Affordable SEO for UK businesses

SEO stands for search engine optimisation: the work of making your website easier for Google to understand and more convincing to the people who find it. It is not a switch you flip. It is a steady run of small, sensible improvements to your pages, your site’s technical health and the way other websites refer to you.

The plans on this page are priced so that a small business can start without betting the year on it, and stop whenever it likes. What you get for the money depends on how competitive your market is, how healthy your site is to begin with, and how many search terms you want to win. The sections below explain which plan tends to suit which business, what SEO can and cannot honestly promise, and how you will know whether it is working. If you would rather talk it through, send me your site address and I will tell you what I would do first.

The right plan follows from what you are trying to win, not from how much you would like to spend.

• Foundation, £300 a month: suits a small site or a business serving a handful of towns. The aim is a technically healthy site with steady, modest gains. If most of your customers are nearby, my local SEO service is also worth a look.
• Growth, £650 a month: suits a business selling in a defined niche across the UK, or serving several distinct service areas, where you need new pages and outside links to keep pace.
• Competitive, from £1,200 a month: suits crowded markets, large product catalogues, or anyone trying to overtake established names.

Not sure which fits? Tell me about your site and I’ll recommend the plan that makes sense.

SEO can make your site easier for Google to read, get the right pages in front of people already searching for what you sell, and build a body of content that keeps working month after month. It can also show you which terms are worth chasing and which are a waste of money.

What it cannot do is guarantee a ranking. Nobody outside Google controls that, and anyone who promises a position is guessing or selling something. Results depend on your competition, the age and health of your site, how much useful content you have and how much useful content you already have. A weak offer or a slow, confusing site will hold back even good SEO.

Search rarely fixes a business on its own, but it is one of the few marketing channels where the work keeps paying after you stop paying for each click. That is why I would rather fix your foundations first than chase headline rankings.

Every month you get a report written for a business owner, not an SEO. It sets out what I did, what changed and what happens next. I use Google Search Console (Google’s free tool that shows how your site appears in search) and analytics to track the things that matter:

• Which search terms bring people to your site, and whether those visits are rising
• Where your target pages sit for the keywords we agreed
• Enquiries, calls and form submissions that came from search
• Technical issues found and fixed

Rankings on their own are a poor scoreboard, because a top position for a term nobody buys from is worthless. So the report leads with visits and enquiries, and the ranking figures explain them. If something has not moved, the report says so and gives my best reading of why.