Why cheap SEO packages don't work for trades The fee picks the task list, not the other way round
The assumption almost everybody brings to a cheap SEO quote is that it is the same work, done slower, by somebody less good at it. That is not what you are buying.
You are buying a different list of jobs. From 1 April 2026 the National Living Wage for anyone 21 or over in the UK is £12.71 an hour, so a £99 monthly fee is about 7.8 hours of minimum-wage time before a single piece of software, a desk or an hour of profit is paid for. Nobody can fit the real job into that, and nobody sane tries. What they do instead is build the package out of the handful of tasks that cost almost nothing to produce, because those are the only ones the arithmetic allows. The list looks busy on a quote. It is busy. It is just not the list of things that gets a trade business into the three results on the map.
Cheap SEO packages fail because the fee sets the task list before anybody looks at your business. At the UK's April 2026 National Living Wage, £99 a month buys 7.8 hours of unskilled time, so the package fills up with an automated audit, bulk directory links, keyword-shaped posts and a rank report. The jobs that move a trade up the Map Pack need your customers or your photographs.
What a monthly SEO fee buys in hours
Divide any monthly SEO quote by £12.71 and you have the absolute ceiling on the human time inside it, because that is the lowest hourly rate it is legal to pay an adult in Britain and nobody in this trade works for it.
This is the only sum that matters and it takes ten seconds. The point is not that cheap suppliers are greedy. The point is that the number on the quote has already decided what can physically be delivered, and it decided it before anyone looked at your Google listing, your town or your trade.
Monthly fee, converted into hours
| £99 a month, at £12.71 an hour | 7.8 hours |
| £149 a month | 11.7 hours |
| £249 a month | 19.6 hours |
| £99 a month, if the supplier is VAT registered | 6.5 hours |
Arithmetic on the National Living Wage for ages 21 and over, £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026. It is a ceiling, not an estimate: it assumes the supplier pays the legal minimum, owns no software, rents no office, employs nobody and takes no profit. A real specialist's hour costs several times it, so halve these figures and you are closer.
Run the same sum on the deliverables rather than the hours and it gets sharper. A package promising four blog posts a month for £99 is pricing a written page at £24.75 before anything else on the list is touched. My own SEO and Map Pack includes twelve search-led posts every four weeks; at £99 that would be £8.25 a post. Nobody writes a page about ventilation requirements for a loft conversion for £8.25, so either the posts are generated, or they are not really coming. The same arithmetic is why a £99 website is a particular kind of product rather than a cheaper version of a built one.
The four jobs that fill the gap
Three of the four standard items in a cheap SEO package are either named in Google's own spam policies or cautioned against in Google's own documentation, and the fourth is a one-off change billed monthly.
I have read a lot of these quotes, mostly because UK tradespeople forward them to me and ask what they are looking at. The line items vary in wording and almost never in substance.
| Line on the quote | What it costs to produce | What it does for your position on the map |
|---|---|---|
| Full technical site audit, delivered as a PDF | Minutes of a tool's time, often a free tier | Nothing by itself. An audit is a list of things nobody has agreed to fix |
| Submission to 50 or 100 directories | One bulk form | Google's spam policies list low-quality directory and bookmark site links under link spam |
| Four keyword-optimised blog posts a month | Minutes, if generated | Scaled content abuse covers content produced at scale to game rankings, by automation or by hand |
| Meta titles and descriptions rewritten | An hour, once | A real gain, worth having, and finished after the first month. It does not touch Maps |
| Monthly ranking report | Automated, no human time | Google calls average position a complex metric that can be misleading |
The middle column is my own reading of five quotes forwarded to me by tradespeople during 2026. The right column is sourced: the spam policy wording and the Search Console caution are both in the source list at the foot of this page.
Read the second row twice, because it is the one with teeth. Google's spam policies say that sites which violate them may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all, and the site being linked is yours. If a supplier spends your £99 building a hundred directory links, the risk sits on your domain and the invoice sits with you. There is nothing wrong with being listed in a few real directories your customers actually use, and getting your name, address and phone number to match across them is useful work. A hundred of them in a month is not that work.
