CHART MBR / SEC 120 / COST
What SEO costs an industrial services firm on Teesside
Quotes for this work arrive between a few hundred pounds a month and several thousand, with no obvious reason for the spread. Here is what actually sits behind the number, and what my own prices are.
The three figures on this site
Fixed fee for the AI Visibility Sprint. It ends rather than rolling into anything.
FIXEDMonthly floor for ongoing search and AI visibility work. No minimum term.
FIXEDHourly rate for advisory work that fits neither the Sprint nor a retainer.
FIXEDEvery figure above is one of my own prices rather than an industry average. That is what the FIXED tag means. Nothing here predicts what your firm will earn from the work.
The three ways this work gets priced
Almost every proposal you receive uses one of three shapes. Knowing which one you are reading makes two quotes comparable.
- A fixed-fee project. A defined piece of work with a defined end, priced once. Audits, baselines and single page builds fit this shape, and the £400 Sprint is an example of it.
- A monthly retainer. A recurring fee covering continuing technical work, research, content and reporting. Search work compounds, so this is the shape most ongoing engagements take.
- An hourly rate. Advisory time billed in agreed blocks. Useful for reviewing another agency's proposal or sitting in on a supplier selection, and inefficient for delivery.
Watch for a fourth shape sold as one of these. A twelve month contract with a large early payment and no defined deliverable is a finance arrangement rather than a pricing model.
Five things that change the quote
The variables below explain most of the spread between two honest quotes for the same firm.
- How many distinct things you sell. A shop offering machining alone needs a fraction of the pages a firm offering fabrication, installation, maintenance and inspection needs. Page count drives cost more directly than site size does.
- How many sectors you serve. Selling the same capability into chemical, offshore wind and rail means three vocabularies, three sets of standards and three buyer types. Each one is separate research.
- The state of the existing site. A site with sound foundations and a structure problem is cheap to fix. A site that cannot be crawled properly, or that lost its URLs in an undocumented rebuild, carries recovery work first.
- Whether your engineers will review copy. A firm that gives me two hours of technical review a month gets accurate pages quickly. A firm that cannot spare it pushes cost up and quality down at the same time.
- Whether you need the AI channel measured as well. Assistant visibility has no dashboard, so a baseline has to be built by asking and recording. That is real time and it is priced as such.
What a very low monthly fee leaves out
A quote well under the level described here is not automatically dishonest. It usually means a narrower scope than you assumed, so ask which of the following is missing.
- Technical work on crawling, indexing, speed and redirects, rather than content alone.
- Research into the specific process, material and standard terms your buyers use.
- Pages written for review by your engineers rather than generated and published unread.
- Reporting that shows the same figures in the same format every month, including bad months.
- A named person who does the work, rather than an account manager relaying it.
Ask one further question of any proposal. Find out who writes the technical detail, because a supplier who plans to invent your approvals and tolerances will damage you with the exact buyers you want.
How to read two quotes side by side
Strip both proposals down to four questions. The answers are usually more revealing than the totals.
- What ships in the first ninety days, stated as items rather than activities.
- What gets measured, in what format, and how often you see it.
- What happens if the numbers stay flat for six months.
- What the exit terms are and how much notice each side gives.
Value in this sector rarely tracks search volume. A term searched a handful of times a month by procurement leads sourcing a specific process can be worth more than a term searched thousands of times by nobody who buys.
Every figure I charge is published rather than held back until a call. The rest of this cluster is indexed on the Teesside industrial guide.
Frequently asked questions
Why can you not quote a fixed monthly figure on the website?
The work genuinely differs between a ten page site selling one process and a two hundred page site covering four sectors. £600 per month is the floor below which I cannot do work worth putting my name to. Your actual figure is quoted in writing before anything starts.
Is £600 a month expensive for an industrial firm?
Compare it against one job rather than against a marketing budget. A single fabrication package or maintenance contract usually covers a year of the retainer several times over, which is why contract value matters more than search volume in this sector. The honest risk is that the work produces nothing, and no fee level removes that risk.
Do I have to start with the Sprint before a retainer?
Most engagements here start that way and none is forced to. £400 buys a dated baseline and a written view of whether ongoing work is worth doing at all. Deciding to stop after it is a legitimate outcome.
What does my team have to do, and does that cost me time?
Budget a few hours a month from someone technical. I structure and draft the pages, and your engineers correct materials, tolerances, approvals and process detail because inventing those would be worse than leaving them out. That review is the difference between a page a buyer trusts and one they dismiss.
Is there a contract length or a setup fee?
No minimum term applies and no setup fee is charged. Notice is one month in either direction. Prices exclude VAT where applicable and are confirmed in writing before work begins.
Getting a figure for your firm
Every figure on this site is published rather than quoted on request. Read them and decide before anyone speaks to you.
All prices exclude VAT where applicable and are confirmed in writing.