How this works
Local SEO cost for a trade business: what to expect and ask
The honest local seo cost answer, from checking 504 UK agencies. Four in five will not publish a price, the rest start at a median £425 a month. Here is the sum.
Expect a monthly fee somewhere between £299 and £750, with £425 in the middle, and expect most agencies to refuse to tell you until you are on a call. Both of those numbers come from checking 504 UK agency websites in August 2026, not from a feeling.
This post is the version of that study for somebody actually buying: what the market charges, what the money should be doing each month, and the sum that tells you whether it can pay for itself on your jobs.
Three numbers decide it: the fee, what you keep per job, and how many quotes you win.
What the market actually charges
Of 504 agencies, only 59 published a price for SEO at all, which is 11.7 per cent. Among the 44 quoting an entry level monthly fee, this is where the money sits.
| Entry monthly fee | Share of agencies publishing one |
|---|---|
| Under £250 | 25% |
| £250 to £499 | 38.6% |
| £500 to £999 | 20.5% |
| £1,000 to £1,999 | 9.1% |
| £2,000 and up | 6.8% |
The median entry point was £425 a month, the middle half of the market between £299 and £750. My own numbers are on the pricing page, because I am in the 11.7 per cent that thinks you should not have to sit through a sales call to learn a price.
Two warnings from the same study. The cheapest monthly SEO retainer in the set was £39 and the highest starting price £3,000, a seventy-fold spread for two things both sold as monthly SEO, so the word on the invoice tells you nearly nothing. And 58 agencies had a pricing page with no price on it, which tells you the page exists to catch the search, not to answer the question.
What the money should buy each month
A fair monthly fee maps to work you could point at. For a trade business the list is short and none of it is mystical.
- The profile, actively run. Categories, services, photos, posts, and questions answered. You stay the owner of the profile. An agency that wants to own it is holding your shop keys.
- A review routine that actually runs. This is the strongest lever you hold. In my geogrid study, going from under 10 reviews to 150 or more stretched how far a top three placement reached from 0.71 miles to 1.84. Earned, permanent, and yours.
- A website that backs the profile up. Of 445 ranking trade sites I crawled, 16.9 per cent had no phone number in readable text and only 29.7 per cent carried LocalBusiness schema. Basics, still not done by most of your competitors.
- Proof, on a fixed grid. A geogrid scan costs about 40p to run. The same grid, same keywords, before and after, is what evidence looks like in this trade. A ranking screenshot from one spot is what marketing looks like.
What the money cannot buy is distance. Proximity is roughly 55 per cent of what decides the map pack, and nobody moves your postcode. Anyone promising you the whole city is promising you somebody else’s street corners.
The sum that decides it
Same arithmetic as the Checkatrade sum, because a monthly fee is a monthly fee. Take the quoted fee. Take what you keep on a typical job after materials and your time. Divide one by the other, then allow for the quotes you do not win.
| Monthly fee | Kept per job | Jobs to cover it |
|---|---|---|
| £300 | £150 | 2 a month |
| £300 | £500 | Under 1 a month |
| £600 | £150 | 4 a month |
| £600 | £500 | Just over 1 a month |
Round numbers to show the method, not anybody’s real figures. What SEO can honestly promise is visibility and calls: showing up in more of the searches near you and making the phone easier to find. It cannot promise what a job is worth or how often you close, because those are yours. So run the sum with your own numbers, and if two extra jobs a month sounds implausible from where you rank today, that is worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
The difference from a directory subscription is what you are left holding. Rented visibility stops the month you stop paying. The profile, the reviews and the website are yours, they compound, and they do not vanish with a cancelled invoice.
Both are real options. The difference is what you still have in three years.
Five questions that sort the real from the rest
Get the answers in writing.
- Where is your price list? Four in five agencies will not publish one. Make of that what you will, and get your quote itemised.
- Who owns my Business Profile? You do, as Primary Owner, or walk away.
- What is the baseline? If they cannot show you a saved scan of where you stood before the work started, they cannot show you what changed.
- What happens in month one? A concrete list, not “optimisation begins”.
- What will you not promise? The right answer includes rankings they cannot guarantee and revenue they cannot control. An agency that promises everything is telling you it measures nothing.
If you want the baseline before you talk to anybody, including me, start with a free check of where you stand across your own patch.