An honest breakdown of the four shapes an SEO package normally takes in the UK, what each one should include, and how to tell whether the one you're being sold fits your site.
Anyone comparing quotes and struggling to work out why two agencies have priced the same job three times apart. Usually the answer is that they are not the same job. One is a technical fix, the other is an ongoing content programme, and the proposals do not say so.
Across the UK market, small-business retainers commonly run from a few hundred pounds a month, mid-market work into the low thousands, and competitive national campaigns higher again. One-off audits typically sit in the low hundreds. Those are market ranges, not our price list. We don't quote a figure before looking at your site, because the same monthly number buys wildly different amounts of work depending on what your site needs.
Because a five-page local site and a five-hundred-product store need entirely different work, and a fixed price either overcharges the first or underdelivers on the second. We'd rather audit first and quote something we can defend line by line. Our pricing guide explains what drives the number.
At minimum: a technical audit, keyword research tied to your actual services, on-page work on your money pages, and monthly reporting that shows organic sessions and conversions rather than only rankings. If content or link work is included, the proposal should say how much of each per month.
We ask for three months to start, because a shorter window genuinely cannot show whether the work is landing. The first month is diagnosis and fixes. After that it is rolling. Be wary of twelve-month lock-ins with no break clause.
Yes, and for a lot of businesses that is the right first purchase. You get the findings and the priority order, and you are free to hand them to your own developer. Our free audit covers the automated checks before you spend anything at all.
Usually hours and seniority, not method. The risk at the very bottom of the market is that the hours are made up with automated output, bulk directory links or AI-written pages nobody edited, which costs you more later. See cheap SEO for what to check.
Ours do where content is the bottleneck, and the proposal states how many pieces per month and who signs them off. Content written without your input reads like it, and Google is increasingly good at noticing.
Plenty of small businesses can do the fundamentals themselves. The complete guide has a six-step starting tutorial. Packages make sense when your market is competitive or when the hours are worth more spent elsewhere.
You take everything: accounts, content, documentation, the keyword map. We do not host your site, hold your domain, or write content into a system you cannot export. Agencies that do are relying on it.
Technical fixes can show in weeks. Competitive commercial rankings realistically take six to twelve months. Any package sold on a promise faster than that is either targeting keywords with no demand or cutting corners you would not agree to.
No, and we would treat an offer of it as a warning sign. It pushes an agency toward easy keywords nobody searches for and toward short-term tactics that carry penalty risk, because their incentive is a ranking number rather than your enquiries.
Yes, with notice. Rankings do not vanish the moment you stop. The work already done keeps compounding for a while, but competitors keep publishing, so long pauses cost ground.
Everything below is multiplication on real rates from our own keyword export for this market. No industry averages, no projections, and no claim about how much traffic you would win, because that depends on your site.
Cost per click × 1,000. The same thousand visits arriving organically cost nothing per click, which is the whole of the difference. Source: Semrush keyword data, Manchester SEO/marketing cluster, Aug 2026.
The four figures above are published third-party research and are cited so you can check them. Everything else on this page is our own data.
What SEO costs depends on one thing more than any other: how hard the searches you want are to win. A plumber in Rochdale and a national ecommerce brand need the same disciplines applied with very different force. These are the three bands we work in. The free audit tells you which one you are in before anyone quotes you.
A single-location business competing inside one town or a handful of neighbouring ones. Trades, clinics, salons, independent retail, professional services with one office.
Businesses working across a region, or in a local market with established competitors who already take SEO seriously. Multi-service operations and growing ecommerce.
National campaigns, multi-location operators and ecommerce catalogues, where the terms worth having are contested by businesses with real budgets behind them.
Nobody can guarantee a position in Google, and an agency that offers one is either misunderstanding the job or counting on you not checking. What we commit to is this: the work described above is carried out and evidenced every month, you can see exactly what changed, the reporting follows enquiries rather than vanity positions, and you can leave whenever you like. If the work is not producing, we will say so before you do.
There is always somebody cheaper. This is what the difference actually buys, stated plainly so you can hold both of us to it.
| Budget SEO£300-500/mo | WhatIsSEO£1,200+/mo | |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | One junior across 40+ accounts | A strategist who sets the plan, specialists who carry it out |
| The audit | A generic PDF from a tool | A real audit, then the fixes actually implemented |
| Content | Generic blog posts written around the subject | Written on your expertise, corrected by you before it goes live |
| Off-site work | Bought links and directory spam | Digital PR and earned placements, judged on relevance |
| Reporting | Rankings for terms nobody searches | Visibility, traffic, enquiries, conversions |
| When it stops working | You find out months later | We tell you, and you can leave that month |
Everything on this page is teachable. A full day in a class of three or four is £499, or £999 with the work implemented on your own site while you watch. If you can give it an hour or two a day afterwards, that is usually the cheaper route.
Ask me anything about SEO, or about the tools, the training or what we do.
If your problem is one you can fix yourself with the free tools, I will say so.
Where I am not certain, I will say so rather than guess, and Imran will follow it up.
Answers are generated and can be wrong. For anything that matters, call 0161 315 1152.