Why SEO costs what it does, and where the money actually goes
Not a defence of the industry’s pricing — a breakdown of it. What the work involves, why the cheap end cannot deliver it, and how to tell whether a quote is fair before you sign anything.
The thing you are actually buying
Attention concentrates violently at the top of a search results page. Sistrix analysed more than 80 million keywords and found the first organic result takes around 28.5% of clicks, the second about 15.7%, and the tenth roughly 2.5%. Position one gets more than ten times position ten.
Two honest caveats. That study is from 2020 and measured mobile only, and since then AI Overviews, featured snippets and the local pack have pushed the blue links further down, so real figures today are softer and vary hugely by query. Your own Search Console data beats any published curve.
The shape holds regardless, and it is why SEO is priced the way it is. Moving from page two to position three is not a 20% improvement in visibility. It is the difference between almost nobody and a steady flow.
Where a monthly fee actually goes
Almost all of it is time. That is the unglamorous answer and it is the true one.
- Writing, which is most of itA service page researched, written and checked takes a couple of hours. A properly researched article takes longer. This is where the bulk of any honest retainer goes, and it is the part that cannot be automated without the result showing.
- Technical workIndexing problems, speed, structure, schema, broken links. Bursty rather than steady — a lot in month one, much less by month four.
- Google Business Profile and localOngoing rather than one-off. Posts, photos, review responses, keeping details accurate.
- Reporting and reading the dataLooking at Search Console properly every month and changing what you do next because of it. Easy to skip, and skipping it is how retainers quietly stop working.
- ToolsGenuinely the smallest line. We should be straight about this, because the industry is not.
What £49 a month buys, and why
Not a moral argument, an arithmetic one. At £49 a month there is no time in the budget. A single properly written page costs more than that in labour, so whatever is being delivered has to be automated.
In practice that means an automated report, some directory submissions, and generated content. None of it is fraud. It is simply what £49 covers, and it will not move you up a results page.
The useful question is not “is this too cheap” but “how many hours of human work does this price contain, and doing what?” Any provider should be able to answer that. Ours are on the pricing page, published rather than quoted.
Three things nobody selling SEO wants to tell you
- You cannot buy .gov.uk or .ac.uk linksSome agencies list these as a deliverable. They are not obtainable on request, and anyone offering them is either selling something that will not arrive or planning to get them in a way you would not want associated with your business.
- Nobody can guarantee a positionNot us, not anyone. If a proposal contains a guaranteed ranking, that alone is enough to decline it.
- Some businesses should not buy SEO at allIf nobody searches for what you do, or you need the phone ringing this month, or your service pages do not convert the traffic you already have — spend the money elsewhere and come back later. We would rather say that than take a retainer that will not work.
What the market looks like
| Option | Typical monthly cost | What you tend to get |
|---|---|---|
| Doing it yourself | £0 | The Google Business Profile and content work, which is most of the value. Limited by your time, not your ability. |
| Budget packages | £49–£150 | Automated reports and directory submissions. No hours in the budget for anything else. |
| Get Your Website Seen | £199–£800 | Human-written content, technical work, local SEO, monthly reporting. You deal with us directly. |
| Mid-range agencies | £500–£1,500 | Comparable deliverables with higher overheads, usually via an account manager. |
| Larger agencies | £2,000+ | Broad campaigns and specialist teams, built for businesses with more at stake than most small firms. |
Those bands are what we see on the quotes prospective clients send us to look over, not published industry figures. And the first row is not a joke — most of what a small local business needs is free and self-serviceable. Five local SEO fixes you can do in an hour covers the highest-return part of it.
Frequently asked
How long before it pays for itself?
Three to six months before meaningful movement, longer in competitive sectors. Whether it pays for itself depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you — one job might cover a year, or it might take twenty.
Why is SEO not a one-off job?
Parts of it are. The technical work is largely front-loaded and does not need repeating monthly. Content and local presence are ongoing because your competitors are publishing too. If someone is charging you a full retainer for technical work in month eight, ask what they are finding.
Do I need a separate page for every town?
For every town you genuinely work in and can write about specifically, yes. For towns where you would only be swapping the place name, no — that produces pages Google filters out.
What should an audit include?
Indexing and crawl issues, page titles and descriptions, content gaps against what people search for, Google Business Profile, and a prioritised list of what to fix first. If an audit hands you two hundred issues with no order of work, it is a tool export rather than an audit.
Am I tied in?
Not with us. Monthly, cancel any month. We would rather earn it than lock it.
What £199 a month bought
Paramount Space Cleaning in Coventry started with us on the Light plan in October 2025, having tried SEO before and got nothing for it. In seven months they went from no visibility to position one for “deep cleaning coventry”, page one for 55 search terms, and a £7,000 commercial contract traced back to organic search.
The caveat we attach to everything: one business, one city, one sector that is competitive but not brutal. Not a forecast for anyone else, and we will tell you which category you are in before you commit. Nora approved every figure before we published it.
Simon & Lisa Batchelor run Get Your Website Seen. Simon spent ten years as owner and editor of a magazine, then built and sold Commerce Computers Ltd, a trade computer supplier that traded online as shop4it.co.uk. So we have been on the buying side of marketing that did not work, which is most of why this site reads the way it does. You deal with us directly, and every figure published here belongs to a client who approved it.
Been quoted for SEO?
Put the proposal through our free checker. It works through what is included, what is missing, and what to ask before signing — and it tells you at the top that we are an agency and to weigh our opinion of other agencies accordingly.
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