We work with Welsh clients from Poole rather than from an office in Cardiff, which is worth stating rather than implying otherwise. What follows is what we would actually account for when working in Wales.
The north-south split is the first thing to get right
There is no easy route between north and south Wales, and the economies reflect that. Wrexham, Deeside and the north coast orient toward Chester, Liverpool and Manchester; Cardiff, Newport and Swansea form a separate belt along the M4 looking east toward Bristol. Mid Wales is rural, sparsely populated and served by businesses covering enormous distances.
A single “Wales” page treating this as one market will be vague enough to rank for nothing. Businesses generally serve one of those three areas, and the content should say which.
Welsh language provision
Welsh is an official language in Wales and public bodies operate under Welsh Language Standards. For private businesses there is no obligation, but there is an opportunity — bilingual content is genuinely valued in Gwynedd, Ceredigion, Anglesey and Carmarthenshire, where Welsh speakers form a substantial share of the population.
If you do it, do it properly: professionally translated, with hreflang markup identifying the Welsh pages as cy and the English as en-GB, and consistently maintained. A half-finished Welsh section that stops after the homepage is worse than none, because it signals a gesture rather than a service.
Three cities, three characters
Cardiff is the capital and the largest professional services market, with the media and public sector presence that follows. Swansea is smaller, more self-contained and noticeably less contested in search. Newport sits close enough to both Cardiff and Bristol that businesses there often compete against firms in two other cities without realising it.
Where the opportunity actually is
Welsh search terms are among the least contested in Britain relative to their volume. There is real demand and comparatively few businesses competing properly for it, particularly outside Cardiff. For a firm in Swansea, Wrexham, Bangor or Aberystwyth, a genuinely well-built local presence can dominate quickly because almost nobody else has bothered.