26 September 2026 / 6 min read
How much SEO costs in the UK, and what you get for it
From £300 local campaigns to £5,000 national retainers: the real brackets, what moves the number, and the red flags in between.
- seo
- pricing
- search
- agencies
Ask five agencies what SEO costs and you will get five numbers between £99 and £10,000 a month. Most of them are answering a different question, so here is the market as it actually is.
The short answer
Most UK businesses pay between £500 and £2,000 a month for SEO. Local-only work — one town, one map listing, one set of search terms — starts around £300 a month. Competitive national terms run £1,500 to £5,000 a month and up, and London agencies charge 20 to 40 percent more for the same work. Freelancers bill £25 to £100 an hour. Anything pitched under about £150 a month is not search optimisation; it is a subscription to a report.
| Level | Typical monthly cost | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Local-only | £300–£800 | Map listing, local terms, on-page basics |
| Most small businesses | £500–£2,000 | Technical fixes, content, links, reporting |
| Competitive / national | £1,500–£5,000+ | Content programmes, digital PR, full technical ownership |
| Enterprise | £5,000+ | Dedicated teams, multiple markets, procurement |
What drives the price
- Competition. Ranking for a town plus a trade, and ranking nationally, are different sports.
- The state of your site. A fast, crawlable site spends the budget on content; a broken one spends it on repairs first.
- Content volume. One good page a month and four are different budgets.
- Links and mentions. Earning coverage is real work and priced accordingly.
- You. Slow decisions and late content stall campaigns more than any agency bottleneck.
One-off work vs monthly work
Audits, migrations and fix lists are projects, usually a few thousand pounds. Rankings compound, which is why the ongoing work is monthly: expect movement at 8 to 12 weeks and meaningful gains across two quarters. Set the contract length accordingly — the median UK agency minimum is around four to five months, and anything shorter rarely shows what the work can do.
Red flags
- Guaranteed positions. Nobody honest can promise page one.
- £99-a-month packages. That buys automated reports, not work.
- No number until you sit through a pitch.
- Contracts you cannot leave, or results defined as anything other than enquiries.
How we price it
Search is engineered into our builds rather than bolted on afterwards — see SEO & AEO. If you already have a site, an audit plus a fix list is the common first engagement and often pays for itself before any new content is written. Read the technical SEO checklist and how AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend, or get a bracket for your own project through the guided brief.