What actually moves a trade up the map
Every job that genuinely moves a UK trade business into the Map Pack needs something the supplier cannot supply: your account access, your customers, your photographs or your signature.
That constraint, not laziness, is why these jobs are missing from the cheap package. They are slow, they involve you, and they cannot be run in bulk across two hundred clients on a Tuesday.
None of those five is secret and none is difficult. They are simply long, and the first two cost nothing at all, which is the part the pitch leaves out. If you are about to sit down with anybody, the questions to ask an SEO company before you sign turn this list into something you can say out loud in a meeting.
Why the report says you went up
Average position improves on searches nobody types, which is why a report can show a climb in the same month the phone stays quiet.
Google's own Search Console documentation describes average position as a complex metric that can be misleading if you do not understand the subtleties, and recommends paying more attention to trends in impressions and clicks than to position on its own. A report built from that one number, with no calls and no clicks beside it, is not dishonest. It is just answering a different question from the one you asked.
Sometimes the website eats the whole spend
Of 189 readable UK trade homepages I measured, the median page was 112 KB of HTML and every one of the 24 Wix sites was over 318 KB, against a median of 19 KB for the sites with no builder fingerprint on them.
On 9 September 2026 I ran 236 real UK trade domains off my own cold-call lead sheets, plumbers, electricians, roofers, builders and the rest, and recorded what each homepage returned and how big the HTML document was. 189 came back as a usable page. That dataset has been published here before for who owns the files and who answers when a site goes down. The size column has not been, and it is the one that matters when somebody is selling you page speed.
| Platform | Sites | Median HTML | Over 98 KB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | 24 | 474 KB | 24 |
| Squarespace | 4 | 248 KB | 3 |
| GoDaddy | 7 | 142 KB | 7 |
| WordPress | 83 | 141 KB | 54 |
| Duda | 13 | 98 KB | 7 |
| Weebly | 3 | 69 KB | 1 |
| No builder fingerprint | 52 | 19 KB | 8 |
236 UK trade domains checked on 9 September 2026; 189 returned a page over 1,000 bytes with a success code. Figures are the HTML document only, not images or scripts, so they understate the real difference. The last row is sites carrying no builder fingerprint, which is a mix of hand-coded work and custom builds I could not identify. Two platforms with one or two sites each are left out of the table. No business is named.
The gap between the top row and the bottom one is roughly twentyfourfold, and it is generated markup. You cannot edit it, your supplier cannot edit it, and no amount of a monthly fee changes it, because it belongs to the platform rather than to you. That is worth knowing before you buy technical SEO as a line item, and it is a separate question from whether to move: there are real costs to leaving, and what actually happens to your rankings when you move off Wix covers them honestly. The decision here is narrower. If the platform is the ceiling, spending £99 a month on audits of that ceiling is the worst available use of the money.
What a fee that works looks like, and when to pay nothing
A fee is only honest if it names the search, the measurement and the remedy, and plenty of trades should spend nothing on SEO this year.
Make the fee name a search and a remedy
I will use my own prices because they are published and you can check them against the SEO and Map Pack page. It is £300 every four weeks on a website you already have, or £350 every four weeks with a website I build and host, with a £150 deposit taken off the first payment and no setup fee. Billed every four weeks is thirteen payments a year rather than twelve, so £300 is £3,900 over twelve months. That has to win roughly one £4,000 job, or four £1,000 ones, before it has paid for itself, and whether it does depends entirely on what your work is worth. Quote it to yourself that way before anybody quotes it to you.
When the right answer is to spend nothing
The honest other half: there are trades that should not pay anybody this year. If your Business Profile is not verified, do that first and for nothing, because nothing else works until it is done. If you have no reviews, go and ask your last twenty customers, which costs an evening. If the firms above you on the map are sitting on four reviews each, you can pass them yourself. And if you are already turning work away, getting found is not the problem you have.
Do not negotiate a cheap package down. Ask what it leaves out. Take the monthly figure, divide it by £12.71, and look at the hours. Then ask the supplier which of the five jobs in the checklist above they are doing, who is asking your customers for reviews, and what one named search will be measured on. If the answer is an audit, some directories and a report, the arithmetic has already told you why. A cheap package is not a slow route to the Map Pack. It is a different road that does not go there.