What you pay for with local SEO, and when it is worth it.

What you are paying for

Local SEO covers three kinds of work, and a quote should say which it includes:

• A one-off setup or repair: the Business Profile filled in properly, a page on the website for each main service, technical problems fixed, redirects after a redesign.
• Ongoing work: new or better pages, a routine for reviews, listings on the sites that matter in your trade, links from real local organisations and a monthly report.
• Looking after the profile for you: updates, photos, posts and replies.

What decides the price is how much of each you need. These push it up:

• More locations, or a wide service area with many towns that each deserve a real page.
• Many services, each needing its own page with real content.
• A website with problems: slow on phones, missing pages, a botched redesign, a move to a new domain.
• Who writes the words. Pages that answer customers' real questions are the slow part.
• Outreach for links and mentions, which means time spent with real people.
• How much reporting and how many calls you want.

A small trade business with a sound website may need a one-off setup and a monthly routine it can run itself. A firm with five branches and a broken site needs much more. Neither needs a contract for work nobody can name.

What Google says moves local results

Google says local results rest mainly on three things: relevance, meaning how well a profile matches the search; distance, meaning how far the business is from the person searching; and prominence, meaning how well known it is. Prominence takes in how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has, and Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking.

Google also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Its advice on working with third parties is blunt: they cannot promise or directly influence where your business ranks on Search or Maps.

So a fair local SEO offer sells work that improves relevance and prominence: accurate details, the right category, a page for each service, reviews and real links. It cannot sell a position, and nobody can do anything about distance.

What you can do yourself in an hour a month

Set aside an hour on the first Monday of each month and work down this list. In our view it covers the routine part of most monthly plans for a single-location business:

• Check the Business Profile: hours, holiday hours coming up, phone number, website link, services and service areas.
• Add a few real photos from the month's jobs.
• Reply to new reviews, and check that every finished customer got a review request; how to get more Google reviews covers the asking.
• Open the Performance report in your Business Profile: calls, website clicks, direction requests and the search terms people used to find you. Note them next to last month's.
• Open Search Console and look at clicks and searches for your main service pages. Why your website is not showing up on Google explains the reports.
• Pick one question customers asked this month and make sure your website answers it.
• Check your details wherever else customers look, such as your Apple Maps place card and any directory your trade uses.

This is the work that slips first in a busy season, so put it in the diary.

One note on the numbers: Google says the Business Profile performance figures include interactions from Google Ads as well as unpaid results. If you run ads, a rise there is not all down to SEO.

What is worth paying for

Pay for work that is hard to do yourself and keeps paying back once it is done:

• A proper setup of the Business Profile: the right primary category, services, areas, photos and a link to the right page.
• A website with a page for each main service, written from the questions customers ask, fast on a phone and set up for Google with titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap and Search Console.
• Technical repairs: pages Google cannot index, broken redirects, a site that is slow on phones. A website redesign done carelessly can lose the searches the old site had.
• A review routine that asks every customer after every job, which an automation can run for you.
• Writing, if nobody in the business can write the pages.
• Real local links and mentions: your trade association, suppliers who list approved installers, the club you sponsor.

Our own website setup includes those Google basics and the Business Profile set up or tidied, and our Growth plan includes a monthly look at your Google results, reviews and enquiries in plain words. Ongoing content and search work beyond that can be agreed separately. The figures are on our prices page.

What is rarely worth paying for

• Monthly SEO with no named tasks. If the plan cannot say what will change on your site and profile this month, it is a subscription to nothing. What website maintenance covers lists other padding to spot.
• Directory submissions by the hundred. Google's own page on hiring help warns against firms that talk about submitting your site to thousands of search engines.
• A page for every town in the county, each the same with the name swapped. Google's spam policies treat pages aimed at specific cities that funnel visitors to one page as doorway abuse.
• Links sold in packages. Google's spam policies list buying links for ranking purposes as link spam.
• Reviews for sale, or a tool that sends only happy customers to Google.
• Daily posts on the Business Profile for the sake of posting.
• Special packages for appearing in AI answers. How a local business shows up in Google's AI answers explains why the ordinary work is the work.

