What are SEO packages, and what should a UK package include?
An SEO package is a monthly bundle of search work sold at a set scope: some mix of technical fixes, on-page changes, content, local listings, links and reporting. The useful question is never the tier name but the list of jobs that will be done in a given month.
A UK package worth paying for includes, at minimum, an initial audit with the findings fixed, a keyword map that ties each important search to one page, ongoing on-page and content work, local profile work if you serve an area, and a monthly report that shows enquiries or sales from organic search. Everything else is a question of volume and depth.
The trouble with comparing SEO packages UK providers publish is that two plans with the same headline, say “Growth” or “Pro”, can hold wildly different amounts of work. One may be a few hours of automated reporting; another may include a developer making changes to your site every week. This guide gives you the checklists to tell them apart.
We sell monthly SEO ourselves, so read this with that in mind. We are three freelance developers working from India: another of us plans the SEO and data work, one of us implements changes in code and CMS, and the third of us keeps the monthly schedule and report on track. The comparisons below apply to any provider, including us.
How much do SEO packages cost in the UK?
Prices for SEO packages in the UK vary widely, from budget plans costing a few hundred pounds a month to agency retainers well into four figures. Our own monthly plan starts from US$150/mo. The spread reflects hours, skill and who does the work, not a hidden secret.
Four things drive the price of any package. Scope: a local plumber needs a fraction of the work of a national retailer. Site state: a site with indexing problems or a messy migration history needs technical work before anything else pays off. Competition: ranking for “conveyancing solicitor London” takes more sustained effort than “dog groomer Kendal”. Content volume: writing four solid pages a month costs more than one.
What you should avoid is buying on price alone in either direction. A cheap plan that does nothing measurable is expensive over a year; a large retainer spent on meetings and slide decks is worse. Ask each provider how many hours of skilled work sit behind the monthly fee and what those hours will produce.
If a website rebuild is part of the decision, our UK website cost guide covers that side, and a site structured for search from the start makes every later month of SEO cheaper.
How do you compare a cheap SEO plan with a large retainer?
Put both proposals into the same grid: deliverables per month, who does each task, how fixes get implemented, what the report measures and what happens when you leave. The cheaper plan wins only if it produces comparable work.
- Deliverables: named outputs per month, such as “six technical fixes, two service pages, one article, citations for two locations”, not “ongoing optimisation”.
- People: is the work done by an SEO specialist, a junior, a tool or an unnamed subcontractor?
- Implementation: does the provider change your site, or send recommendations your own developer must pay to action?
- Measurement: does the report show calls, forms or revenue, or only positions for chosen phrases?
- Exit: do content, accounts and reports stay with you if you cancel?
Most budget plans fail on implementation and measurement; most big retainers pass both but carry costs, such as account management and strategy workshops, that a small business may not need. A mid-point is a plan where the people doing the work are also the people you talk to. That is the gap our plan is designed for, and you can check it against this list yourself.
Local SEO packages: who they suit and what they include
Choose a local package when your customers search with a town or “near me” and you serve an area rather than the whole country. Trades, clinics, solicitors, salons, letting agents and restaurants usually belong here.
A local package puts most of its hours into the Google Business Profile, a lawful system for collecting reviews from every customer, consistent listings on UK directories such as Yell and Thomson Local, service pages and a small number of genuine town pages. Google says local results depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and there is no way to pay for a better local ranking, so the package is built around those three factors.
The report for a local package should count calls, form enquiries and direction requests, not only rankings, because a map listing that sends calls is the whole point. If you run several branches, expect the price to rise with the number of locations, as each needs its own profile and page.
Our UK local SEO page covers the detail, including how UK rules on fake and incentivised reviews affect review campaigns.
National SEO packages for UK service firms and B2B
Choose a national package when you sell to customers across the country and location is not part of their search: software, online services, B2B suppliers, training providers, specialist consultancies.
National SEO spends more time on keyword research and content planning, because you are competing for topics rather than towns. A keyword map groups searches by intent, one page per group, and the monthly work fills gaps: comparison pages, guides that answer detailed questions, pages for each use case or industry you serve. Internal links tie those pages together so authority flows to the ones that make money.
Authority matters more at national level, and this is where cheap packages cut corners with bought or low-quality links. Google's spam policies treat buying links for ranking as link spam; a package that includes “50 backlinks a month” should worry you. Useful national authority usually comes from original data, expert commentary for journalists, partner and supplier links and industry directories.
Measurement shifts too: demo requests, sign-ups, quote requests and assisted conversions in GA4, with Search Console showing which topics bring qualified visitors.
Ecommerce SEO packages for UK online shops
Choose an ecommerce package when most of your organic value comes from category and product pages. The work is more technical than a service-business plan, because shop platforms create duplicate and thin pages at scale.
An ecommerce package should cover category structure and copy, product structured data, filter and sort URLs that waste crawl budget, out-of-stock and discontinued product handling, internal links from content to categories, image optimisation and Google Merchant Center feed health for free product listings. On Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento, many of these fixes live in theme code or apps, so a provider who cannot touch code will hand you a list rather than results.
