SEO prices in the UK run from a few hundred pounds a month to several thousand. Here is what drives the number, what you should get each month, and the red flags in an SEO quote.
Most UK SEO is sold as a monthly retainer, and most price guides from UK agencies put a small business somewhere between £500 and £2,000 a month, with local-only work at the lower end. What you should pay depends on how competitive your searches are, how many services and places you want to rank for, and how much work your website needs first. The number matters less than what you get for it each month.
There is no official price list for SEO, which is half the problem. Two quotes for 'SEO' can be completely different jobs. This post is about how to tell them apart.
The ranges, and where they come from
The best-known survey is from Ahrefs, which polled 439 SEO providers. The most common monthly retainer was $501 to $1,000, charged by 20.4% of them. That is in dollars and leans on US and Canadian data, so treat it as a rough guide, not a UK price.
UK agency price guides tend to land in the same place: a few hundred pounds a month for straightforward local work, climbing past £2,000 a month for national searches or bigger sites. Most of those guides are written by agencies selling at their own price, this one included, so read them as a range rather than a rule.
What actually moves the price
- How competitive the search is. 'Damp proofing Sheffield' is a different fight to 'solicitor London'.
- How many services and places you want to be found for. Every one needs its own page and its own work.
- The state of your website. A slow site with broken pages needs fixing before anything else will stick.
- Content. Proper pages and articles take writing, and that is usually the biggest part of the cost.
- Who does the work. A consultant guiding your team costs less than an agency doing the lot.
What you should get every month
Whatever you pay, you should be able to say what was done this month and what changed because of it. At minimum:
- Rankings for the searches that bring you work, not a list of hundreds of terms nobody types.
- Enquiries tracked, so you can see calls and forms that came from Google, not just visits.
- Changes made to the site, in plain English: pages added, pages fixed, what was improved.
- Your Google Business Profile looked after, including posts, photos and replying to reviews.
- A short summary of what is next and why.
Our own SEO runs on RankSauce, the system we built, which checks rankings every week and writes the results up in plain English against last month. You should expect that kind of visibility from whoever you use.
One-off SEO versus monthly SEO
Some SEO is a one-off job. Setting a new site up properly at launch: titles and descriptions on every page, the business marked up for Google, a sitemap, Search Console and Analytics connected. Every website we build is set up for Google at launch as standard, so you are not paying extra for the basics.
Monthly SEO is the ongoing part: new pages, better pages, reviews, local mentions and keeping ahead of whoever else wants the same searches. If you only ever pay for the one-off, you have a site Google can read, but nothing pushing it up.
Red flags in an SEO quote
- A guaranteed number one position. Nobody can guarantee a ranking, including us.
- A long contract with no way out. Good SEO keeps you because it works, not because you are stuck. Ours is month to month.
- Reports full of numbers and no enquiries. Traffic you cannot turn into calls is not the point.
- No list of what is done each month. If they cannot tell you, assume not much.
- Very cheap packages that promise everything. Proper pages take time to write, and that time has to come from somewhere.
Is SEO worth it for a small business?
Work it backwards. What is one customer worth to you over a year? How many extra a month would cover the cost? If one job is worth more than a month of SEO, one or two extra jobs a month pays for it, and the rankings keep working while you are busy doing the work.
Where it is not worth it is if you cannot take on more work, or if your website turns visitors away when they arrive. Fix that first.
Questions people ask
Can I do SEO myself?
The basics, yes. Keep your Google profile accurate, ask every customer for a review, and make sure each service has its own page. The technical side and keeping it going every month is where most owners run out of time.
How long before I see results?
Usually some movement in weeks and meaningful results in months. We have written up what that looks like in practice, with real numbers from a Sheffield site we launched in October.
Do you publish your SEO prices?
We price SEO on the searches you want to win, because that is what decides the work. Tell us what you do and where, and we will look at who you are up against before we give you a number.
