How much should we be paying for SEO? (2026 guide)

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Table of contents:

  • The different types of SEO pricing models
  • What are the benefits of paying for a monthly SEO retainer?
  • Wouldn’t paying an hourly price work out better?
  • Why we would encourage you not to pay for performance-based/guaranteed first page rankings
  • How much does your agency charge?
  • Is your business ready to start improving its search engine optimisation?

Introduction

It sure can be confusing trying to work out how much any company should spend on search engine optimisation services in sunny Bristol. For many businesses, most of their new customers come via Google’s organic results- therefore, the level of investment is something that they need to get right.

This, therefore, means businesses need to carefully consider the level of SEO work they require to ensure they get good value for money. You don’t want to underspend and end up with mediocre or half-baked work!
At the same time, well, you don’t want to pay through the nose to keep the agency director in a new Ferrari each year.

Prices vary, and therefore vary massively in the South West- for example some agencies charge as little as £300 pcm, with some quoting in excess of £3k pcm. The reason prices vary wildly is that some companies focus only on technical SEO improvements, which often means a few basic tweaks here and there to say page titles. This won’t usually cut the mustard if that’s the only work being implemented. This therefore means that some of these companies are just taking money for pulling a few of the more quick and basic SEO levers- such as editing H1 tags on the odd main page!

In contrast, others really roll up their sleeves and focus on writing long-form evergreen content and building backlinks (that’s us!). This can involve considerable hours of work and unpicking, for example, your direct competitors’ backlink profiles until the late evenings. It could mean writing 2,000-word articles as regular as clockwork, which is, well, time-consuming to say the least!

The range of work offered by Bristol agencies therefore varies massively; it is thus challenging to compare quotes when the job is so different.

It can therefore feel like comparing apples with pears-well, that’s unless you have a good understanding of what you need and set clear guidance for it.

 

Follow the breadcrumbs

Okay, bear with us when we explain this.

If you were to throw money at any marketing agency, sometimes, its is literally like burning money.

However, if you are clear about what you want from the outset, such as stating, “I have these competitors; name 1, 2, or 3 competitors’ websites,” then the objectives become much clearer.

By stating that you want to overtake their visibility with these direct competitors in terms of keyword ranking, you’re much more clearly setting out what you want to achieve. Plus, the agency then knows right: I need to build a stronger backlink profile. Then a comparison of the content marketing can be made by stating: for example they are writing, say, four posts a month, we need to quote for more or the same number.

If an agency is allowed the minimum, they will sometimes do just that- if the goals are much clearer, such as I need to overtake this direct competitor then your setting and defining the goal posts. This may sound blooming obvious, but trust us when we say, when businesses just opt for the cheapest monthly SEO prices, what they get in terms of work is shocking or just non-existent.

 

What are the benefits of monthly retainers?

By a country mile, monthly retainers are the most common billing option SEO agencies offer.

They can also be the best option when the goals are clearly defined.

This means that the services run on an ongoing basis, often with a fixed price retainer, often billed at the start of the month.

Therefore, often written into a set of agreements, there will be an understanding of how much time will be spent diligently working on content marketing, link building, and on-page SEO, and how much consulting time will be spent each month on this work. Often this is broken down into set hours on each task, and then where this time is spent, actually working on-site and off-site improvements should be itemised like a MOT failure sheet!

 

Hourly rate

In our opinion, this is less common among most SEO agencies in 2025/2026. The reason is that regardless of which business you run, you are often operating in a highly competitive niche, and because of this, you are almost on a constant treadmill of work that is needed.

A constant cycle of having to produce SEO work each month to keep up with the leading organisations in your industry means an hourly rate is often not the best option unless you have a large or unlimited marketing budget.

Therefore, an hourly rate is often not reasonable, as it may just mean changing a few meta titles or product descriptions or if you allow the company to bill what the website needs, the costs can run away with themselves.

What is often needed is a lot more substantial work, which is why companies usually prefer a monthly retainer instead.

 

Performance-based/guaranteed rankings

From experience, we urge you to be extremely wary of any business offering “guaranteed 1st page rankings on Google”. The reason is that when a business guarantees first-page results, often in a very short period, it means they are going to get the website to rank for search terms that no shopper is using.

So, we are talking about organic SEO here, sure you can spend on Google Adwords, which of course is a good way of spending money, and can provide instant visibility. However here we are talking about organic SEO.

For example, let’s say you sell legal services, let’s say that you are an employment lawyer- you might get on the first page, for example for: “employment lawyers that specialise in compromise agreements and have a vast amount of experience in this field”.

