Union, World Coffee Research, Green Lithium, Biocatalysts, Paws In Work, Propello, Covertex, Modelli Fabrics, Walford Timber, AAB and Wyser. Their own site claims Craft CMS Agency of the Year (Europe), which is self-reported and worth verifying independently if it matters to your decision.

Strongest choice on this list for UK Craft Commerce brands that want organic growth, content and paid media from the same supplier that owns the store build.

Worst fit: US businesses needing local SEO in American markets, and content-only sites with no commerce component, where you would be paying for Commerce expertise you never use.

6. Eyekiller

Eyekiller is a Belfast full-service digital agency with one of the longer Craft track records in this group. Their Craft partner profile states over ten years of Craft expertise and more than eighty Craft-based websites delivered, which is a meaningful portfolio depth.

Their Craft page describes an in-house team including digital marketers alongside designers, strategists and developers, and lists performance and technical SEO as a service. The in-house detail matters: plenty of agencies subcontract search and the handoffs show.

The client profile skews toward arts, culture, charity and public-facing bodies: Grand Opera House Belfast, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, ICC Belfast, Mahlatini, Colinwell Masonry and Pyro + Echo, with Co-Ownership, Cancer Focus, Somerville Fit-Out and Oliver Jeffers on the partner profile. Those organisations tend to have complicated legacy content, event-driven publishing workflows and awkward data migrations, and Eyekiller has clearly done that work repeatedly.

They serve the UK, Ireland and North America.

Worst fit: pure ecommerce operations, and clients wanting search strategy decoupled from a design or build engagement. Their model is full-service, so you are buying the whole agency relationship.

7. Honcho

Honcho was founded in 2013 and is deliberately narrow: web and brand only, and explicitly no WordPress. Craft CMS is the house platform, not one option among several.

Their approach to search is structural rather than bolted on. The Craft page describes Core Web Vitals compliance, schema, semantic HTML and metadata best practice, with information architecture built to support search and conversion goals. Their Craft partner profile lists technical SEO for Craft, covering structured data, sitemaps and on-page improvements.

That framing is a real advantage on migrations. Retrofitting performance and structured data onto a finished build is always more expensive than specifying it upfront, and Honcho sells the upfront version.

Their site names Google, Oxford University, Zip World, AstraZeneca, Quality Hive and Stellarmann, with Schuh, The Church of England, Ogilvy, YMCA and the UK Space Agency on the Craft partner profile. They are UK-based and remote, serving the UK, US and Europe.

One honest caveat: SEO is not a standalone service on their homepage. It is presented as built into Craft builds, with technical SEO appearing on the partner profile. If you want an ongoing search retainer with monthly reporting and content production, confirm scope carefully before signing.

Worst fit: organisations that want continuous SEO campaign management, link acquisition or content marketing as a separate ongoing service. Also anyone committed to staying on WordPress, since that is a stated non-starter here.

8. Mud

Mud is a Bath agency that has been building on Craft since version 1.3, over ten years, and states it has delivered more than a hundred client websites on the platform. That is one of the deepest Craft tenures on this list.

Their Craft partner profile lists technical SEO covering structured data, sitemaps, redirects and on-page optimisation, alongside accessibility, multilingual builds, migrations and performance optimisation. Their own Craft page ties lightweight, ultra-fast builds directly to search performance, which is the correct causal argument and one many agencies get backwards.

The client list is heavily mission-driven: Axis, The HR Dept, World Organisation Against Torture, Light VFX, Paleo Ridge, NVB Studio, Rochester Independent College, Base Structures and Vincent Wildlife Trust, with Environmental Justice Foundation and Climate Changemakers on the partner profile.

For a charity or education organisation facing a WCAG-compliant multilingual rebuild with a large legacy content archive, this is a strong fit. Accessibility and multilingual work sit right next to the technical SEO in their stated capabilities, and those three things share a lot of underlying work.

Worst fit: anyone whose primary need is aggressive organic growth. Their headline services are web design, web development, support and optimisation, and branding. Technical SEO is real but supporting, not the centre of the offering. Also a poor fit for commerce-first projects.

