On this page
The search for this phrase returns a hundred pages that all do the same thing: a numbered list of agencies, with the agency that wrote the page at number one. That is not a buying guide, and we sell this service, so a list like that from us would be worth even less.
So this ranks the services rather than the suppliers, in the order a small business should buy them. The order matters more than the budget, because each item on the list needs the one below it to be in place before it can pay back. If you are not yet certain search is the right one of the six jobs sold as digital marketing, start there instead.
The five services, in buying order
| Order | The service | Typical cost | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Technical fixes: speed, phone layout, being readable by search engines | A one-off, often a few hundred pounds | Everything else is wasted if the page is broken or slow |
| 2 | The local listing: a Google Business Profile, filled in properly | Free | The largest change most local businesses can act on, at no cost |
| 3 | Written pages that answer real questions | The bulk of any monthly fee | The only item that keeps working years later |
| 4 | Links and mentions from other sites | Slow, and expensive when bought | Only worth it once there are pages worth linking to |
| 5 | Paid advertising | Whatever you set, paid to the platform | A separate decision, and it stops the day you stop paying |
Nothing here is a package. Any supplier can sell you all five; the question is which ones you need this quarter.
One: the technical fixes
This is the least interesting item and the one most often skipped, because it is invisible. It covers whether the site loads quickly on a phone with poor signal, whether the pages have honest titles, whether search engines can read the site at all, and whether anything is broken.
It comes first for a plain reason: it is usually a one-off cost, and every pound spent on the four items below it is diminished while it is undone. A visitor who leaves because the page took six seconds was found successfully and lost anyway.
Two: the free one
A Google Business Profile is the listing that puts you in the small box of businesses on a map, above the ordinary results. It costs nothing, you claim it yourself, and for any business a customer might travel to it is worth more than the next three items combined.
- Claim it, so you control what it says rather than whatever a directory said about you in 2014.
- Set the category precisely, and add the services people ask for by name.
- Use exactly the same address and phone number as everywhere else online.
- Add real photographs of the premises and the work.
- Ask every satisfied customer for a review, and reply to all of them.
If a supplier's proposal does not mention this, it is a proposal written for a different kind of business, and it is fair to ask why.
Three: written pages
This is where a monthly fee mostly goes, and it is the only item on the list that keeps earning after you stop paying. A page written in March that answers a question customers type is still answering it in three years' time.
The pages worth having are narrow. One per service you sell, one per area you serve if you serve several, and one per real question a customer asks you on the phone. Broad pages about your industry are the ones agencies write when they have run out of specifics, and they rarely earn anything.
The plain test for whether this is happening: at the end of a month, can somebody point at pages that did not exist at the start of it?
Four: links, and why they come fourth
When another website mentions yours, search engines read it as a small vote. That is real, and it is also the item most heavily sold, because it is the hardest for a buyer to check.
It comes fourth because a link to a thin page is worth little and a link to a genuinely useful page is worth a lot. Sequence the two the other way round and you are buying votes for something nobody wants to read. For most small businesses the honest version of this item is local: a trade body, a supplier's stockist page, a local paper, a charity you sponsor. That is slow, cheap and durable.
Five: paid advertising, which is a different decision
Advertising buys attention immediately and stops the day the card stops. Search work is slow and continues. They answer different questions and it is a mistake to treat one as a version of the other.
What a budget actually buys
Under about five hundred pounds a month you are buying a few hours of one person's week. That suits a small local site with a short list of things to fix, and it will not win a busy category. Between five hundred and fifteen hundred is where most small business work sits and where the question stops being how much and starts being who. Above that you are paying for a team, which only pays back on a site large enough to keep them usefully busy.
A senior person working two days a month beats a junior working eight, and the price will not tell you which one you are getting. Ask by name.
The four things to ignore
- Guaranteed positions. Nobody controls the results, so a guarantee is either a promise about a phrase nobody searches for, or it is not a guarantee.
- Submission to hundreds of directories. It was a tactic fifteen years ago. Today it mostly generates inconsistent copies of your address, which actively works against the map listing you spent an afternoon getting right.
- A report with no decision attached. A monthly document full of charts is not a service. The service is somebody reading it and changing what happens next.
- Anything priced as a percentage of your advertising spend. The incentive points away from you.
What AI answers change, and what they do not
A growing share of questions now get answered by an assistant summarising a few sources instead of a page of ten blue links. It changes the shape of the result, not the work: assistants read the same pages, and they favour clear, specific, well-structured answers, which is what item three was already asking for.
The one genuine difference is that being named matters more than being listed. In a list of ten you can be seventh and still get clicked. In an answer that names two suppliers, there is no seventh.
Order beats budget. The cheapest two items on this list gate the other three.
Where we sit
It would be a strange article about buying order that hid its prices behind a phone call, so here they are. pomegranate is one person's studio in Walthamstow doing this work for small businesses, and the plans are printed rather than quoted.
| Plan | A month | Roughly what it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | £445 | The smallest month that still moves something |
| Growth | £950 | Working depth: more pages, more writing, quarterly review |
| Harvest | £2,250+ | Weekly cadence, scope agreed page by page |
No minimum term, no notice period, and no percentage of any advertising spend.
And the genuinely useful advice, which costs us money to give: if you have not yet claimed your Google Business Profile or fixed a site that takes six seconds to load, do those two things before you pay anybody a monthly fee. They are items one and two for a reason.