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.