Home / SEO services / Local SEO cost
Most small businesses in the UK pay somewhere between £300 and £1,000 a month for local SEO that genuinely moves the needle. Some pay less and get very little for it. Some pay a lot more and get reports instead of results. This guide sets out what local SEO costs, what pushes the price up or down, the extras to watch for, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
Local SEO is priced on the amount of work involved, so the honest answer is that it depends on your trade, your area and the state of your website. What we can do is show you what each level of spend usually buys, so you can tell a fair quote from a poor one.
The figures below are typical of the UK market for small and medium sized businesses, based on what we see when prospective clients show us quotes from other providers. They are a guide to the market, not our own prices, which you can find on our pricing page.
Three broad bands cover most of what small businesses are offered. The difference between them is almost always the amount of hands on work each month.
Automated reports, a handful of directory listings and very little hands on work. Rarely enough to overtake a competitor who is investing properly.
Google Business Profile work, on-page optimisation, new location and service pages, citations, regular content and a monthly report. The right level for most trades and local services.
Several towns or branches, heavier content production, link building and strategy sessions. Suited to crowded markets or businesses covering a wide area.
One-off audits usually run from free up to around £500. They are a useful starting point, but an audit on its own does not change your rankings. Most agencies also quote before VAT, so the figure you actually pay is often 20% higher than the one on their website.
Two businesses can both ask for local SEO and need completely different amounts of work. These six things make the biggest difference to what a fair quote looks like.
A roofer in Newcastle is up against far more competition than a piano tuner in Hexham. The busier the search results, the more pages, content and authority it takes to reach the top three.
Ranking in one town is very different from ranking across Tyneside, Northumberland and County Durham. Each area you want to win usually needs its own properly written page.
A slow, dated or thin website holds back everything else. Sometimes the most cost effective SEO move is fixing or rebuilding the site first, rather than paying to promote it as it is.
For local searches, your profile often decides whether you appear in the map results at all. An unclaimed, incomplete or quiet profile needs work before anything else.
Location pages, service pages and helpful articles take time to research and write well. The number of new pages each month is one of the biggest drivers of cost.
Businesses with a steady flow of genuine Google reviews tend to rank faster. If reviews are thin, building a simple way to ask for them becomes part of the job.
Cheap SEO is tempting, and we understand why. But at under £150 a month there simply is not enough time in the budget to do the work that moves rankings. Writing one properly researched location page can take several hours on its own. Add Google Business Profile updates, citations, technical checks and reporting, and a low monthly fee only stretches to automated tools and a monthly PDF.
The usual result is a year of payments and very little change in how often the phone rings. It is often cheaper in the long run to pay a fair price for work that is done properly, by people who can show you local businesses they have already ranked. You can see some of ours in our work.
We will check your website and Google Business Profile for free.
You get a clear report within one to two working days.
No obligation and no hard sell.
The monthly figure on a quote is not always what you end up paying. These are the extras that most often catch small businesses out.
We built our plans around a simple idea: there is no point paying for SEO on a website that is not good enough to rank. So rather than selling SEO and a new website separately, we put them together in one monthly plan, with a 12 month term so the work has time to compound.
A fast, modern website built for search from day one, included in your plan rather than charged as a separate project. Most sites are live within about ten days. More on our web design.
Location and service pages written for the towns and jobs you want to win, plus helpful articles answering what your customers are searching for. More on our local SEO services.
Your profile kept accurate and active with weekly Google posts, so you keep showing up in the map results where local customers look first. More on Google Business Profile.
A plain English report each month showing where you rank, what has changed and what we are working on next, with direct access to us and no account manager in the middle.
Tell us your trade and the areas you want to cover.
We will give you an honest view of the work involved and what it costs.
Whoever you choose, these questions will quickly tell you whether you are paying for real work. Any good provider will be happy to answer every one of them. Google's own SEO starter guide is also worth a read if you want the basics before you talk to anyone.
Local SEO is not instant, and anyone promising first place on Google within a few weeks should be treated with caution. As a rough guide, this is what most local businesses can expect.
Google Business Profile improvements and technical fixes start to show, often with early movement in the map results.
New location and service pages begin to rank, and enquiries from search usually start to pick up noticeably.
The work compounds. Each month builds on the last, which is why steady, consistent SEO beats short bursts of activity.
The things business owners most often ask us before deciding whether local SEO is worth the money.
For most local service businesses, yes. People searching for a trade in their area are usually ready to buy, so ranking in the map results and the top organic results tends to bring in better enquiries than most other marketing. The key is paying for real work rather than automated reports.
You can do some of it, such as keeping your Google Business Profile up to date and asking customers for reviews. Google's Business Profile help centre is a good place to start. The time consuming parts, like location pages, technical work and citations, are where most owners find it makes sense to hand it over.
Because SEO takes months to build momentum, not weeks. A minimum term gives the work time to deliver before anyone judges it. Our plans run for 12 months and then move to a rolling monthly agreement.
Not always, but a slow or dated website makes SEO harder and more expensive. That is why our monthly plans include a rebuilt website, so you are never paying to promote a site that is holding you back.
An audit shows you what is wrong, but it does not fix anything. It is a good starting point, and ours is free, but rankings only improve when someone does the work the audit uncovers.
Yes. We are based in North Shields and work with businesses across Tyneside, Northumberland and County Durham, and we look after clients further afield across the UK too.
Start with a free health check of your website and Google Business Profile.
We will show you what is holding you back and what it would take to fix it.
Health check reports are back with you within one to two working days, with honest advice in plain English.
