SEO for Small Business: What to Do Free, What to Pay For

By Sameer Bhat · Published 28 April 2026 · Updated 1 September 2026

We do not sell SEO retainers, so this page has no package to steer you toward. Both our essential website audit and our full Deep Scan are free (three free when you create a free account and one free each month after that, then £9.99 for another, or Pro at £14.99 a month for 15), and the honest position is that a small business should spend nothing at all until it knows what is actually wrong.

“Affordable SEO” is usually the wrong question. Most of what gets sold as SEO for small business is work you can do yourself for nothing — it costs attention, not money. The useful question is which jobs are which.

The free work, in the order that matters

This ordering is not arbitrary. Our audit weights findings by severity, and the pattern is consistent: the things that cost the most visibility are the things that stop you being reachable, not the things that make you better. Content cannot rescue a page a crawler cannot open.

1. Make sure nothing is blocking you. A robots.txt rule, a noindex tag left over from a redesign, a sitemap returning 404, or a homepage that only renders for real browsers. Any one of these can hide a whole site. Check it with the robots.txt and AI crawler checker and the sitemap validator — both free, both take a minute.

2. Fix your Google Business Profile. For a local business this is usually the single biggest source of enquiries, and AI assistants read it too. Complete every field, get the primary category right, publish opening hours. If Google has you marked as permanently closed, nothing else you do will matter — that is the one local check our audit rates critical.

3. Make your details agree with each other. The phone number and postcode on your Business Profile should appear on your website, ideally inside LocalBusiness structured data. Two records that disagree give Google — and an AI assistant — two different answers about you. Check yours with the schema checker.

4. Ask for reviews. Below roughly ten reviews your rating carries little weight against a competitor with more, and a profile whose newest review is over six months old reads like a business that stopped trading. Just ask, plainly. Do not offer incentives and do not screen for happy customers first — Google’s review policies prohibit both, and the profile at risk is yours.

5. Give each real service its own page. One page per thing you actually sell, saying plainly what it is, who it is for and what it costs or how pricing works. Check how each one will look in results with the SERP previewer.

6. Then, and only then, write more. Answer the questions customers actually ask before they buy. This is the slowest-returning work on the list, which is exactly why it should not be first.

Steps one to five cost nothing but a few evenings. We publish eleven free tools that cover most of them, and the free audit covers the rest without asking for an email.

What Google says you can safely ignore

A meaningful share of what gets sold to small businesses addresses things Google has publicly stated it does not use. Its own SEO Starter Guide says, in its own words:

None of this means these things are worthless — heading order genuinely helps screen-reader users, and tidy URLs are easier to live with. It means they are not ranking work, and should not appear as billable line items dressed up as ranking work.

If a proposal leads with a keyword-density report or a word-count target, you have learned something useful about the proposal.

Where small budgets actually get wasted

• Buying articles before fixing access. New content on a site crawlers cannot read is money set on fire.
• Location pages for towns with no demand. Twenty pages naming twenty villages is a pattern Google’s spam guidance treats as doorway abuse, not a local strategy.
• Paying for reports instead of work. A monthly ranking chart is not a deliverable. A list of changed URLs is.
• Keeping a retainer after the one-off work is done. Profile completion, technical fixes and NAP corrections are finite. Reviews and content are not. When the finite work finishes, the retainer should shrink or stop.
• Chasing broad head terms. “Plumber” is not your market. “Emergency plumber [your town]” might be.

When paying starts to make sense

Spend money when the problem is one of these:

• The cause is unclear. You have done the free work and it has not moved. Diagnosis is worth paying for.
• The fix is genuinely technical. Server response problems, JavaScript rendering, a migration, structured data that will not validate. A few hours of someone competent beats months of guessing.
• The work is genuinely ongoing. Reviews, content and local links need someone doing them every month. If you have nobody, that is a real retainer, honestly earned.

On price: the Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers found freelancers average $1,348 a month and the most common retainer of any kind is $501–$1,000 — well under the averages agencies quote. Hourly work most commonly runs $75–$100. For a defined technical fix, hourly or fixed-price is almost always better value than a monthly contract, and it lets you test someone before committing.

The checklist

1. Run a free audit and write down the confirmed failures.
2. Fix anything blocking crawlers first.
3. Complete every Business Profile field; check the primary category.
4. Make your phone number and postcode match across site and profile.
5. Ask three recent customers for a review. Then keep asking.
6. Give each service its own page with a specific title and description.
7. Re-run the audit and compare. Only then decide whether to spend.

Where to go next

If you serve a defined area, local SEO covers the map-pack side in detail, including the review and listing thresholds we use. If you have decided to hire someone, what SEO services cost and how to choose a provider has the pricing data and the questions to ask. And if you are still trying to work out what is wrong, why your business does not appear on Google separates the three problems people describe in the same words.