Ask what local SEO costs and you will usually get one of two answers. Either a shrug and “it depends”, or a number with no explanation of what it buys. Neither helps when you are trying to work out whether to spend anything at all.
So here are the actual UK ranges, what sits inside each one, and where the work we do fits. There is one thing worth settling first, because it explains most of the confusion around price.
These two get quoted as if they were interchangeable. They are not, and the gap between them is most of the reason you see prices from under £300 to over £3,000 for what sounds like the same service.
Google Business Profile management is one defined job: keeping your profile accurate, active, properly categorised and well reviewed, and watching it for changes. It affects how you appear in Google Maps and the local map pack. It is a bounded piece of work with a bounded price.
Local SEO is that plus your website: technical health, service and location pages, content, internal linking, citations and link building. It is a much larger job, it takes longer, and it costs considerably more.
A business that needs the second one will not be well served by paying for the first. A business that only needs the first is wasting money on the second. Most of the “SEO is a rip-off” stories start with that mismatch.
Across published UK rate cards and pricing research for 2026, the ranges cluster fairly consistently:
By provider type rather than service, the same research puts an experienced freelancer at £800 to £2,500 a month and a small agency at £1,000 to £3,000, with hourly rates running from around £60 to £150 for an experienced practitioner.
Those are market ranges, not quotes. What you are actually asked to pay depends on the condition of your website, how competitive your trade is where you work, and how much of the job is yours versus theirs.
Under £300 a month. Be careful here. At this level you are usually buying automated citation submissions and a monthly report of numbers that do not connect to enquiries. There are honest exceptions, but the burden is on the provider to show you what a human actually does each month.
£300 to £800 a month. Profile work done properly, citations built and corrected, a review process, basic on-page fixes, monthly reporting. For a lot of local businesses this is genuinely enough, particularly if the website is already sound.
£800 to £2,000 a month. Adds real content: service and location pages written rather than generated, keyword research, technical fixes, some link building, and a senior person actually involved rather than supervising.
£2,000 and above. Technical audits, regular published content, active outreach, competitor analysis, and the account management structure that comes with a bigger team.
Our Google profile management service starts at £299 a month.
That is below the usual entry point for local SEO, and the honest reason is scope. It is not local SEO. It is profile management: the eight things we actually do every month, which are keeping the foundations right, keeping the information accurate, working on visibility, publishing content to the profile, managing reviews, keeping imagery current, monitoring for changes Google or the public make, and reporting what came of it.
It is a narrow service delivered by one experienced person rather than a broad one delivered by a team, and there is no agency overhead sitting on top of it. That is why it can be £299 rather than £750, and it is also why it is not the right answer for every business.
We do not promise particular rankings or a guaranteed number of enquiries at that price or any other. Nobody can, and you should treat it as a warning sign when someone does. Our post on SEO ROI guarantee terms explains why those promises usually come with the escape hatch written into the small print.
Profile management works when your website is in reasonable shape and your problem is visibility in Maps. It will not fix a slow, thin or badly structured site, and it will not win you competitive organic rankings on its own.
If your website is the bottleneck, you are looking at a full SEO retainer, and that is a different budget entirely. We have written separately about what SEO should cost monthly, where the realistic range for an established business runs from around £750 to £3,500. Both things are true at once: profile management is a £299 job and full SEO is a £750-plus job, because they are not the same work.
The quickest way to tell which one you need is to look at where your enquiries would come from. If people in your area are searching for what you do and simply are not finding you in the map results, start with the profile. If they find you, click through, and then do not get in touch, the problem is the website.
Whatever you end up spending, these four questions separate a real service from a monthly invoice:
A provider who answers those clearly is usually worth their fee. One who redirects to a package name and a list of features is usually not. There are more of these in our post on questions to ask an SEO agency.
Before spending anything, it is worth knowing how your profile currently performs and whether the gap is the profile or the website. Our 27-point Google Business Profile checklist will tell you how much of the basic work is already done, and most business owners are surprised by how much of it is not.
If you would rather we looked, we offer a free Google Maps visibility report. It shows where you currently appear for the searches that matter in your area, and it is usually enough to tell whether you need £299 a month of profile work or something considerably larger.
For a single-location business, published UK pricing research for 2026 puts local SEO at roughly £999to £1,999 a month. Multi-location work runs from £1,500 to £4,000, and one-off audits or setup projects from £500 to £3,000.
Because it is a narrower job. Profile management covers your Google Business Profile and how you appear in Maps and the local map pack. Local SEO covers that plus your website: technical work, service and location pages, content and link building. The second takes considerably more time, so it costs considerably more.
Below about £300 a month you are usually paying for automated citation submissions and an automated report. The test is not the price but what a human does each month. Ask for that in specifics, and be wary of any answer that describes features rather than work.
Look at where the problem is. If people searching in your area are not finding you in the map results at all, the profile is the place to start. If they find you, visit your website and then do not get in touch, the website is the bottleneck and profile work will not fix it.
