Outsourcing website and marketing: what it costs in 2026

Outsourcing your website and marketing together costs £49-£199 a month. Buying them separately costs £15-£50 for website maintenance plus £250-£1,000 for standalone marketing, and creates a problem beyond the price: the gap between two providers who each assume the other is handling something.

The gap is the real argument for bundling

Price is the obvious point. The interesting one is what happens between two suppliers.

Your SEO consultant says the site is too slow and needs work. Your web company says speed is a hosting matter and they only do maintenance. Your SEO firm writes a new page; your web company charges to publish it. Rankings drop and neither is quite sure whose problem it is.

None of them are being unreasonable. Each is doing what they were contracted for. The bit that falls between them is unowned, and it is usually the bit that matters.

What the two approaches cost

The bundled figure is lower for a straightforward reason worth understanding rather than being suspicious of: the provider is already hosting your site, already in your Google profile, already writing your pages. The marginal cost of doing the next piece is small. A standalone SEO firm has to set all that up just to begin.

The trade-off is depth. A specialist SEO agency at £600 a month will go deeper on search than a bundled service at £99. If search is your entire business model, that depth may be worth buying. For most local businesses it is not.

What should be included

Hold any quote against this list:

• Hosting, security, backups, updates. The maintenance layer.
• Content changes. Prices, staff, services, offers, without a quote each time.
• Google Business Profile. Posts, photos, services, hours, review replies.
• Review requests. Going out after every job or visit.
• Local SEO. Pages for the areas and services you want, on-page work, site speed.
• Reporting that means something. Enquiries and calls, not impressions.
• Ads, on higher tiers. With the spend paid to Google directly by you.

If a quote covers the first item and calls itself marketing, it is maintenance with a better name.

Versus hiring someone in house

The comparison people reach for, and the numbers are not close at small scale.

A part-time marketing employee at two days a week costs meaningfully more than £199 a month once salary, employer’s National Insurance, pension, holiday, equipment and management time are counted. And one person, however good, cannot cover web development, SEO, content writing, Google profile work and ads to a decent standard.

In house starts making sense when marketing is genuinely a full-time role with enough work to fill it, which for most small businesses it is not. In-house versus managed service cost works through the maths.

The middle option people forget is a virtual assistant at £15-£30 an hour, who executes well but does not decide what should happen. Useful if you have a plan and no time. Not useful if you have neither.

What to keep in house regardless

Even fully outsourced, three things stay yours because nobody can do them better:

Answering enquiries quickly. No marketing survives a business that replies in three days.

Asking for reviews in person. A provider can automate the follow-up text. The ask lands better from you, at the moment the customer is happy.

Photos of your work. You are the one there. It is the raw material everything else uses.

A provider who does not tell you this is not being straight with you.

How to judge whether it worked

Set this up before you start, because judging it afterwards on feel is how people waste years.

Count your enquiries now: calls, forms, emails, walk-ins. Write the number down. Then look at the same number at six months, not at six weeks, because local search takes three to six months to move.

Track enquiries rather than traffic. Traffic going up while enquiries stay flat means the wrong people are arriving, which is a different problem and worth knowing about.

What we charge

Our plans bundle website and marketing at £49 Essentials, £99 Complete and £199 Premier, monthly with no contract, and you own the domain, site and content throughout. Complete is what most single-location small businesses need.

The pricing page itemises each tier so you can compare it against separate suppliers properly. If you would rather describe the business and get a straight recommendation, including whether you would be better served by a specialist, tell us.

Related: signs you should outsource your online presence and no time for marketing, who you can hand it to.