Who should hire which

Frequently asked questions

Does Craft CMS handle SEO out of the box, or do I need a plugin?

Craft gives you the raw materials and almost nothing else. There is no default meta description field, no automatic XML sitemap, no built-in canonical logic and no structured data. Most teams add a plugin such as SEOmatic or Sprout SEO to provide a field layer and sitemap generation, but a plugin only exposes controls. Somebody still has to decide what your title pattern is per section, which entry types get which schema, and how canonical tags behave across a multi-site install. That is a strategy decision, not an install. Treat plugin choice as the smallest part of the work. Ongoing governance of those fields is a content management discipline, not a one-time setup task.

What is the biggest SEO risk when migrating to Craft CMS?

Redirects, without close competition. Craft lets you restructure your URL model completely, which is often the point of migrating, and that means every old URL needs a mapped destination before launch. The failure pattern is predictable: the site launches, rankings hold for two weeks while Google works through its crawl queue, then traffic drops and nobody can reconstruct which URLs existed on the old platform because it has already been decommissioned. Export the full URL list, including anything with backlinks and anything that ever ranked, before you turn the old site off. Second biggest risk is losing structured data and metadata that the old platform generated automatically and Craft will not.

Should I hire a Craft development agency that does SEO, or an SEO agency that knows Craft?

It depends on which asset is weaker. If your Craft build is solid and your rankings are not, hire search specialists. You will get better competitive analysis, keyword strategy and content planning than a development shop will produce, and the technical fixes can be handed to your existing developers. If your build is the problem, if it is slow, poorly structured or missing basic technical foundations, hire the development-led agency. An SEO consultant can only write recommendations. Someone has to change the templates. The worst outcome is hiring a strategy-only partner when the constraint is engineering capacity.

Does Craft CMS give any inherent ranking advantage over WordPress?

No, and be sceptical of anyone who says otherwise. Search engines rank pages, not platforms. What Craft gives you is the absence of obstacles: no page builder injecting nested div soup, no plugin conflicts generating duplicate meta tags, no theme making structural decisions you did not authorise. A competently built Craft site is usually faster and cleaner than a heavily plugged-in WordPress site, and speed and clean markup do affect performance. But a badly built Craft site will lose to a well-built WordPress site every time. The platform raises your ceiling, it does not raise your floor.

How do I evaluate whether an agency actually does Craft SEO or just says it does?

Ask three questions. First, describe your redirect process on a Craft migration, specifically how you build and validate the map. Second, how do you configure hreflang on a multi-site Craft install. Third, how do you decide which entry types get structured data and what schema you apply. Agencies that genuinely do this work answer immediately and in detail. Agencies that do not will talk about SEO-friendly code and best practices. Also ask to see a Craft site they have worked on and check its sitemap, canonical tags and structured data yourself. It takes five minutes and it is the most honest evidence available.

What does Craft CMS SEO cost?

Nobody on this list publishes rates, and any number quoted here would be invented. What we can say is that pricing splits along the same line as the agencies themselves. Build-led engagements are usually scoped as projects with a support retainer attached, and the SEO component is a fraction of the total. Search-led engagements are usually monthly retainers scaled to how much content and technical work you need. Migrations are almost always project-priced. Get quotes structured the same way from at least three firms, because comparing a fixed-price build against a monthly retainer tells you nothing useful.

Conclusion

Craft CMS attracts a certain kind of agency: technical, opinionated, allergic to bloat. That is good news for anyone who cares about site performance. It is less good news if you assumed search would be handled, because on Craft it will only be handled if someone is explicitly responsible for it.

The eight firms here all clear that bar, but they clear it differently. Brilliance and webdna give you build and search from one team. Unbranded Digital gives you search specialists who speak Craft. DBS Interactive is furthest ahead on AI answer engines. Eyekiller and Mud have the deepest experience with complicated legacy migrations in the charity and culture sectors. Honcho designs performance in from the start rather than bolting it on.

Pick based on which of your problems is actually the binding constraint. If it is the build, hire a builder. If it is strategy, hire strategists. If it is that nothing ever gets shipped, hire a team that does both.

And whoever you hire, ask them the redirect question first.