Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
The question of how much you spend on SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay-per-click) is always a relevant one but it’s an especially pressing one right now. With operating costs rising across the board, marketing budgets are under real scrutiny and businesses need more than a rough answer. Setting the right SEO and PPC budget for your business is vital. How do you do that? You begin with a framework.
This guide helps you build that framework by setting out the following:
- What SEO and PPC cost in both time and money.
- What you can realistically expect in return.
- How to make smart decisions even when budgets are being squeezed.
We start with the bigger topic of marketing…
Marketing Shouldn’t Be A Discretionary Spend
Marketing is frequently one of the first areas to be cut when money is tight. Often, it’s seen as a discretionary spend rather than a business-critical one. But visibility doesn’t maintain itself. If you’ve built up a decent search presence or a steady stream of paid traffic and suddenly you go quiet, competitors will fill the space. Winning that ground back tends to cost considerably more than holding your position in the first place.
That said, spending for the sake of it isn’t the answer either. The businesses that navigate difficult periods well are the ones making deliberate, informed choices about where their marketing spend goes.
What Your Money And Time Are Buying
Understanding what SEO and PPC can deliver is pretty key to spending wisely on either or both.
Every business with an online presence can, and will, benefit from having their website optimised for search engines (SEO). Businesses that compete in crowded markets or offer services people urgently search for tend to benefit most from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The two work well in combination: solid SEO improves the quality and relevance of your PPC landing pages, while PPC data can sharpen your SEO keyword strategy.
SEO
Search engine optimisation improves the visibility and performance of your website in organic (unpaid) search results. Your SEO and PPC budget goes towards:
- Content creation: well-researched, well-written content that answers real search queries. This includes AI-powered search platforms (Answer Engine Optimisation – AEO) which are becoming increasingly prevalent in 2026. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews are changing how users find information. It’s wise to make your content and structure AI-friendly.
- Technical SEO: ensuring your site is fast, crawlable and properly structured.
- Ongoing optimisation: reviewing performance, updating content and adapting to algorithm changes.
- Tools: platforms, apps and trackers that support automation and analysis.
This is specialist work. It requires up-to-date knowledge and hands-on experience which is why many businesses find it more economical to work with an external specialist, such as Improve Position, rather than manage it in-house.
PPC
PPC is a digital advertising model where you pay a platform, typically Google or a social media channel, each time someone clicks on your ad. Rather than earning visits organically, you’re buying targeted traffic directly. Your investment covers:
- Ad spend: the money that goes to the platform for each click.
- Creative: writing ads, designing display assets, producing video content.
- Landing pages: compelling destination pages on your website that convert the traffic being driven by the ads.
- Testing: running and refining variants based on performance data.
- Management: campaign setup, monitoring and ongoing optimisation.
A common and costly mistake is allocating an SEO and PPC budget to ad spend without factoring in management fees. A well-managed smaller budget will nearly always outperform a larger budget left to run without proper oversight.
The Breakdown
SEO: Operational Time
- Small business: 1-2 days per month.
- Growing business: 4-6 days per month.
- Enterprise or high-competition sectors: upwards of 6 days a month
SEO: Typical Operational Costs (UK Market)
- Small business: £1,000-£1,500 per month (budgets below £1,000 are increasingly unlikely to produce meaningful results).
- Mid-market / regional or national: £1,500-£5,000 per month.
- Enterprise / highly competitive sectors: £5,000-£15,000+ per month.
Of course, the more knowledgeable and experienced the person or team undertaking this work, the more economical the outcome, whether agency, in-house or a combination of both.
SEO: Realistic Timeframes
A realistic timeframe depends on the competitiveness of your sector, how established your domain is, and the degree of groundwork already in place. As a guideline, most businesses can expect meaningful movement in rankings and, therefore website visits, within three to six months, with more significant results from six to twelve months. Some immediate improvements should be an increase in targeted traffic, a drop in bounce rate and rise in time spent on site. You might even get some quick quality leads but it will take Google a little time to translate these positives into a ranking. (So, if anyone promises you page-one rankings within a few weeks, run in the opposite direction.)
