How much does local SEO cost a UK tradesman? £864 to £10,387 a year
Two quotes land in the same week. One firm wants £74.75 a week. Another wants £299 a month. The weekly one sounds like the small commitment, the kind of number you would not notice, and most people I speak to would put it second on the list without doing the sum.
It is the dearer of the two. £74.75 a week is £3,887 a year. £299 a month is £3,588. The quote that looked like pocket money costs £299 more, and nothing on either page tells you that, because neither page is lying and neither page is adding up.
So I read ten live prices from five firms currently selling local SEO to British trades on 1 September 2026, and converted every one of them into the same unit: what it takes out of the account over twelve months. That list is below, and it does not run in the order the headline prices do.
Local SEO for a UK tradesman really costs £864 to £10,387 a year on ten live prices read on 1 September 2026, with most one-van options landing between £3,500 and £5,200. Headline figures are quoted weekly, monthly, four-weekly and sometimes excluding VAT, so multiply every quote out to a full year before you compare them. The order changes when you do.
Ten UK prices, plus my own two, converted to one number
Ranked by what they actually cost over a year, the cheapest-looking headline on the list finishes fifth and the priciest-sounding one finishes third from the end.
Every figure here comes off the seller's own live pricing page, read on 1 September 2026. Where a price is published excluding VAT I have added it, because a sole trader under the registration threshold cannot claim it back. Where a price is a required add-on to something else, I have added the something else, because you cannot buy it alone.
Weekly, four-weekly and VAT-exclusive prices are all converted to a twelve-month total. Sitework's own two prices are on the chart, at sixth and seventh of twelve.
Twelve bars, ten of them sellers' prices and two of them mine, and a spread of about twelve to one from top to bottom. That spread is not really a quality gradient. Two of the three cheapest options are not local SEO at all in the sense most tradesmen mean it, and the dearest is not twelve times better than the middle. What separates them is how much human time is attached to the fee, and almost nobody says that on the page.
The unit is the trick, and it is not a deliberate one
Four different billing units are in use across these twelve prices, and comparing headline numbers across them gets the ranking wrong more often than it gets it right.
There are four units in this market. Per month bills twelve times a year. Every four weeks bills thirteen. Per week bills fifty two. And a price quoted plus VAT is 20 per cent higher than the number printed on the page. None of these is a con. All four are perfectly normal British business practice, and every one of them changes the annual total.
| Seller and tier | As published | Billed | Year one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trades Get Online, DIY SEO | £60 + VAT per month | 12 | £864 |
| Digital Tradies, Pro | £79 per month, SEO inside a website plan | 12 | £948 |
| Trades Get Online, SEO with Support | £150 + VAT per month | 12 | £2,160 |
| Outcome Digital, Essential SEO | £299 per month | 12 | £3,588 |
| SEO 4 Tradesmen, Starter | £74.75 per week | 52 | £3,887 |
| Sitework, SEO on your existing site | £300 every four weeks | 13 | £3,900 |
| Sitework, website and SEO together | £350 every four weeks | 13 | £4,550 |
| Trades Get Online, Ultimate | £330 + VAT per month | 12 | £4,752 |
| SEO 4 Tradesmen, Growth | £99.75 per week | 52 | £5,187 |
| Yell, Amplify plus Local SEO | From £299 plus from £300 per month | 12 | £7,188 |
| Outcome Digital, Professional SEO | £799 per month | 12 | £9,588 |
| SEO 4 Tradesmen, Pro | £199.75 per week | 52 | £10,387 |
That last figure is the one that should annoy you, and it is the same finding I got when I scored nine trade website sellers against the eleven lines a quote should itemise yesterday. Not one of them totalled their own numbers for a year either. The unit is not chosen to mislead. It is chosen for cash flow, and then never translated for the person paying.
Yell's £300 local SEO is an add-on, not a product
Yell prices Local SEO at "Add-on from £300 per month" and states that it "Requires: An active Amplify or Accelerate solution", so the real entry price is about £599 a month.
This one matters because Yell is the number most UK tradesmen have heard, and the number circulating is half a price. Their own Local SEO page, read on 1 September 2026, carries both lines above. Amplify, the cheapest thing it can attach to, is "From £299 per month" on the Yell Business homepage. You cannot buy the £300 on its own.
