Is there any actual point doing SEO as a smaller business?

What you're actually spending on SEO (and why agencies won't tell you)

If you ask any marketing agency, they'll tell you that SEO is the cornerstone of brand visibility and helps you get in front of customers. But when you talk to your mates who own businesses, they have all tried it and ended up poorer without really seeing much change. So what's actually going on here!?

I've seen this enough times to stop being surprised by it. A business owner gets a quote, nods along to the deck, and signs a retainer that bears zero relation to what they're actually paying per new customer. The true cost of SEO never comes up. Not per lead. Not per ranking. Just a monthly number that sounds vaguely professional.

The plumber who got quoted £4,500 a month

I saw a Reddit thread recently that showed a plumbing business owner asking whether their SEO quote was reasonable. The range they'd been given: £1,200 to £4,500 per month. Responses were mostly people saying "sounds about right for a decent agency."

It's not about right. It's about whether it works.

Let's do the maths the agency didn't offer to do.

A plumbing lead, depending on the job, is worth roughly £150 to £300 in gross revenue. Say £200 as a working number. To justify a £3,000/mo retainer, you'd need 15 leads a month just to break even on the spend. That's before the lag. Organic SEO takes 6 to 9 months minimum to start moving real volume for competitive local keywords. So you're paying £3k a month for the best part of a year before you can even check if the number holds up.

That's £27,000 before you know if it's working. Doesn't that sound absolutely bonkers?

What £3,000 a month actually buys in Google Ads

For comparison: plumber keywords in most UK cities run at £8 to £20 per click depending on the term. "Emergency plumber London" is at the top end. Something like "boiler service Manchester" sits lower.

At £3,000 a month and an average CPC of £12, you're buying roughly 250 clicks. If your landing page converts at 10% (not unreasonable for a well-targeted local page), that's 25 leads. At £200 each in revenue, you're generating £5,000 from £3,000 spent. You can see that in week two.

Ads have downsides. You stop paying, traffic stops. But the transparency is total. You know exactly what a lead costs. There's no 6-month cliff to walk off before the data comes in. Now ask yourself if that SEO retainer sounds just as appealing?

Why agencies quote high

Here's a rough breakdown of where your £4,500/mo retainer actually goes, based on what I've seen from the inside:

• 40% margin to the agency (overheads, account management, profit)
• 30% junior staff time (someone doing link outreach and writing keyword-stuffed blog posts)
• 20% tools (Semrush, Ahrefs, whatever they've licensed)
• 10% actual strategy

That last number is the one that stings. The person who actually knows what they're doing touches your account for maybe three or four hours a month. The rest is process, overhead, and the cost of keeping the lights on in an office with ping pong tables and free beer. How do I know? I have friends who work there.

I'm not saying junior staff are useless. Some of them are sharp. But you're paying senior prices for what is, in practice, a semi-automated content and link operation.

The thing is, SEO is brilliant.

The reason anyone even bothers with SEO is because when it works well, you can generate new customers for such a low cost, that it's perfect. And businesses get drawn into the seductive appeal of appearing first on Google.

But smaller businesses need to think it through. If you're willing to sink hours and cash into the long-game, then absolutely a proper SEO strategy is a brilliant way forward.

But, if you're chasing next month and wondering about finding new customers- please for the love of God don't get swindled by marketing agencies that just use complex language to bamboozle you into a bloated retainer.

If you do want SEO - remember this

If you're looking to do SEO for small business, then you need to factor in what you actually want out of the equation. Here's some basic prerequisites that are going to influence whether it's worthwhile for you.

• Can you wait 12 months for any results?
• Can you pay for 12 months before any results?
• Is your money better spent elsewhere? Like on Ads
• If you are willing to play the long-game, choose a partner (ahem!) that can deliver your SEO at a fair price
• What can you do to bridge the gap between starting an SEO strategy as a small business and then seeing the customers come in
• Are you genuinely, really, truly, hand-on-heart committed to SEO because you're in it for the long-term dividends, or just because you've heard that it's what you ought to be doing?

If you're serious about SEO as a smaller business...

I can help you build a really clever, automated system that will make the process so, so much easier.

I only do it for my Full Monty clients, as it's a true game changer. However, I can help you rank slowly, steadily and in a way that will actually get you winning new clients for basically nothing. What I won't do is sell you a dream and charge you a few grand per month to go nowhere.