PPC: Typical Costs (UK Market)
- Ad spend (small business): £500-£2,000 per month.
- Ad spend (mid-market): £2,000-£10,000 per month.
- Agency management fee: typically 10-20% of ad spend, or a flat retainer of £500-£2,500 per month.
PPC: Realistic Timeframes
PPC can drive traffic within hours, but it typically takes one to three months to generate consistent, profitable leads. The timeline breaks down as follows:
- Weeks 1-2: ads launch and platforms enter their learning phase, collecting data on search intent and audience behaviour.
- Month 1-3: the optimisation phase, eliminating wasted spend, refining keyword bids, testing landing pages. Most campaigns reach consistent profitability within this window.
- Months 3-6: the scaling phase; once a predictable cost-per-lead is established, budgets can be increased to maximise returns.
PPC has become more expensive. Average cost-per-click on Google Ads has increased significantly in recent years, driven by greater competition and more sophisticated bidding algorithms. This doesn’t make PPC unviable but it does mean campaigns that once ticked along quietly without much intervention are now losing money if they’re not actively managed.
Location also plays a role: London-based campaigns typically see CPCs 15-30% higher than equivalent keywords in northern England, Scotland, or Wales which is significant for national campaigns.
Marketing Spend Benchmark
A commonly cited benchmark for marketing spend is 7-10% of revenue for businesses looking to grow, and 3-5% for those maintaining their current position. Of that total marketing budget, digital channels typically account for 40-70% depending on business model. These are benchmarks, not rules; a new business in a competitive market may need to invest more aggressively early on.
So, build in reviews of your SEO and PPC budget, quarterly as a minimum. With costs changing and algorithms evolving, a budget set at the start of the year and never revisited is likely to drift out of alignment fairly quickly.
Getting More From What You’re Already Spending
Before increasing your SEO and PPC budget, it’s worth making sure you’re getting as much as possible from your current spend.
In PPC, wasted spend is common: ads showing for irrelevant search terms, overly broad targeting, or budget allocated to underperforming ad groups. A proper audit will nearly always find money that can be reallocated more effectively. Also consider where you’re sending visitors: a high bounce rate often signals a landing page (eg content) problem, not a traffic problem.
In SEO, look at which content is driving traffic and which isn’t. Look at consolidating or refreshing underperforming pages as well as creating new. The quality of your technical and on-page SEO impacts accordingly on ranking. Our Website Quality Audit will highlight these and other areas for SEO improvement.
PPC and SEO also work better when they’re not siloed. Keywords converting well in paid campaigns are worth targeting organically. SEO audience data can sharpen PPC targeting. The two channels reinforce each other when the people managing it liaise with one another, and that includes working on a combined SEO and PPC budget.
A Realistic SEO And PPC Budget
Setting a realistic and hard-working SEO and PPC budget will help drive new business while you navigate through this tough economic environment. Understand what each channel is doing (or can do) for your business, be honest about your timelines and goals, and don’t let a tight budget drive you into false economies.
If your in-house team is spending significant time on SEO or PPC, time they could spend on their core role, it’s worth considering whether a specialist could deliver better results more efficiently. A specialist agency brings focused expertise, dedicated resource, and current knowledge of platform changes and algorithm updates. This is genuinely difficult to maintain when digital marketing isn’t your primary job.
Improve Position focuses specifically on SEO and PPC which means the team stays current in ways that generalist or in-house resource often can’t. That specialism translates directly into campaign performance, particularly when rising costs make efficiency more important than ever.
If you’re unsure whether your current activity is performing as well as it should, an independent audit is often a good place to start. It doesn’t have to mean committing to anything, it just means going in with clearer information.