This sounds okay; the problem is quite simple: no shopper is really searching for a query that long. Technically, the SEO business has achieved a first-page ranking that it promised- but what on earth is the point if no one is searching for it?

Therefore, guaranteed rankings can be a monumental waste of time and money if the end result is ranking on page one of Google for long-tail keywords no one is searching for. Instead, you’re better off going with a more honest and transparent agency (like us), which works on a monthly retainer and just provides a full break down of the work carried out.

 

Local SEO

How much of my business will be paying per month?

There are many factors to consider, such as the city’s population and size. For example, in a large city, say for example in Bristol there will be a lot of competition. However, then compare this with in a small town, there will be fewer competitors; therefore, it is much simpler to cut through and get a business onto the first page of Google in a village or town because there’s less competition.

However, with that said for an average large city in the UK, and we would recommend paying between £300 and £ 3,000 per month for local SEO (based on level of competition).

The price difference is based on the level of competition in your area. If your competitors are heavily investing, working hard, and doing a lot of work, you will need to match that level of effort if you want to overtake them.

 

National SEO

To rank nationally, you have to consider all the businesses operating locally, then multiply that by a national basis. It could mean your therefore competiting with say a thousand plus businesses nationally. For example, you are competing with companies based in all the UK’s major cities. This involves much more work, so the search engine optimisation is much more complex.

We would suggest a budget of £3000 plus national SEO.

 

How our agency can help

What we would say is the most crucial factor to consider is what level of experience the agency or specific freelance SEO consultant has. You have to factor in that here at Digital Tailors, not a single consultant here working for us has less than 10 years of experience. This is what really makes the difference, so we are not interested in competing with companies offer super low prices, as their packages often disappoint the customer over the long run.

The reason is that super cheap monthly retainers or hourly rates typically mean cutting corners.
When you cut corners, you sometimes get very short-term wins, but rarely does this really help improve the website’s long-term ranking on Google.

This is where we come in: we are only interested in implementing methods that help the business in the long run. This means putting your effort and time into the important work, the more time-consuming jobs that is well worth all of that effort.
So, for example, writing highly informative long-form buying guides, this could easily be in excess of 2000 words, stuffed full of helpful information and answering questions which are frequently asked.

This involves a lot of research into page SEO and, obviously a huge amount of time spend proofreading. This is the type of work that can move the needle towards SEO success.
Come to the best, come to us.

 

If your shopping around to find a new agency then talk to us. We’ve been helping businesses for an extended period of time to improve their organic search as well as the local search engine optimisation.
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Google Knowledge Graph: What It Is & Why It Matters

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Google’s Knowledge Graph: Why all companies who are looking to improve their SEO needs to know about this!

 

If you’re a business looking to improve your search engine optimisation, then you should learn about Google’s Knowledge Graph as well as also Google’s Knowledge Vault. The reason is quite simple, it gives you a very good insight to how Google better understands “entities”- such as people, places and events.

Then how Google uses this vast array of information whether it be on “who was Henry Ford” though to “who is Rockefeller”- Google uses its Knowledge Vault to generate “Knowledge Panels”- its these that can be beneficial to businesses, as it allow to promote for example a brand, or what a key company employee or director is famous for.

Can you explain some more, what does Google’s Knowledge Graph actually mean?

Google’s Knowledge Graph is rather fancy way of just saying that Google owns a massive database, a library of information. Therefore, sometimes this information is so widely known, and can be crossed-checked, that the answer appears directly in the SERP’s. This can therefore means that Google can display the answer as a Google Knowledge Panel, directly in the SERP’s which can result in a zero click search. However, Google’s Knowledge Panel, came well before Google’s AI Overview, yet many leading SEO experts believe the two are linked.

 

People, things and places (Semantic SEO)

It was said for a long time, that backlinks sure they are important, but also is defining your business as an entity. When it comes to semantic SEO, its all about defining people, things and places. For example, its widely known that Google uses Wikipedia has one of the key place to obtain information of entities. Therefore, for example, if you’re a person in the public eye, and say there’s a fact that incorrect on Wikipedia, then its most definitely worth requesting an edit, because this is often where Google Knowledge Graph pulls its information from.

 

Tell me more, how exactly does Google’s Knowledge Graph work?

 

Google’s Knowledge Graph simply gathers information from reliable websites, which are kept up to date such as Wikipedia, and also Wiki data for example. Often there is there’s a mistake, say a mistake with a celebrity’s date of birth, then often is picked up by the millions of people who visit these websites. And the authors and the administrators of these websites often then correct the work, and therefore this is why for example such sources of information are such highly reliable, and therefore widely cited on Google Knowledge Panel results.

