About five or six hours of someone’s attention, every month.
That is the honest answer, and everything else in this article follows from it. Whether five hours is enough depends entirely on what those hours are spent on, and that is a question almost nobody answers before taking your money.
Why you keep being told £500 is not enough
Search for SEO pricing and you will find agency after agency explaining that meaningful work starts at £1,000, or £1,500, or £2,500 a month. One well-known UK guide states plainly that below £500 you should expect automated output rather than strategy. Another says a few hours spread across a whole website produces reporting rather than movement.
There is truth in both. There is also a commercial interest behind both, because every business writing that sentence sells retainers above the figure they are warning you about.
So here is a number from a source with no stake in it. Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO providers about what they charge. The most common monthly retainer band was $501 to $1,000, chosen by more providers than any other, and nearly seven in ten charged $2,000 a month or less.
Converted into sterling, the most common retainer in the world brackets £500. It is not a fringe budget. It is the middle of the market being described as the bottom of it by people selling from further up.
That does not mean £500 buys what £2,000 buys. It obviously does not. It means the honest conversation is about what five hours a month can and cannot achieve, not about whether the number is respectable.
The arithmetic nobody publishes
We can do this using a competitor’s own figures rather than ours.
One of the more transparent UK pricing guides states that £2,500 to £5,000 a month buys 30 to 50 hours of strategic work. That works out at roughly £80 to £100 an hour.
Apply the same rate to £500 and you get five to six hours a month. Call it three quarters of a working day.
Two things affect that number in either direction. Agency overheads push it down, because rent, sales teams and account layers all come out of your fee before anyone touches your website. Lower overheads push it up: we work remotely, which is a large part of why our entry plan sits where it does rather than at £900.
But five or six hours is the right order of magnitude, and any agency quoting you £500 without being willing to tell you roughly how many hours that represents is asking you to buy something with no unit of measurement.
What five hours a month should be spent on
The failure mode at this budget is not laziness. It is spreading the hours across everything.
Five hours split between technical fixes, content, link building, reporting and a monthly call is five things done badly. The version that works picks one job and does it properly until it is finished, then moves to the next.
For most local businesses the order looks like this.
The Google Business Profile, first and completely. Categories, services, hours, attributes, photographs, and a review process that actually runs. For a business whose customers search from a phone within ten miles, this moves more enquiries than anything else you could spend the time on, and it is routinely half finished.
Then the pages that already nearly rank. Positions eight to fifteen on commercially relevant terms are where small amounts of work produce visible change. Rewriting a page that sits eleventh is a better use of two hours than writing a new page that will start from nowhere.
Then the technical problems that are actively costing you. Not a 200 point audit. The three or four things suppressing the pages that matter.
Then, and only then, content. One good page a month that answers a real commercial question beats four that answer none.
That is what our SEO service does at the entry tier, and the reason it is scoped narrowly is that a narrow scope is the only honest thing to sell at this level.
What £500 does not buy
Being specific about this matters more than the rest of the article.
It does not buy a serious link building programme. Digital PR and outreach are expensive because they are labour, and at this budget there are no hours left for them once the work above is done.
It does not buy competitive national rankings. If you are trying to rank for a term that established companies are spending five figures a month on, £500 will not get you there and no amount of patience changes that.
It does not buy volume content. One page a month is one page a month.
It does not buy a rebuilt website. If your site is genuinely broken, fixing it is a project with a price, not something that emerges from a retainer.
And it does not buy speed. Every budget takes months to compound. This one takes longer.
Who it works for, and who should not bother
It works for a local service business with a defined catchment, a site that basically functions, a competitive landscape made up of other small local firms, and the patience to give it six months. Garages, trades, salons, clinics, hire firms. Most of the businesses in Kent, in other words.
It does not work if you are launching into a competitive national market, if your website needs replacing before anything can be optimised, if you need enquiries this month rather than next quarter, or if you will judge it at week six.
If you need results now, put the money into Google Ads instead and start SEO when you can run both. We would rather tell you that than take a retainer you are going to cancel in March.
What the next tier up actually adds
Worth showing the other end of the scale, because the gap is not what most people assume.
We handle a Medway garage that has been with us since it opened. Its search presence went from nothing to more than 300 pages indexed and over 600,000 impressions in a two month window, alongside a paid campaign built around one high value job.
That did not come from a £500 plan and we are not going to imply it did. Its advertising budget alone runs several times that figure.
The difference between the tiers is not that one is real SEO and the other is not. It is volume and speed. More budget buys more hours, more pages, paid traffic running alongside the organic work, and a result that arrives in months rather than quarters. The work itself is the same work.
Four questions to ask before you sign anything
Any agency, including us.
How many hours a month is this? If they will not answer, you cannot compare their quote with anyone else’s.
What is inside the fee and what is billed separately? Content and off-site work are the usual answers, and the usual surprise.
Who actually does the work? The person in the meeting is frequently not the person on your account.
Who owns the website, the content and the Google accounts if we stop? The answer should be you. It often is not, and you find out at the worst moment.
Not sure what your budget is realistically worth? Tell us what you are working with and what you sell. We will tell you whether £500 a month is the right starting point or whether you would be better off spending it somewhere else, and we will say so if it is the second one.
