FIXED £600 monthly retainer starting point, no percentage of spend
Why is there no percentage-of-spend or revenue-share pricing?
Percentage-based SEO pricing is common in the industry, and it creates an obvious conflict of interest: an agency paid a share of your ad spend has an incentive to recommend more ad spend, and one paid a share of claimed revenue impact has an incentive to claim more impact than it can prove. Fixed fees avoid that entirely. You know exactly what you are paying and exactly what you should be getting for it.
Why is there no promised return on investment figure?
Because nobody can honestly calculate a specific ROI figure before doing the work. Competition levels, your existing site quality, and how quickly AI platforms recrawl your changes all affect the outcome, and any percentage quoted upfront is a guess dressed up as a forecast. What is offered instead is a documented starting point, a clear list of what will be done, and monthly reporting so you can judge the value yourself as it accrues.
Is there a minimum contract length?
No long minimum term is required for the retainer. SEO and AI visibility work genuinely takes months to show its full effect, technical fixes can move indexation within days, content and citation authority build more slowly, so a single trial month rarely gives a representative picture either way.
※1 Tolerance note: a single trial month on the retainer rarely gives a representative picture either way, since technical fixes move faster than content authority. The Sprint exists precisely to give a lower-commitment way to judge the working relationship first.
How does this compare in cost to hiring in-house or briefing a large agency?
| Route | Cost shape | Trade-off |
|---|
| In-house hire | Salary, National Insurance, pension, management time | Rarely covers technical, content, local, and AI depth in one hire |
| Large agency | Account management layers, high minimum retainers | More process than a Sheffield SME needs to start |
| This retainer | From £600/mo fixed | Specialist across clients, not in your office day to day |
For a business deciding between these routes, the Sprint is a useful, low-cost way to see the standard of work before committing to any of them, in-house, this retainer, or elsewhere.
Does pricing differ for manufacturing and engineering firms versus other Sheffield businesses?
The headline figures are the same, but the scope of work inside them often is not. A fabrication or machining shop near the Don Valley corridor typically needs fewer, deeper capability pages, stating tolerances, certifications, and materials handled, rather than a wide spread of shallow service pages, and the technical audit weighs structured data for Service and Product entities more heavily than a typical local business review would.
A retail or hospitality business in Sheffield city centre, by contrast, usually needs broader local SEO and review management work relative to technical capability content. Both fit inside the same £400 Sprint and the same retainer structure, the difference shows up in how the hours inside that scope get allocated, agreed openly before work starts rather than buried in a generic package description.
What happens if my priorities change partway through a retainer month?
They get discussed and re-agreed, not silently absorbed or ignored. A retainer here is not a fixed, unchangeable list of tasks handed over once at the start of a twelve month contract.
If a new product line launches, a certification is achieved that changes what a capability page should say, or a competitor development shifts priorities, that gets raised directly and the month's work adjusts accordingly. The fixed monthly fee buys ongoing attention and expertise, not a rigid, pre-set task list that ignores what is actually happening in your business.