 

Semantic search and things and not string

It used to be the case that Google’s algorithm solely relied on backlinks to understand to connection between businesses. For example, if a retailer of say a car brand, they may link to local dealership that authorised dealer of that brand of car. It then becomes obvious to Google that the car dealership locally, is say the authorised dealer for say Ford Motor cars in that particularly area.

Therefore, that connection, that backlink would mean that normally that local business, that local Ford Dealership would rank much higher locally, that’s when anyone was making a search for car related to that car brand locally.

However, now Google’s algorithms don’t just rely on backlinks, to understand the link between businesses. Now there’s also the semantic web, and Google can understand how entities all connect, how they are connected. For example, a famous movie actor will be connected to movies they have featured in. The semantic web, the Google Knowledge Graph will know for example that the actor featured in those movies, and other key facts thanks to the Google Knowledge Graph. For example the graph will know key facts such as age, where they were born and also people they were married to previously.

What is Google’s Knowledge Panel?

When you search for say which films has “Sir Anthony Hopkins appeared in”- you will often be shown a Google Knowledge Panel. The knowledge panel is therefore the answer that appears in Google’s search engine results pages. It’s the panel which provides you with the answer to your question. Its what pulls the facts from Google’s Knowledge Valt and then reflects in Google’s Knowledge Panel.

Appearing Google’s Knowledge Panel can help your business in the following ways:

Appearing in Google’s Knowledge Panel is good for any business, because when people are interested in your company, they wont have to go through different websites to find the information they need. Often information about key staff, products and the brand itself can appear in the search engine results pages, directly Infront of the shopper in the SERP’s.

This means that you can improve brand and product awareness. For example, imagine you sell quite unique or specialist part for say machinery or for a car manufacturing.

If the car brand Google Knowledge Panel appears, and gives an introduction about the company, this confirms in a shoppers perspective that your running a well known company.

It confirms that your selling a product that well known, then the Google Knowledge Panel may show company directors, perhaps a link to their LinkedIn profiles, which again may reinforce the message that you are a highly experienced business, with highly knowledgably staff.

 

More visitors

When people click the links and the citations in Google AI Overviews, or in Google Knowledge Panel, this can bring more visitors to your company website. Therefore, you can improve your businesses organic visitor numbers.

Increase brand awareness
Its important for any business to improve their brand awareness. For example, when someone searches your brand, it may appear as Google

Knowledge Panel, that also provides supplementary information about other products or services that your business may offer. This creates positive brand awareness, for example, it might state that your product has won a prestigious product innovation award.

Generate more awareness about your business, what its stand for and company owners

 

Did you know that you can claim and edit your businesses Google Knowledge Panel?

 

It’s possible that a Google Knowledge Panel already exists for your business, that’s without any input from your business or your marketing company to create it. Sometimes a Google Knowledge Panel will just be automatically created, and therefore if this occurs your business should claim it. This way then you can edit the details, for example, the year the company was founded might be incorrect.

My business hasn’t got a Google Knowledge Panel- how can we create one?

Its widely known by some of the best SEO agencies, such as our in Bristol, that if your business is cited on websites such as Wikipedia.org that Google will use this information to then sometimes create a Google Knowledge Panel. Therefore, if you own a company, making say a product, you could create a Wikipedia page, stating facts such as when the company first started and some of the products that you sell.

This was your helping to improve your businesses search engine optimisation by improving your semantic SEO. This just means helping the search engines such as Google to better understand your business, for example when the company was started, and some of the products that you sell.

When your business is listed on say Wikipedia or let’s say on LinkedIn, it’s then much easier for Google to crawl and index that information, and then it will better understand your business and the products that you offer. Fo

 

Here’s some of the websites that you may wish to create a company page:

LinkedIn
Crunchbase
Bloomberg

Here how to further improve your businesses sematic SEO and increases your chances of your business featuring in Google’s Knowledge Graph:

 

Listing management

Do ensure that your chosen SEO agency from time to time makes sure that your company listings are all correct and kept up to date. For example, on Wikipedia and LinkedIn, and say on a relevant business directory, such as Chambers if you a solicitor is kept up to date.

Digital PR

Do some digital PR work, for example, if your opening a brand-new larger store in Bristol do make sure that your making sure this is highlighted on say local news websites such as the Bristol Post. This can generate backlinks.

