What does local SEO cost a small business?
Local SEO for a small business costs from £195 a month with us, before VAT, as part of our Care Pro plan, paid monthly and cancelled on 30 days' notice. For that, we keep your Google Business Profile, your listings on other sites and the local pages on your website up to date, and send you a report each month. Setting up a profile from nothing goes on a fixed quote first.
Most owners picture local SEO as a job that gets done once. A plumber has the profile set up and the phone starts ringing. A year later it has gone quiet again, with nothing obvious to blame. Usually something did change: the winter hours never went on, a new service is missing, three competitors have collected fifty reviews between them, and a directory still lists the old landline. Upkeep is most of what you pay for.
What the monthly work covers
The monthly fee pays for a person who checks your profile against the business as it runs today and puts right whatever has drifted. We copy the same contact details to Bing Places and Apple Business Connect, and to the directories your trade uses, so nobody rings a number you gave up two years ago. On your website, we write pages for the towns you want work from and keep the titles and structured data in order.
Reviews take the most patience. After each job your customer gets a request with a link that opens the review form, inside Google's rules, and we reply to the reviews that arrive. Once a month you get a short note with the calls, direction requests and website visits that came from the profile, and what we changed. Care Pro also includes everything in our other care plans, so the hosting and the small edits to your site come in the same fee.
What changes the price
Three things move the cost of local SEO up or down: the state your profile starts in, how many places you want to be found, and how much of the review work you want off your desk. The first is paid once. A business with no profile, or one claimed years ago by a former employee whose login nobody has, takes more hours in the first month, which is why we quote that setup before we start.
The number of places is where two businesses of the same size end up far apart. A café with one door needs a well-kept profile and a steady flow of reviews, and Care Pro covers that. A roofer whose vans reach twelve towns needs a page for each town that says something true about the work there, such as the age of the roofs on a particular estate or how soon a van can arrive, and writing twelve of those well takes days, so a business covering that many places should expect a quote above the starting price. We would rather write four good town pages than twelve that swap the place name and nothing else.
A business that gets several reviews a week can add our AI review replies from £145 a month: every review answered the same day in your words, with the angry ones sent to you first. At the other end, if you would rather keep the profile yourself, Care Plus from £85 a month looks after the website and its small changes and leaves the local work to you.
What not to pay for
Do not pay anyone who promises you the top of the map. Google's own help page on local ranking says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and that local results come mainly from relevance, distance and how well known the business is. Distance means where the person searching happens to be standing, and no agency can move that. We work on the first and the last, which is what the listings and the reviews are for.
Be wary of a package that puts your business on a hundred directories. A handful matter, the ones your customers open, and each extra listing is one more place for your phone number to go out of date. The same goes for a monthly report full of rankings for phrases nobody types; ask how many people rang or asked for directions. And read the contract. Ours bills monthly and cancels with 30 days' notice, with no exit fee. A year-long tie-in leaves you paying for months after the calls from it have stopped.
You can do much of this yourself if someone in the business will give it an hour a month, and the profile's own figures will tell you whether it is working. Pay for it when that hour keeps slipping to next week. If you are unsure which camp you are in, send us your business name and the towns you cover, and we will tell you what the profile needs and what keeping it there would cost.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published