All you need to know about how much you should be paying for professional SEO.
To the inexperienced, the world of SEO and digital marketing offers a range of fast promises and prices ranging from £199 to £10,000 per month. Price in most industries reflects the costs of materials and production, but in SEO, it is the amount a customer can afford.
Advice please?
In This Section
How much should SEO cost for a small business?
There is no simple answer to this question. It is a little like how much is a car? It depends on what you are hoping to achieve.
Clients
It is all about expectation. What do you hope the amount of money you spend will generate for your business?
If you give a company £500 per month, what are you hoping to see in returns? To pay £500, your small business would need to generate £1500 in sales to break even.
Look at the table below if it is based on selling a product or service for £250 with a gross profit rate of 40%.
Your Expectations
Clients
It is all about expectation. What do you hope the amount of money you spend will generate for your business?
If you pay a company £500 per month, what are you hoping to see in returns? To pay £500, your small business would need to generate £1500 in sales just to break even. Is this likely?
Figures
Have a look at the table below. It is based on selling a product or service for £250 with a gross profit rate of 40%.
Expected return from investing in UK SEO
The table shows the expected return on investing a certain budget into your website’s SEO.
The more work that is done to a site, (the more content created, backlinks built and pages optimised etc.) has a cumulative effect of accelerating the amount of traffic an SEO could hope to generate from an hour’s work. However, this also reduces over time.
| Monthly SEO Cost | Hours Purchased | Traffic Generated | Sales | Revenue | Profit | P&L |
| £250 | 4 | 63 | 0.9 | £234 | £94 | -£156 |
| £500 | 8 | 167 | 2.5 | £625 | £250 | -£250 |
| £750 | 13 | 313 | 4.7 | £1,172 | £469 | -£281 |
| £1,000 | 17 | 500 | 7.5 | £1,875 | £750 | -£250 |
| £1,250 | 21 | 729 | 10.9 | £2,734 | £1,094 | -£156 |
| £1,500 | 25 | 1000 | 15.0 | £3,750 | £1,500 | £0 |
| £1,750 | 29 | 1313 | 19.7 | £4,922 | £1,969 | £219 |
| £2,000 | 33 | 1667 | 25.0 | £6,250 | £2,500 | £500 |
| £2,250 | 38 | 2063 | 30.9 | £7,734 | £3,094 | £844 |
| £2,500 | 42 | 2417 | 36.3 | £9,063 | £3,625 | £1,125 |
| £2,750 | 46 | 2750 | 41.3 | £10,313 | £4,125 | £1,375 |
| £3,000 | 50 | 3100 | 46.5 | £11,625 | £4,650 | £1,650 |
| £3,250 | 54 | 3467 | 52.0 | £13,000 | £5,200 | £1,950 |
| £3,500 | 58 | 3850 | 57.8 | £14,438 | £5,775 | £2,275 |
| £3,750 | 63 | 4250 | 63.8 | £15,938 | £6,375 | £2,625 |
| £4,000 | 67 | 4667 | 70.0 | £17,500 | £7,000 | £3,000 |
Major Red Flags
Money back Guarantee
If you see any prices or SEO packages or services that include the phrase, results guaranteed or we will refund you money if we fail then please run to the hills. Unless they own Google, they cannot guarantee anything. More.
PPC included
If you talk to an Digital Marketing Company and they mention that half or more of your budget should be ploughed into Facebook or Google Ads then this company does not have any faith in its SEO skills and should be avoided.
SEO Content, AI content
Content for search engines or for ‘SEO’ is a red flag. This is not future-proof. Google is the cleverest software company in the world. They are experts at identifying poorly crafted or plagiarised content.
SEO 101
The below are so basic that if your SEOs are mention these as an important part of their offer, then walk away, you are working with amateurs
- Robots.txt Creation
- Creation & Implementation of XML Sitemap
- Sitemap ROR Sitemap
- Google Webmaster Setup
- Bing Webmaster Setup
- Website usability
- Content Quality
- Showing you results for keyword no one searches for!
Content Audits
Our Content audits are designed to correct and improve on all existing content. This includes grammar and spelling and on-page optimisation. It is not just listing your content or seeing what content is missing.
If your SEOs don’t mention writing content or auditing content then your may be stuck with a techie team who can only do half the job. LEAVE NOW.
Content Strategy
A content strategy starts with researching and cataloguing where your current organic search traffic is coming from and where your competitors are gaining there’s from.
The result is a comprehensive list of what content needs to be created and in what form ie as a page or a blog.
Google rewards new informative content. The more relevatntopics your website covers in detail and better than your competitors the more traffic and sales.
If the company you are talking to ask your team to supply all the content move on.
This is how much SEO elements cost.
Buy exactly what you need and enjoy 50% off*
All orders are completed in 14 days. You can use our SEO Pricing calculator to gain an idea of how much you should be paying. * Remember all our prices have a 50% introductory offer that can be only used once. Please note these cut-price offers end 02.03.24.
Not sure what to buy? See our SEO consulting services to help point you in the right direction or to create plan.
This is what you are buying and the time it takes
Content
Content costs the most to create. It is the most expensive and valuable SEO element. Prices range from £20 (Fivver) to a journalist or technical writer £350 per 600 words.
Here the
Blogs
Blog pages are more conversation like content which are written to elaborate on a service or product you offer or simply to show off your knowledge. They are usually 600 words.
Local SEO Content Pages
Local GEO targetted content is the cheapest to produce. The reason is that there is a degree of repetition. They are usually 500 words.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is charged by the hour and can be used to solve and fix any technical element of your website causing the site to appear lower in Google’s search engine. The most common fixes are site speed and other core metric issues,
Content Audits
Content audits are designed to correct and improve on all existing content. This includes grammar and spelling and on-page optimisation. It is not just listing your content or seeing what content is missing.
Content Strategy
A content strategy starts with researching and cataloguing where your current organic search traffic is coming from and where your competitors are gaining there’s from.
The result is a comprehensive list of what content needs to be created and in what form ie as a page or a blog,
On Page Optmisation
This is sold by the page, not by the hour. Here we carefully go through a page and either make optimisation improvements live or we document them in a Word document for your webmaster to implement.
On-page improvements take into account everything from content, code, mark up language and internal links.
It is very comprehensive and something we are best at.
Backlinks
Drip-feeding backlinks into your SEO can increase organic search rankings by 10-20%.
Our backlink service includes outreach to speak to a website owner, the content for the backlinks and the anchor text and URL.
It is a slow, careful process to ensure the backlink is natural and future-proof. We have been building backlinks for over 16 years.
DA or domain strength is approximately 10-35.
Conversion Optmisation
UX journey audit that looks to improve user engagement and lead to more enquiries and sales.
Reporting
Whatever we do for you, you will receive a full report at the end of your work. If you have any questions or queries about your work you will have a direct telephone line tospeak to the person doing your work.
Unhappy with anytihng
If you are unhappy with any aspect of your SEO work, then you can speak to Mr Sykes our MD directly on 07802 944593 (9-5 Weekdays). Any work not completed not of sufficient quality is refunded.
