SEO in the UK costs anything from a couple of hundred pounds a month to several thousand, and the price decides how much real work fits in a month. For a local or regional business, hands-on SEO tends to start in the high hundreds of pounds a month. Ours starts at around £750 a month, month to month, reported on enquiries.
Here's what each level buys, what a month of work should contain, and how to judge it.
What it costs in the UK
We'll avoid inventing survey figures. In general terms:
- The low end, a couple of hundred pounds a month, is largely automated tools and reporting.
- A retainer with real hands-on work for a local or regional business tends to start in the high hundreds of pounds a month.
- Competitive or national markets cost more, because the work needed to move is larger.
Many agencies, us included, start with an audit before a retainer, so the monthly work is aimed at the problems that are actually there.
What a month of genuine work looks like
The mix changes month to month. Early on it leans technical; later it leans towards content. But you should be able to point at specific things that were done.
Technical fixes
Pages Google can't index, broken links, redirects that go in circles, slow templates, missing or duplicated titles, a sitemap full of pages that no longer exist. Search Console usually has a list. Someone should be working through it, and the technical SEO side often makes up most of the first month or two.
Content
New pages, and improvements to existing ones, for the searches your customers actually make. For most local businesses that means a properly written page per service, and often per area, rather than one page listing everything. We covered why that matters in why your website isn't showing on Google.
This is where most of the long-term value comes from, and it's the part cheap retainers skip because it takes real time.
Local search and your Business Profile
For a local business, the map results often matter more than the ordinary listings. Categories, services, photos, posts, review replies, and making sure your name, address and phone number match everywhere. There's more in how the map pack works in Leicester and Huddersfield.
Internal linking
Making sure your important pages are linked to from the rest of the site, with sensible link text. It's unglamorous and it works.
Reporting on enquiries
A report should start with what you care about: calls, forms and bookings that came from search. Then rankings and traffic, as the explanation for those numbers. A report that only shows rankings can look great while the business gets nothing from it.
Red flags
Automated link packages. "50 high-authority backlinks a month" almost always means links from sites built to sell links. At best Google ignores them. At worst they cause a problem you later have to pay to clean up.
Reports with no work in them. If the monthly report is charts and no list of what was changed, ask what was changed. If the answer is vague, you have your answer.
Rankings-only reporting. Ranking first for a phrase nobody searches looks impressive and earns nothing.
Long lock-ins. Twelve-month minimum terms protect the agency, not you. Good work keeps clients without a contract forcing it.
Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. Anyone who guarantees a position is either guessing or planning to report on a phrase that was easy all along.
Why very cheap retainers are mostly reporting
Do the sums. A retainer of £150 or £250 a month, after the agency's overheads and margin, pays for very little skilled time. That's enough to run a ranking tool and send a monthly PDF. It isn't enough to write a good service page, let alone a few of them, plus technical fixes and local work.
That doesn't make the people behind cheap retainers dishonest. It just means the price decides what's possible, and at the very low end what's possible is mostly reporting.
How we do it
Our SEO is a monthly retainer from around £750 a month. Below that, there isn't enough time to do more than report. There's no lock-in; it's month to month.
It often starts with a £900 site and search audit, which is credited against the work if you carry on. Reports lead with enquiries, then rankings and traffic. We don't guarantee rankings, we won't buy links, and we'll tell you if a market is too small or too competitive to be worth it.
If you're local, there's more on SEO in Leicester and SEO in Huddersfield. Or get in touch and we'll tell you honestly whether a retainer makes sense for you.
