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SEO pricing for a Wigan food producer
Food production is one of the harder sectors to price honestly because a bakery on Wallgate and a wholesale supplier at Kitt Green are not the same business at all. This note sets out what drives the number.
The A-side
Three businesses in one
Why a food business is three businesses to a search engine
A Wigan food producer usually sells in three directions at once. The counter or the shop is one direction and the trade account is a second. The delivered or online order is the third.
Each of those is a separate search behaviour with a separate set of pages behind it. Somebody wanting a pie at dinnertime and a foodservice buyer sourcing a case quantity have nothing in common except your product.
That is the single biggest driver of cost in this sector. A plumber has one audience and one page set while a producer selling retail and trade and direct has three. The work is scaled by the surface rather than by the size of the firm.
The mistake that follows is predictable. One website gets built for the walk-in customer and the trade side is left with a contact form and a phone number. That is the half of the business with the largest orders in it.
The B-side
The two prices
What the two published prices cover
£400 FIXED
Fixed fee for the AI Visibility Sprint, run over seven working days.
£600 FIXED
Monthly floor for the ongoing retainer, priced up from there on scope.
The Sprint is a diagnosis with fixes attached. It records whether Google and four AI assistants name your business, ships five specific changes and sets a dated re-check.
The retainer is the ongoing version. Work is prioritised each month against what the data shows and the changes go live rather than into a document you have to hand to somebody else.
What pushes a food producer above the floor
- Number of selling directions
- Retail only is the cheapest shape. Retail plus trade plus direct delivery is three page sets and three sets of buyer questions to answer.
- Product line count
- Six product lines is a manageable page set. Sixty is a structural job about categories and filtering before anything gets written.
- Accreditation load
- Certification schemes are what trade buyers filter on. Each one needs stating in text with its scope and its renewal position rather than sitting in a PDF.
- Allergen and specification data
- Ingredient decks, allergen tables, shelf life and case configuration all belong on the page. This is slow work and it is usually the work that wins the trade enquiry.
- Existing platform
- A modern site where the shop and the trade pages can both be edited is cheap to work on. A brochure site nobody has logged into since it launched adds a fortnight before anything ships.
- Geographic reach
- A Wigan only delivery radius is a small job. Selling into the north west or nationally means competing with producers who are not local at all.
What a trade buyer actually searches for
The searches that produce a wholesale enquiry are unglamorous. They name a product, a format and a qualifier. Nobody types the name of your town unless proximity genuinely changes the deal.
The qualifier is where the money sits. A buyer who needs an accredited supplier searches for the accreditation. A buyer who needs a specific case size searches for the case size.
That is why a page reading about our pies loses to a page reading wholesale meat and potato pies, 48 per case, frozen, delivered across the north west. The second one answers a filter and the first one answers nothing.
Wigan carries a real reputation for pies and that reputation is worth using in copy. It is not worth relying on. A reputation gets you read once the buyer has already found the page.
What you should refuse to pay for
- Recipe blogging aimed at home cooks when your revenue comes from trade accounts.
- Directory submission packages sold by volume rather than by consistency.
- Any guaranteed ranking position, from anybody, at any price.
- A rebuild of a site that works, when the actual gap is missing trade pages.
- Monthly reports full of impression graphs with no shipped changes attached.
The test is simple enough. Ask what shipped this month and ask what moved. An invoice that cannot answer both is buying you activity rather than progress.
The order of work that costs least
Start with the facts a buyer filters on. Certifications, case sizes, minimum order values, lead times and delivery radius all belong in text on your own pages before a penny goes anywhere else.
That single job usually moves more than a quarter of content marketing does. It is work you can begin yourself this week.
Common questions
Why does a food producer cost more than a plumber to work on?
A trades firm normally has one audience and one buying decision. A Wigan food producer usually has three audiences and three sets of pages. The same monthly fee therefore covers a wider surface.
Is £400 really enough to find out whether anything is wrong?
Yes because a diagnosis is a smaller job than a fix. The Sprint produces a dated baseline across Google and four AI assistants, five shipped fixes and a re-check date.
Should I pay for content about recipes and food trends?
Only if a buyer of yours reads it. A trade buyer sourcing a case of pies does not want a seasonal recipe post. That kind of content is the most commonly sold and least commonly useful thing in this sector.
My accreditation certificate is a PDF. Does that matter?
It matters a lot. A PDF certificate is difficult for retrieval systems to read and impossible for most of them to associate with your business. The accreditation should also exist as plain text on a page.
Can I do the first pass myself and pay for the rest later?
Yes and it is often the sensible order. Write out your certifications and case sizes and minimum order and delivery radius as text on your own site first. Then pay someone to work on what is left.
The full reasoning behind both prices
This note covers what changes the number for a food business. The pricing page sets out why the two prices exist at all and what is deliberately not sold.