What drives SEO pricing, why "how much for SEO" has no single answer, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
A 5-page local business site and a 500-product ecommerce store need entirely different amounts of work. Anyone quoting a fixed monthly figure before auditing your specific site and competition is guessing, not pricing.
Three things: how much technical work your site needs, how competitive your target keywords are (a KD of 12 and a KD of 65 are very different jobs), and how much content needs writing to cover the gaps.
A one-off technical audit and fix is a bounded, quotable job. Ongoing content, link building and competitive keyword targeting is retainer work by nature. It compounds over months, not a single sprint.
What does the audit check? Do I own my Analytics and Search Console access? Is there a minimum contract length? What happens to the work if I leave? If an agency won't answer these plainly, that's the answer.
Our SEO + PPC service covers exactly this, built around your own audit findings.
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 |
Sometimes. A bounded technical fix doesn't need a premium agency. What's rarely worth it is a suspiciously cheap ongoing retainer, since real content and link-building work takes real time that has to be paid for somewhere.
That's usually a template package applied regardless of your site's actual needs. Fine if it happens to match what you need, a waste if your site needs far less or far more than that.
Month to month with no lock-in is the fairer structure for you. It means the agency has to keep earning the retainer with results, not just with a signed contract.
Depends entirely on competition. A low-difficulty local term needs far less investment than a nationally competitive one. The audit and keyword research should tell you which situation you're in before any number gets quoted.
No. The audit is free whether you proceed or not, and any quote that follows is based on what it found, not padded to recover the audit's cost.
For a single bounded fix, yes. For ongoing competitive keyword targeting, a one-off project usually just delays the recurring cost instead of avoiding it, since rankings need maintaining once won.
Specifically what will be done, over what timeframe, what's excluded, and what reporting you'll receive. A quote that's just a monthly figure with no scope attached is a red flag.
Yes, considerably. Location affects overheads more than it affects the actual work, so two agencies quoting very differently for the same scope isn't unusual and is worth asking about directly.
Generally yes. A long lock-in protects the agency's cash flow more than it protects your interests, and a confident agency shouldn't need one to keep your business.
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.