On this page
Search for this and you get a wall of pricing tables with three columns called Bronze, Silver and Gold, each one a list of nouns. Keyword research. On-page optimisation. Monthly reporting. None of it tells you what will happen to your website in October, which is the only thing you are actually buying.
So this page does it the other way round. Here is what is inside a package, then what the bands cost, then what London changes.
What is inside every SEO package
Whoever you buy from and whatever they call the tiers, a monthly package is the same four ingredients in different amounts. Once you can see them, the sales pages get much easier to read.
Research, and deciding what to do
Which searches are worth chasing, who is already winning them, and what would have to change for you to be in the running. Usually the smallest slice by hours and the one that decides whether the other three are wasted.
Changes to your actual website
Headings, page titles, the words on the pages you already have, internal links, page speed, and the wiring that lets a search engine read the site at all. The plain test of whether this is happening: at the end of a month, can somebody point at pages that are different?
Writing
New pages that answer questions your customers are typing. This is normally the largest slice above about £700 a month, and it is the first thing quietly dropped at the cheaper end, because it is the most expensive ingredient by hours.
Reading the numbers
Somebody looking at what happened and changing what happens next. A report on its own is not this. A report is a document; this is a decision.
The three bands, in London money
| A month | Who is doing it | What lands |
|---|---|---|
| Under £500 | One freelancer, a few hours | A tidy site, slow improvement on a handful of pages |
| £500 to £1,500 | One senior person, a few days | Research, real page changes, new writing, a decision each month |
| £1,500 and up | A small team, or one specialist nearly full time | The same work at volume, which needs a site big enough to spend it on |
London quotes tend to sit toward the top of each band rather than in a band of their own.
The middle band is where most small London businesses land, and it is where the question stops being how much and becomes who. A senior person working three days beats a junior working eight, and the price will not tell you which one you are getting. Ask.
What London actually changes
Less than the pricing tables imply, and more than nothing. Three things genuinely differ.
- The competition is heavier. In most London categories the businesses above you are already paying somebody. That does not change the work, it changes how long it takes to matter, which usually means a longer patient stretch before the numbers move.
- The map results carry more weight. For anything a person might travel to, the three businesses shown on the map take a large share of the clicks, and getting into that group is a different job from ranking a page. If your customers come to you, this is the first thing to fix.
- Borough beats city. Almost nobody wins 'SEO London' and almost everybody can win their own patch of it. Walthamstow, Redbridge, Hackney: these are searches with real intent behind them and a fraction of the competition.
Nobody wins London. Everybody can win their own bit of it.
Five questions before you buy
Send these to every agency on your shortlist. The answers separate a package from a price far more reliably than the tiers do.
- What arrives in month one, and in what form?
- How many pages will be written, and who writes them?
- Who does the work, by name, and are they the person I am speaking to now?
- How long am I tied in, and how much notice do I give?
- If we stop, what stays with me: the pages, the writing, the accounts and the data?
The fourth one is where London differs from the rest of the country in a way that costs money. Twelve-month terms are more common here, and a twelve-month term with three months' notice is a fifteen-month decision. It should be described that way before you sign it.
What ours contains
It would be a strange article about vague packages that was vague about its own. We are in Walthamstow, in the same city, and the prices are printed rather than quoted after a call.
| 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.
There is no contract behind those figures, which is the reason they can be printed at all. If a month is not worth what it cost, the next one does not happen. That is a harder discipline than a twelve-month term and a better deal for you.