What a fair monthly report shows

A good report is short, comes from your own accounts and ends with what happens next. It shows:

• The work done that month, with a link to each page changed and each listing updated.
• Calls, website clicks and direction requests from your Business Profile, next to the month before and the same month last year.
• The search terms from the Business Profile, and clicks and searches for your main pages from Search Console.
• New reviews, and any still waiting for a reply.
• Enquiries and booked jobs by source, which is the number that pays the bills.
• The plan for next month, in a few lines.

Be wary of reports built on screenshots instead of your own access, ranking charts for keywords nobody searches, and visibility scores you cannot check anywhere. If the numbers come from your Search Console and your Business Profile, you can open them yourself and see the same thing.

Who owns what

The profile, the website, the domain and the accounts behind them belong in the business's name. A provider gets access to them and nothing more:

• Business Profile: you stay the primary owner and add the agency as a manager. Google's roles let a manager do almost everything an owner can, except add or remove users or remove the profile.
• Search Console: Google's own advice when hiring help is to grant read access at first, not write access.
• The website, the domain and analytics: in your name, with the agency invited as a user.
• Pages and content written for you: yours, as the contract says.

If a past provider still holds your profile or your domain, get them back while you are on good terms. How to get your website back from a web designer covers the domain and the site.

Offers to walk away from

• A promised ranking, such as "first on the map by spring". Google says nobody can promise a number one ranking, and that third parties cannot promise or directly influence where you rank.
• A claimed special relationship with Google, or a priority submission. Google names both as warning signs, and anyone who says they work for Google should be able to give a name and an @google.com email address.
• Link packages, or a fixed number of new links each month.
• A long contract with no way out if the named work is not done.
• An agency that wants to be the primary owner of your Business Profile, or to register your domain in its own name.
• A setup fee presented as Google's charge. Google says the Business Profile is free to use, though providers often charge to manage it.
• An email out of the blue saying your site is invisible. How to spot SEO spam emails covers those.

What to put in writing

Google's own advice for working with a third party on your Business Profile is to get a written agreement that sets out the services and the costs before you commit, to try one provider at a time, and to review performance monthly. Add these to the agreement:

• The tasks each month, named: pages written or improved, fixes, listings, reports.
• Where the reported numbers come from.
• Who holds which role on each account.
• Who owns the content created.
• The notice period, and what you get when you leave: logins handed back, the content, and a list of everything changed.
• How changes to the plan are agreed and priced.

What to check in a web design contract covers the same ground for a website build.

When local SEO is worth paying for, and when it is not

Worth paying for:

• Customers find businesses like yours through local search, and your website or profile has real gaps.
• A redesign or a move to a new domain is coming, or went badly.
• You are opening a second location, or moving.
• Nobody in the business has time to write the pages customers need.

Not worth paying for, or not yet:

• Your diary is full from referrals and repeat customers.
• The site is sound, and you will run the monthly hour yourself.
• Calls go unanswered and enquiries wait days for a reply. Fix that first, because more visitors to a business that does not answer is money wasted. Enquiry follow-up is where we would start.

Two businesses, two answers

A two-van plumbing firm has a sound website with a page for each service, a verified profile and a steady trickle of reviews. It needs a one-off check of its category, service areas and photos, a review request after every job, and the monthly hour above. A monthly SEO plan would mostly be paying someone else to do that hour.

A physiotherapy clinic with three branches redesigned its site last year, lost the old treatment pages without redirects, and has one profile with the wrong hours. It needs paid work: redirects and repairs, a page per treatment and branch, three profiles set up properly, and a short report from its own accounts for a few months until the numbers settle. After that, the routine can come back in-house.

How to compare two quotes

Send each provider the same short brief: your services, your area, your website address, what brings enquiries today and what you want more of. Then compare:

• The named tasks, one-off and monthly, side by side.
• A sample report, and where its numbers come from.
• Examples of past work, and whether they follow Google Search Essentials. Google suggests asking both.
• What results they expect, by when, and how they measure them. Google suggests this question too, and a careful answer is a good sign.
• Who will do the work, and who you will talk to.
• What happens to your accounts and content if you stop.

A large gap between two quotes usually means one of them leaves work out. Find out which before you choose.