LOCALiQ has been shortlisted in four categories at the UK Digital Excellence Awards 2026, recognising our work across website design, integrated performance marketing, digital PR and SEO leadership in the UK market. These nominations celebrate the impact we deliver for clients through data-driven strategy, creativity and a focus on measurable growth.
The UK Digital Excellence Awards exist to spotlight the game-changers, rule-breakers and growth-makers redefining success in the digital world. From SEO specialists and data-led strategists to UX experts and creative teams, the programme spans the full digital spectrum. Founded in 2023 and accredited ‘Outstanding’ by the Independent Awards Standards Council’s Awards Trust Mark, they’re widely regarded as a benchmark for trustworthy, meaningful recognition in the industry.
Our Nominations
- Standout B2C Website of the Year
- Standout Integrated B2C Campaign of the Year
- Standout PR Campaign of the Year
- Standout SEO Agency of the Year
Standout B2C Website of the Year:
LOCALiQ & Prestige Granite
Prestige Granite is a premier stone worktop supplier with a strong showroom presence, but their old website had become slow, insecure and functioned more like a static brochure than a modern performance channel.
LOCALiQ’s goal was to evolve, not completely replace, the website: preserving hard-won SEO equity while transforming the site into a high-performing lead-generation engine for a high-consideration purchase journey. The new site focuses on trust, transparency and ease, helping users understand pricing, finance options and next steps before they ever pick up the phone or visit the showroom.
Key outcomes include:
- Significant uplift in overall website performance and lead generation year-on-year
- Notable growth in total site visits after launch
- Strong increases in total phone calls driven via the site
- Major uplift in online form enquiries, indicating reduced friction and higher intent
- Successful SEO-first migration that protected rankings while improving user experience
Behind these results were several core innovations. We introduced a custom interactive finance calculator to remove price ambiguity, helping users model monthly payments instantly and pre-qualify themselves before speaking to sales. The site’s content and UX were rebuilt around a streamlined “browse to book” journey, with simplified forms and always-on mobile click-to-call functionality to reflect the reality that the majority of traffic is mobile. Operationally, a bespoke self-service offer engine in the CMS now enables Prestige Granite to launch and update site-wide offers, sticky banners and countdowns in minutes, aligning digital activity with the pace of their showroom floor.
Standout Integrated B2C Campaign of the Year:
LOCALiQ, The Cut & Craft & Lucia
Demand Growth for Premium Hospitality
The Cut & Craft and Lucia are premium hospitality brands operating in highly competitive city-centre locations, where every table, booking window and season matters. LOCALiQ was briefed to transform search into a scalable revenue driver, not just a visibility play, across existing sites and new launches. We built a location-specific, intent-led strategy spanning paid search, SEO and digital PR, positioning both brands to win on the queries that matter most from high-intent restaurant searches to private dining and events. Rather than generic hospitality advertising, every element was designed around booking demand, seasonal moments and local audience behaviour.
Key outcomes include:
- Paid search leads scaled from low triple digits per quarter to well over 2,000, then 3,500+ per quarter as the framework matured
- Cost-per-click reduced dramatically while overall lead volume increased
- Click-through rates on paid search rose into the 20–35% range, indicating highly relevant, intent-aligned messaging
- Organic keyword footprint more than doubled, with strong growth in organic clicks and sessions to booking-related pages
- Successful new location launch (Manchester), which outperformed established sites within weeks thanks to the repeatable framework
The campaign combined three performance pillars. Paid search focused on responsive search ads aligned to live offers, events and booking windows, with weekly optimisation of keywords, messaging and ad extensions. SEO work centred on rebuilding location pages around user intent, replacing static PDFs with indexable private-dining content, adding FAQs to capture long-tail queries and structuring content around events and local relevance. Digital PR delivered authoritative coverage and high-quality backlinks, amplifying E-E-A-T signals and supporting both SEO and brand trust. The result was a scalable, location-aware model that Cut & Craft and Lucia could rely on for new openings as well as mature venues.
Standout PR Campaign of the Year:
LOCALiQ & The Devonshire Clinic
The Expert-Led Skin Health Strategy
The Devonshire Clinic is a Harley Street dermatology practice whose founder is a leading consultant in skin cancer and complex skin health. The challenge wasn’t a lack of expertise, but ensuring that this expertise was visible in the right places, to the right audience, at the right time. LOCALiQ’s Digital PR team set out to move beyond generic “skin tips” and instead build an expert-led, clinically credible presence in Tier 1 media, positioning the founder as a trusted national voice and aligning PR activity with the clinic’s ethical mission around melanoma prevention and skin health.
Key outcomes include:
- 25–35 targeted, high-quality backlinks secured from national and sector publications (ultimately far exceeding initial backlink and coverage targets)
- Significant uplift in average Domain Authority of referring sites, moving from mid-20s to a much stronger authority profile
- Multiple features in top-tier national outlets, including key UK news brands
- A record month of placements during the campaign period, demonstrating the scalability of the approach
- Clear reinforcement of the clinic’s positioning as a serious, medical-first provider rather than a general beauty brand
The strategy hinged on a pivot to a “reactive expert-first” model. Instead of chasing soft lifestyle angles, we used the founder’s credentials to respond rapidly to breaking stories, from celebrity health news to emerging dermatology topics. We redesigned the approvals process so the team could create quotes in his clinical tone of voice, securing quick yes/no sign-off even when he was in surgery. Alongside this, we developed proactive, hard-hitting stories such as a Freedom of Information investigation into underage sunbed use, generating new, newsworthy data for journalists and supporting the clinic’s advocacy against harmful tanning practices. Creative visual assets and clear, ready-to-publish explainers made it easy for journalists to use the content, turning PR into a sustainable engine for authority, links and brand trust.
Standout SEO Agency of the Year:
LOCALiQ UK
Being shortlisted for Standout SEO Agency of the Year reflects the depth and breadth of LOCALiQ’s work across organic performance, technical excellence and integrated digital strategies. Since 2018, we’ve focused on simplifying complex marketing for UK businesses, combining best-in-class technology with the audience reach and local insight of Newsquest Media Group. Our teams work across PPC, SEO, web design, paid social and display advertising, with a shared focus on measurable ROI and long-term growth. The nominations for Prestige Granite, Cut & Craft & Lucia, and The Devonshire Clinic collectively showcase how our SEO thinking underpins web, campaigns and PR.
Key strengths highlighted by this shortlist include:
- Proven ability to protect and grow organic performance during complex website rebuilds and migrations
- Integrated SEO thinking across paid search, content, web and PR, rather than operating in silos
- Strong track record in high-intent, high-value categories such as healthcare, home improvement and premium hospitality
- Use of data and customer intent to shape everything from site architecture to creative angles and media targeting
- A culture of testing, iteration and close client collaboration, ensuring strategies evolve with market conditions
As part of Newsquest Media Group, we also bring something unique to SEO and digital performance: access to 200+ local news brands and an audience of over 45 million consumers across Google, Facebook and Bing. That combination of local reach, data and performance expertise allows us to help clients of all sizes (from local specialists to national brands) turn search visibility into real enquiries, bookings and revenue.
What’s next…
We’re incredibly proud of our teams and our clients for the work behind these four nominations, and we’re excited to see it recognised on a national stage. The winners of the UK Digital Excellence Awards 2026 will be announced at the awards ceremony at The London Hilton Paddington on Thursday 23rd April 2026.