Reports for shops should show organic revenue, transactions and the categories driving them, which needs ecommerce tracking working properly in GA4. If it is not, fixing it is month one's job.
For a deeper view, see our ecommerce SEO services. If you are thinking about a new store at the same time, UK shop builds with us start from US$750.
What deliverables should you get from an SEO package each month?
Every month you should receive a plan agreed in advance, evidence that the planned work went live, and a report that connects that work to results. If any of those three is missing, the package is hard to judge.
Start of month
A short written plan: which pages, fixes and listings will be worked on and why, based on last month's data.
During the month
Changes made on the site and profiles, each logged with the URL, what changed and the date.
End of month
A report with organic enquiries or sales, Search Console clicks and queries, and the task log, plus a few sentences in plain English on what it means.
Every quarter
A review of whether the plan is working, what to stop, and what to try next.
The task log is the single most useful document in any SEO package. It lets you or your web developer check that the work happened, and it keeps the history if you ever change provider. Ours is shared with you as a live sheet, not sent as a PDF once a month.
What should a monthly SEO report show?
A good SEO report answers three questions in order: are more of the right people finding you, are they getting in touch or buying, and what was done this month. Pages of ranking positions without the second and third answers are padding.
We build reports from Google Analytics 4 and Search Console. GA4 supplies key events (calls, forms, WhatsApp taps, purchases) by channel and landing page. Search Console supplies clicks, impressions and the queries that brought them. Rankings for a handful of important searches appear as supporting context.
One setting catches many UK businesses out. Google's Analytics help says standard GA4 properties can keep user-level and event-level data for either 2 months or 14 months. If yours is set to two months, some year-on-year comparisons in explorations will not work, so we check it in week one.
Reports should also admit what they cannot show. AI assistants send some visits without clear referral data, and phone calls from people who saw you in search but dialled later are hard to attribute. We label those gaps rather than hiding them. See our AI search work for how AI referrals are tracked.
SEO contract length and notice periods: what to check
Before signing any SEO package, read how long you are committed, how much notice you must give, what happens to work in progress and who owns what afterwards. These terms matter more than the monthly price.
Many providers ask for a minimum term because SEO takes months to show results, and that reasoning is fair up to a point. What is not fair is a long lock-in with no defined deliverables, automatic renewal that is easy to miss, or content and accounts that stay in the provider's name when you leave.
- Minimum term and what you get in each month of it.
- Notice period and how notice must be given.
- Automatic renewal: does it roll over, and when?
- Ownership of content, reports, tracking set-up and profiles.
- Access removal and handover steps at the end.
- What counts as extra work and how it is priced.
With us, scope, duration and any notice arrangements are written into your quote, and our terms set out the general conditions. We do not give legal advice; if a contract is large, have your own solicitor read it. Whatever you sign, keep ownership of every account in your name from day one.
Red flags in SEO packages, from ranking promises to bulk links
Walk away from any package that promises a number-one spot, hides its methods, or sells volume of links and pages as the product. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO says plainly that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
The same Google guidance lists warning signs worth knowing: unsolicited emails offering search visibility, claims of a special relationship with Google, secretive methods, “priority submit” services and pressure to grant access you do not understand. Those signs still describe a lot of cold outreach UK businesses receive.
- Promises of first place, or “page one in 30 days”.
- Packages sold by number of backlinks, directory submissions or blog posts.
- Mass-produced pages; Google's spam policies call generating many pages without adding value for users scaled content abuse.
- Reports that only track obscure phrases you would never have chosen.
- No task log, or vague entries without URLs.
- Your Google Business Profile or domain registered in the provider's name.
- Long lock-ins with deliverables described only as “ongoing optimisation”.
A useful test: ask the provider to show you exactly what they changed on a client site last month, with URLs. Good teams can answer in minutes.
Are cheap SEO packages in the UK worth it?
Sometimes, for very small sites with little competition, if the plan does real work on your own site and profile. Often not, because the lowest-priced packages cut the two costly parts of SEO: skilled time and implementation.
A low-cost package can be sensible for a sole trader in a quiet market, where a tidy Business Profile, a handful of accurate listings and one decent service page are most of what is needed. In that case, check that the provider actually edits your profile and site rather than generating a report.
It becomes a false economy when the low price is achieved through automation that produces the wrong things: bulk directory submissions, spun articles, links from unrelated sites. These can do harm that costs more to undo than the plan ever saved. Google's spam policies cover both link spam and scaled content abuse, and recovering from either takes time.
The honest middle path for many small businesses is a modest monthly plan with clear deliverables, done by people who can implement. If money is tight, a one-off technical audit with fixes followed by a lighter monthly plan can outperform a year of a bargain package.
Does an SEO package include technical fixes and Core Web Vitals?
It should. Technical SEO covers whether Google can crawl, index and render your pages quickly, and fixing it often decides whether everything else in the package can pay off. Ask who makes the changes, because that is where many packages stop.
