What Actually Determines the Price
Competition in your sector. Ranking a local service business and ranking a national e-commerce brand require different amounts of work, and the gap is large.
Site size and condition. A forty-page site with clean architecture is a different technical job from a fifteen-thousand-URL store with a decade of accumulated redirects and duplicate pages.
Content production volume. This is usually the largest line. Whether we write four substantial pieces a month or you supply the content changes the total more than anything else.
Languages and locations. Each additional language is a separate keyword research, content and technical configuration exercise, not a translation.
Who implements. If your developers apply the technical fixes, you pay for strategy and review. If we implement, you pay for the hours.
What a Monthly Retainer Should Include
- Continuous technical monitoring and fixes, not a one-off audit
- Keyword research and a keyword-to-page map kept current
- An agreed volume of new content or content refreshes
- On-page optimisation of existing pages
- Internal linking work as the site grows
- Digital PR and authority building, if it is in scope
- Competitor and search-landscape monitoring
- Monthly reporting on traffic, positions and conversions
- A named person you can actually talk to
If a proposal does not say how many hours or how much content are included, it is not a proposal. It is a subscription to a report.
Why the Cheapest Quotes Are Expensive
SEO has a real floor cost because it is skilled labour. A quote far below the market is achieved by removing the labour: an automated audit sent monthly, a handful of directory submissions, thin auto-generated articles, and link packages bought in bulk.
The directory submissions and bought links are the dangerous part. They can produce a small early lift and a manual penalty later, and recovering from one costs far more than the monthly saving ever did. We have taken on several clients whose first six months with us were spent undoing the previous supplier’s link profile.
The honest position is that if the budget available is genuinely small, a one-off technical fix plus a handful of well-built pages is a better use of it than a cheap ongoing retainer that produces nothing.
How We Price
Audit first, separately. We start with a paid technical and content audit that produces a prioritised action list with expected impact. You own that document and can implement it yourself, with us, or with anyone else. It stands alone.
Monthly retainer. After the audit we propose a scope: how many technical hours, how much content, what authority work, what reporting. The fee is fixed against that scope so you know what you are buying rather than buying attention.
Project work. Migrations, site rebuilds, international expansion and one-off technical remediation are quoted as projects rather than folded into a retainer.
We do not price as a percentage of ad spend, and we do not sell packages named after metals.
What to Expect for the Money
Technical fixes can move things within four to eight weeks because they release pages that were already suppressed. Content and authority work compounds from month three, with the strongest returns typically between months six and twelve. Anyone promising page one in a month is either targeting terms nobody searches or using methods that will cost you later.
What we commit to is a defined scope of work each month, transparent reporting including the months that go backwards, and measurable progress on traffic and conversions rather than on a ranking screenshot for a term nobody types.