Social media

Do make sure that your business has a good social media presence, for example, do make sure that you have LinkedIn profile set up for your business.

Link building

Building strong links, this can improve your businesses Google EEAT score. When a company website is seen an more authoritative, because you’ve built so many strong links, that business is likely to rank higher organically, yet also be displayed as a Google Knowledge Panel result more often, because the sheer number of strong links, will indicate that you run a important business.

 

Google Business and Google’s Knowledge Graph

As we have indicated right throughout this article, Google pulls information from reliable sources so that it can give shoppers reliable answers in its Google Knowledge Panel. Therefore, many top marketing companies believe that Google uses a businesses Google Business account to pull relevant information. For example, if someone was to ask perhaps for a local wood fired business, that sells craft ale, well, this information may come from Google Business then be presented as a answer in Google’s Knowledge Panel.

Why is Schema mark-up so important?

You can use schema to mark-up key information about your business, such as for example NAP information. Then when someone is searching for key information, such as for example they might be looking for Land Rover replacement parts for a vintage business, well if your companies NAP information is marked up using schema, then you help Google and Google’s algorithm to know exactly where your business is located in Bristol.

Why the about us page on your website is so important

Let’s say that on your about us page, you have your key staff, you might then link directly to there LinkedIn profiles. This then allows Googlebot to understand your staff and your businesses experience.

Therefore, Google is now ranking websites based on Google EEAT so if you have more experience and expertise in terms of the products that you are selling, your website is likely to rank higher on Google. For example, if your business website clearly shows your highly experienced solicitors practice, with solicitors with decades of experience, this will help improve the Google EEAT score.

Then when you supplement this with good staff pages, linked to there LinkedIn, this can help the chances of that employee or company director in Bristol being displayed as Google Knowledge Graph answer.

For example, somebody going through a divorce, looking for a family lawyer in Bristol, they are undoubtably going to do some research on that lawyer. Therefore, if you have good on-page SEO plus also thought about improving your semantic SEO, when that lawyer gets searched by a customer, that solicitor may appear as a Google Knowledge Graph answer. Therefore, this doesn’t just help the customer to find the information they need, it also shows that the solicitor is well-known, that the semantic seo is so good, that Google knows who he or she is, because he is well-known and perhaps respected solicitor working in Bristol.

 

Why choose our SEO agency?

At Digital Tailors, we have some of the best, the most knowledgeable SEO minds working for us.

We have SEO experts that simply the bees knees, that understand on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. We can help your business to gain more organic visitors. We are one of the best agencies at what we do.

 

How does having more backlinks help improve a business’s organic SEO?

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Author: David Lang
Subject: Link Building Strategy

Introduction

We get it, you’ve had your website designed, whether it be a Drupal, Magento or a WordPress website and now your planning on how you can bring more shoppers. Reading around various blog posts on how to improve a businesses search engine optimisation, one of the core pillars if you like of gaining more visitors, more sales is to build backlinks.

Superb quality content marketing, optimising for various keywords, and also building backlinks are the areas that any business should work on in order to improve the businesses Google EEAT score.

 

What does Google EEAT even mean?

Think of it like a tick box exercise that Google carries out when its checking the quality of the content marketing a business has published in Bristol.

Also, it doesn’t matter if you run a large firm, say with 1000 solicitors, or you’re a sole trader with a website, Google EEAT is used to work out how good a businesses search engine optimisation is.

It stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Now, the experience and expertise, that’s mostly proved through on-page SEO, such as the businesses content marketing.

However, to improve the authoritativeness of your business’s website, to improve that part of Google EEAT you need to build links. As this whole article is about building links, and why they are important, let us explain that point a little better.

 

What is authoritativeness in the context of SEO?

Well, imagine this, two businesses are based in Clifton Bristol, and they specialise in offering the two same service, let’s say that’s employment law.

Therefore, just for the purposes of highlighting how backlinks work, lets imagine those two businesses are on the same road and have similar websites.

One solicitor has no backlinks, lets say it ranks on page four of Google’s organic SERP’s.

However, then you have business two, it has backlinks from all around the U.K. That business lets say is part of the “magic circle” therefore, the owner of the business is well-known, regularly appears in newspaper articles and on leading solicitor websites. These websites all link back.

 

Well which business in Bristol will rank at the top of Google’s organic results?

You guessed it business two, that’s because it has a better backlink. The reason is more “link equity” will be flowing through to those pages.

The more link equity, the stronger the DA score for those pages.