Google's web.dev guidance sets good Core Web Vitals thresholds as a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. We check these in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, then fix the causes: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, heavy themes and slow hosting.
Other regular technical work includes pages excluded from the index for fixable reasons, redirect chains left by old redesigns, duplicate URLs from tracking parameters or shop filters, broken internal links and missing structured data. Because we are developers, these are done in your WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or custom code rather than passed on.
Large technical problems, such as a migration gone wrong, are often better handled as a one-off project first and then maintained monthly.
How much content and link building should an SEO package include?
Enough to fill real gaps, and no more. The right number of pages or articles per month depends on how many important searches your site does not yet answer well, not on a round number chosen for the tier.
For a service business, content usually means improving service pages first: clearer answers, prices guidance, process, FAQs and proof. Articles come later and should target questions customers actually ask. For a shop, category copy and buying guides that link to categories do more than general blog posts. For a national B2B firm, detailed comparison and use-case pages tend to earn both traffic and enquiries.
Link building in a sound package looks modest: trade body and supplier listings, local sponsorships that are real, resources worth citing, expert comments for journalists. Anything counted in dozens per month is a warning sign.
We write in UK English, draft from your input and your team's knowledge, and publish only after your approval.
Do SEO packages cover AI Overviews and AI search?
A modern package should include the groundwork AI search relies on: pages that answer questions directly, accurate structured data, consistent business details and crawler access that lets the right tools read your site. It does not need a separate expensive add-on to start.
In practice we add answer-first summaries to key pages, FAQ sections based on real customer questions, Organisation, LocalBusiness or Product schema as appropriate, and consistent facts about your business across your site and listings. We check robots.txt so you are not blocking crawlers you want, and we tag known AI referrers in GA4 so the report can show them.
Be sceptical of packages that promise placement in AI answers. Those answers change often and nobody controls them; the realistic aim is to be a clear, trustworthy source that AI tools can quote.
Our AI search optimisation service covers a deeper project for businesses that want one.
Our monthly SEO plan: what it includes
Our monthly SEO plan starts from US$150/mo and is scoped per site in an itemised quote, so you see exactly which work fits your budget before paying anything. It is designed for small and mid-sized UK businesses and online shops.
- Month one audit of indexing, speed, structure and tracking, with priority fixes made.
- Keyword map linking your main searches to specific pages.
- Agreed monthly task plan and a live task log with URLs and dates.
- On-page improvements, internal links and structured data.
- New or rewritten pages and articles in UK English, published after your approval.
- Google Business Profile, reviews process and citations if you serve local areas.
- Monthly GA4 and Search Console report with a plain-English summary.
- Quarterly review of results and plan.
What it does not include: bought links, ranking promises, office visits or legal advice. If you need a sales team of account managers and weekly meetings, a larger retainer suits you better. Sites we build also get two months of free maintenance after launch; for existing sites, care plans start from US$120/mo.
Working with an SEO team in India from the UK
Day to day it feels like working with any remote supplier. India is 4.5 hours ahead of UK summer time and 5.5 hours ahead in winter, so our working afternoon overlaps your morning, and changes made in our day are often live before your office opens.
The first two weeks: you send your site, goals and the searches you care about; we reply with questions and an itemised quote in about two working days. After you approve it in writing, you grant Search Console, GA4 and CMS access through delegated roles. We record a baseline, check tracking, run the audit and start on the fixes that block everything else. By the end of week two you have a keyword map to agree and the first entries in the task log.
Talking: WhatsApp for quick questions, answered seven days a week, and a monthly call at a time that suits your morning. Paying: monthly USD invoices, usually paid from sterling via Wise, or by bank wire or PayPal; your accountant advises on VAT. Owning: your domain, hosting, accounts and content stay in your name throughout.
If you run an agency and want to resell SEO under your own brand, our white label SEO page covers that arrangement instead.
Worked example: a hypothetical Bristol homeware shop comparing two SEO packages
An invented case to show how the comparison works. Imagine an independent homeware shop in Bristol selling online through Shopify, with around 600 products and a small local following. The owner receives two SEO packages UK providers have proposed and wants to compare them sensibly.
Proposal A is a budget plan: “20 backlinks, 4 blog posts, monthly ranking report”. Proposal B is a larger retainer with strategy workshops, a content calendar and a quarterly digital PR campaign. Laid into the grid from earlier in this guide, A lists volume but no fixes, no named people and no revenue reporting. B covers much more but assumes the shop's own developer will implement technical changes, which the owner does not have.
A plan from us for the same shop would start with the problems a crawl typically finds on stores like this: duplicate collection URLs from filters, thin category pages, missing product schema, slow images on mobile. Month one fixes those in the theme. Months two and three rewrite the ten most valuable category pages, add buying guides linking to them and set up GA4 ecommerce reporting so organic revenue appears in the report.
The owner's decision then rests on a clear question: which plan changes the most on the site each month, and which report will show whether sales follow. That question works for any shop, whoever you hire.