How Much Should a Small Business Spend on SEO?

Nobody can tell you what SEO should cost without knowing what you are trying to achieve. But they can tell you how the number is arrived at, and that is more useful.

Here is how I would think about the decision.

Work backwards from one enquiry

Start with two numbers you already have: what a client is worth to you over the relationship, and how many enquiries you convert.

If a client is worth ten thousand and you close one in four enquiries, an enquiry is worth two and a half thousand. Three extra enquiries a year covers most retainers several times over.

That calculation is the whole argument. If three extra enquiries a year would not cover the cost, SEO is the wrong channel for you and no agency should be pretending otherwise.

What you are paying for

SEO invoices hide the fact that three different things are being bought.

• Technical work. Mostly a fixed, finite job. It gets done and then it needs maintaining.
• Content. Ongoing, and the largest cost by some distance, because it is people writing things.
• Authority. Slow, expensive, and the part most likely to be quietly skipped.

Ask any prospective supplier to split their fee across those three. The answer tells you what they really do.

The shapes a budget usually takes

Rather than quote market rates, which vary enormously and date quickly, here are the three shapes I see.

1. A one-off fix. Technical and on-page work, no ongoing content. Sensible when the site has never had any attention and you want to know what it can do unaided.
2. A content retainer. A fixed number of pieces a month inside a defined territory. This is what most service businesses need, and what most of them are not sold.
3. A full programme. Content, technical, digital PR and authority building. Justified when a single client is worth a great deal and the market is genuinely competitive.

Most small businesses are sold the third and need the second.

Three questions that expose a bad proposal

• Which enquiries will this produce, and from whom? If the answer is about traffic, they are selling you the proxy.
• What will you stop doing if it is not working at six months? A supplier with no exit criteria has no plan.
• Who writes the content, and have they written for my sector? Content is the bulk of the cost, so this is the bulk of the question.

Spend less, and spend it on the right terms

The cheapest way to waste an SEO budget is to rank for things your buyers do not search. That costs the same as ranking for the right things and returns nothing.

Before agreeing a budget, agree the terms. SEO for service businesses covers which searches precede a purchase, and it is a much shorter list than most proposals assume.

---

Not sure which part to fix first?

Most founder-led businesses are not short of marketing activity. They are short of a decision about what matters. The Founder-Led Marketing Scorecard takes about three minutes and tells you which of seven areas is holding the rest back.