The more pages with higher DA (Domain Authority) score, the more those pages will rank higher on Google. Links are therefore very important, and trust us when we say, in a city like Bristol often there’s only a small number of freelancers, agencies and companies that truly know how to build good links that are relevant to the business.

 

Quality over quantity

Imagine a jacket for a second, you can buy a lot of cheap jackets made with cheap fabrics that don’t last that long before the white internal stuffing comes out.

Alternatively there are British brands that build quality, such as Barbour Wax Jackets, which are some of the best winter jackets in the world.
Now the point we are trying to make here is simple, think quality over quantity. This is the same with content marketing and backlinks. The reason why this business, with its partners are so well known in Bristol is simple, for over 10 years we place quality over above all else.

We produce top-notch content, not just that, we also build quality do-follow backlinks from some of the best brands in the entire world.

What does domain trust or domain authority actually mean?

Depending on which SEO tool you use, whether it be Moz Pro, Majestic Backlink Checker or Ahrefs, there all good. However, they often describe DA, that’s domain authority in slightly different way. However, all of them do the same thing, they measure how powerful that backlink is. Just as a electrician would check the power of a cable or wire using a multi-metre, well, the tools of the trade for any good SEO agency is to use backlink checking tool to see the strength of the DA before we proceed to build that link.

Domain Trust and Authority

Domain trust or domain authority simply refers to the strength of the link, the power of the backlinks.

 

Why is it considered important to have a link building strategy?

A link building strategy is very important, as backlinks do get deleted from time to time.

Also, a business in Bristol that has more links, more powerful do-follow backlinks, well they will simply rank higher.

Even since the days of Google PageRank, Google used links as way of deciding where a business should rank.

Fast forward to 2025 and at the time of writing we about to enter 2026, well backlinks are still important. Backlinks are still “crawled and indexed” by Googlebot, the businesses that simply have the best links in Bristol, well you guessed it, they are often the businesses that rank at the top of the organic results.

 

How can you build links?

Links are best built, when you do nothing at all.
Now what do we mean by that statement?
Well, its simple?

If your company in Bristol has dedicated a lot of time and energy into writing helpful guides and information, then naturally surrounding websites often tend to want to link to you without you even asking.

Lets say you sell some of the best fair-trade, organic coffee around. Well, you may also have a coffee shop that hires out meeting space, and then a lot of groups in Bristol may tend to meet there.

Everyone from Sci-fi fans, through to classic car enthusiasts, and on there blogs, on there websites, and on forums, and on social media links will be built. For example “The annual meeting of alien spotters will meet as luxe Coffee at 7pm this Tuesday”. Then theres a link to the venue from a blog.

The more links are an indication to Google that your business is popular in that area, and it’s a good way of Google knowing, well how popular is your business. And this stands to reason, as why would other businesses and bloggers, and people on social media want to link to your Bristol coffee shop unless they had a reason to.

 

How many backlinks do I need?

The simple answer is more than the competition.

If the competition have 100 good quality links, well your going to need 101.

This is why SEO agencies are never short of work, well if they are good at what they do that is. That’s because its like an F1 race, were all competing for that top spot, and sometimes its just that little advantage, such as having one more link that does it, that gives your business that top spot.

However the problem comes in terms of maintaining it, because as soon as you do get that edge. A competitor will see the backlinks you have built, say using their own account of Ahrefs, they will then seek to overtake you. So, its always that game of working hard, yet you cant slow down on the treadmill as otherwise you will be overtaken.

 

Does your business have experience of building backlinks?

Do the average Brit love a cup of tea? That’s the same as asking whether we have experience of building backlinks, we would actually go a bit further than that, say our business owner, is probably the most or one of the most knowledgeable link builders in Bristol today.

We have gained links from some of the biggest SEO websites, such as Search Engine Land, through to gaining links from household names such as Samsung Electronics for our clients.

 

We truly are that good.

Is there such thing as bad link?

For sure, its one of the reasons businesses fail, and SEO firms close as well.

It’s a piece of cake to build low quality and spam links. The problem comes when Googlebot indexes too many of these. If Google detects you have been building spam links, then overnight a penalty could be issued. Often there’s no warning, no e-mails, just a website that doesn’t rank on page 1,2,3 or 4 or even beyond. The business is removed from Google’s results, then to recover from a Google Penguin penalty- well that can take years.

So, that’s why we strongly state, quality over quantity.

 

How we can help

Serving clients in Bristol, yet we have a national reach. We don’t compete on price, plus we wont be the cheapest option, however we are one of the best. How can we say that with such conviction?
Simple, we have 10 years experience behind us, we are one of the best at what we do.