A click on "saas seo" costs £25.46. One on "restaurants near me" costs £0.30. Both are businesses looking for customers on Google, and the price of a visitor changes about eighty-five times. The first has 210 searches a month, the second 11.1 million (DataForSEO, Google Ads UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242).
There is no such thing as digital marketing for businesses in general: there are sectors where Google's first page belongs to the people who sell, and sectors where it belongs to the middlemen. Which of the two you are in decides almost everything else, and you can find out in ten minutes.
Below is a comparison of the UK sectors we measured, what changes in practice and how to decide where the budget goes.
The question that comes before all the others
Search Google for what you sell, with your town next to it, and count how many of the top ten results are businesses like yours. The answer splits sectors into two worlds with opposite rules.
In the first world the page belongs to intermediaries. On "restaurants london" the page opens with a carousel of Tripadvisor, OpenTable, SquareMeal and TheFork, then the local pack, then food blogs, news and guides: only two venue websites appear, both landmark buildings at the bottom of the page. On "dermatologist london" the first element is a carousel of directories led by Top Doctors and Doctify. In these sectors organic traffic exists, but someone else already has it: Tripadvisor has an estimated 147.6 million organic visits a month in the UK, and Doctify's organic traffic would cost £547,184 a month to buy through ads.
In the second world the page still belongs to businesses. On "divorce solicitor london" the local pack shows three law firms, and of the nine organic results on the first page eight are law firms and one is the Legal 500 directory. No aggregator on top. The same holds for manufacturing and industrial B2B, where producers compete with each other and nobody else. Healthcare in the UK sits in between: the directories take the top of the page, but the organic results beneath them are clinics' own websites.
| Sector | Main search | Monthly volume | CPC | Who owns the first page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants | restaurants near me | 11,100,000 | £0.30 | platforms and maps |
| Hair and beauty | hairdressers near me | 165,000 | £0.62 | maps |
| Healthcare | dentist near me | 246,000 | £3.97 | directories and maps, clinics below |
| Charities | donate | 9,900 | £18.00 | large charities and giving platforms |
| Travel | travel agents | 18,100 | £2.70 | online travel agents, then high-street agencies |
| Legal | divorce solicitor london | 480 | £35.90 | law firms |
| E-commerce | ecommerce seo | 720 | £42.61 | platform guides and agencies |
If your sector belongs to the intermediaries
Trying to beat the platform on the generic keyword is the most common way to burn a budget. Tripadvisor ranks for 2,523,261 keywords in the UK, 212,195 of them in first position: that game is over.
What remains, and is worth having, comes down to three things. Local presence, because the local pack is the only block on the page where a single business appears next to the giants. Presence inside the platforms themselves, treated as a paid channel with a cost per customer to measure. And the detailed searches the platform does not cover well: the specific treatment, the occasion, the precise problem, where a well-made page ranks even on a small domain.
The measure of success in these sectors is not traffic: it is the share of customers who arrive without a commission.
If the first page is still up for grabs
Here the opposite applies: the website is the main tool and the work moves to content. Volumes are small, CPCs are high, and the value of a single lead justifies an investment that would be absurd in retail. "Divorce solicitor london" has 480 searches a month, but top-of-page bids reach £39.48 a click: a case is worth thousands of pounds, and the firms buying those clicks know it.
In these sectors the typical mistake is the opposite one: publishing a lot and measuring visits. Two UK accounting SaaS products in the same market show it well. Clear Books ranks for 1,710 keywords, but only 365 of them are on page one. FreeAgent ranks for 4.6 times as many keywords and gets thirteen times the estimated traffic, because more than a third of its keywords sit on page one (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026). What counts is not how much you publish, it is where you land.
The sum that decides the channel
There is only one working criterion, and you can calculate it with two numbers you already have: what a new customer is worth and how many clicks it takes to get one.
A restaurant paying £0.30 a click and converting one visitor in a hundred spends £30 per cover: it doesn't add up. A law firm paying £35.90 a click and converting one in fifty spends £1,795 per client on a case worth several thousand: it adds up, with less room than the fee suggests. Same channel, two opposite answers, and neither depends on how good the person running the campaigns is.
When the sum doesn't work with ads, the answer is almost always organic or local, which means slower. When it does work, ads are also the fastest way to find out which terms really convert, before writing pages around them.
Further reading: when Google Ads is worth it and the sum to do before signing an SEO project.
Seasonality moves more than budgets do
In almost every sector we measured, demand swings more widely than company budgets do, and you can read the curve for free on Google Trends. "Holidays" goes from 201,000 searches in November 2025 to 368,000 in January 2026. "Christmas charity" goes from 70 searches in summer to 4,400 in December. "Estate agents near me" drops to 33,100 in December and is back at 60,500 from January to April. "Nutritionist london" has 1,600 searches in September and November and 590 in the summer months (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026).
Spending evenly twelve months a year, which is what almost everyone does because the contract is monthly, means buying expensively when demand is low and going quiet when it is high. The first free improvement to a media plan is almost always redistributing the same budget over the right months.
Agency vocabulary costs more than customer vocabulary
A detail worth knowing if you get sales calls. "Restaurant marketing" has 260 searches a month and costs £5.85 a click, against the £0.30 a restaurant pays to be found by a diner. Nineteen times as much.
The consultancy market is almost always more expensive than the market it serves, in every sector. That is not a problem in itself: it is the reason whoever is calling you needs to close the contract more than you need to sign it.
Guides by sector
We have measured each sector in a dedicated piece, each with the data from its own first page: restaurants, healthcare, law firms, startups and SaaS, e-commerce, hotels, beauty salons, estate agents, manufacturing, charities.
Frequently asked questions
Where do you start with a small budget?
With local presence if you sell to people nearby, with the website if you sell at a distance. They are the two things that keep working even in the month you stop paying, unlike ads.
How much should a small business invest?
The right question is how many new customers you need and what each one is worth. From there you work back to a sustainable cost per lead and find out whether the channel holds up. Price benchmarks are in how much SEO costs.
SEO first or Google Ads first?
If you need answers within three months, ads. If you have a year ahead of you and CPCs in your sector are high, organic costs less for the same number of leads. In most cases you start with ads to learn which terms convert and build organic around those.
What about social media?
Social works on demand that doesn't exist yet, search on demand that is already there. A business with a known product that people search for gets more customers from search; one with a product nobody knows they want has to create demand elsewhere, and search follows.
How can you tell whether an agency is working?
By looking at non-brand keywords on page one and attributed leads, not total sessions. We have written about how to read a report in how to tell if your SEO agency is working.
Where to start
Run the search your customer would run and count how many businesses like yours are in the top ten results. If there are none or one, your work is on local presence and inside the channels of whoever owns that page. If there are five or more, your work is on the website and content, and the game is open. It is the same check we run on the first call with a new business, and it changes the proposal more than any other piece of information. If you want us to run it for your sector, get in touch.