What Yell local SEO actually costs in year one
| Amplify solution, the required base | From £299 per month |
| Local SEO add-on | From £300 per month |
| Monthly minimum, both together | £599 |
| Twelve months | £7,188 |
Both prices are "From", so this is a floor and not a quote. Yell's own terms set a twelve month initial period on its solutions.
To be fair to them, what sits inside that is substantial: keyword research, on-page work, monthly content, Google Business Profile management, local link building, technical fixes and weekly rank monitoring. £599 a month buys real hours. But a tradesman who reads "from £300" and budgets for £3,600 is going to be £3,588 out, and that gap is created entirely by where the word "add-on" sits on the page.
One firm in five publishes a VAT position
Trades Get Online is the only firm here that says anything about VAT, and it prices excluding it, which turns its £330 tier into £396 a month for anyone who cannot reclaim.
Its three tiers are published as £60, £150 and £330 "+ VAT" per month. That is legitimate and it is more disclosure than anyone else on the list offers. The Advertising Standards Authority allows VAT-exclusive prices where everyone the price is addressed to can recover VAT, as long as the exclusion is made clear and the rate is stated. For a limited company that reclaims, the +VAT price is the honest one.
Where it bites. A sole trader under the £90,000 taxable turnover threshold published by HMRC is not VAT registered and cannot reclaim a penny of it. For that buyer, and that is a large share of British trades, "+ VAT" is simply a 20 per cent price rise arriving at invoice stage. £330 becomes £396. Over a year, £3,960 becomes £4,752.
The other four are silent. Silence usually means there is nothing to add, because a one-person agency under the threshold cannot charge it. But you should not have to guess a supplier's turnover to work out your own bill.
What you are actually buying at each level
The fee is a proxy for hours, and below roughly £1,500 a year there are not enough hours in it to move a competitive local ranking.
Read the inclusion lists rather than the prices and the market sorts into four honest bands. This is the part sellers describe least well, so here it is plainly.
The trap at the bottom is buying band one and expecting band three. The trap at the top is buying band four for a business that covers one town, which is the same mistake as buying a £99 website and expecting a £1,000 one, just running in the opposite direction.
Whichever band you land in, the annual figure only means something next to the alternative way of buying the same enquiries. Set band three against a Google Ads account and the two lines cross at a specific, calculable point: the workings are in is SEO or Google Ads cheaper for a tradesman.
Where my own price sits, and it is not the cheapest
Sitework charges £300 every four weeks for SEO on a site you already have, which is thirteen payments and £3,900 a year, sixth of the twelve prices on that chart.
I am not going to put my own number in a chart and then decline to read it. £3,900 a year is £312 more than Outcome Digital's Essential tier at £299 a month, and £13 more than SEO 4 Tradesmen's Starter at £74.75 a week. On price alone, two firms on this list beat me at the same level, and I would rather you saw that here than found it yourself afterwards.
The four-weekly unit is mine to justify too. £300 every four weeks is thirteen payments, not twelve. I bill that way because the work runs in four-week cycles and I would rather the billing matched the work than the calendar, but the honest consequence is one extra payment a year, and that is exactly the arithmetic this whole post is about. So I have put my own conversion in the same table as everyone else's.
What £300 every four weeks covers is twenty pages of town and service content across the cycle, Google Business Profile work, and the technical side of the site. The version at £350 every four weeks includes the website itself, built and hosted, which is why it sits above the SEO-only figure on the chart. What I do not publish, and this is a fair criticism of my own pages, is an annual total. Nobody in this market does. I will fix mine.
Five questions that turn any SEO quote into one number
Ask these five and any quote in the UK becomes directly comparable to any other quote, in about ten minutes.
Send it as an email rather than asking on the phone. What comes back in writing is the answer. What comes back as "let us jump on a call" is also an answer.
1. Is that price per week, per month, or every four weeks?
2. What is the total for twelve months, in pounds?
3. Is VAT included, added, or not charged?
4. Is anything else required for me to buy this, or is it standalone?
5. What is the minimum term, and what notice do I give to stop?
Question four is the one nobody thinks to ask, and it is the one that would have caught the Yell add-on before it caught anybody. Question two is the one that reorders your shortlist. Once you have five annual totals side by side you can compare them against what the work is supposed to produce, which is jobs, and that is a much easier decision than comparing four billing units. If you would rather start with the mechanics than the money, how local ranking actually works is the piece to read first.