How much does SEO cost in the UK?

SEO pricing in the UK is wildly inconsistent. You'll see £99/month packages on Fiverr and £15,000/month retainers from London agencies pitching the same outcome: more traffic, more leads, more revenue. The truth is that what you pay determines what you get — and what cheap SEO buys you is usually worse than doing nothing at all.

UK SEO pricing models in 2026

Monthly retainer (£500–£15,000/month): The most common arrangement. You pay a fixed monthly fee and the SEO agency or freelancer delivers an agreed mix of technical fixes, content, link-earning and reporting. Smart for businesses that want predictable spend and a long-term partner.

One-off audit (£400–£2,500): A deep technical and content audit with a prioritised action list. Great when you've inherited a site, just launched, or want a second opinion on your current agency. Most decent audits pay for themselves through quick wins alone.

Project-based SEO (£2,000–£20,000): A fixed scope — a content rebuild, a migration SEO project, a technical overhaul. Good for businesses with a specific problem rather than an ongoing growth target.

Hourly consultancy (£80–£300/hour): Strategic input for in-house teams. Best when you have someone capable of executing but need senior direction on strategy, prioritisation or technical architecture.

Pay-on-results (avoid): Sounds risk-free, almost always isn't. Either the SEO picks low-competition keywords you'd have ranked for anyway, or they take shortcuts because they're working for free.

What cheap SEO actually does

A £150/month "SEO package" can't fund proper work — there's maybe 1–2 hours of attention in it. What you'll actually get: a monthly automated ranking report, a few low-quality backlinks from PBNs or directories, and templated meta description changes. Worst case the dodgy links earn you a manual action from Google and you lose more traffic than you started with. Best case it does nothing and you've spent £1,800 over a year for noise.

What proper SEO investment looks like

A real £1,500/month retainer covers: 8–15 hours of senior time, a technical audit refreshed quarterly, 2–4 long-form content pieces written or edited by humans, internal linking improvements, digital PR or genuine outreach for 1–3 backlinks/month, schema and Core Web Vitals work, Search Console monitoring, and a monthly call where someone explains what changed and why. That's the floor for moving the needle on a competitive query.

Local SEO vs national SEO

Local SEO is dramatically cheaper because the competitive set is smaller. £500–£1,200/month is realistic for dominating a town or city for a service business — Google Business Profile optimisation, citations, reviews, location pages and a handful of local backlinks. National or international SEO competes against bigger budgets and longer time horizons; serious work starts at £2,000/month and scales with ambition.

What I charge

I run small-business SEO retainers from £600/month (local) and £1,500/month (national), and one-off technical audits from £600. Everything is plain-English, fixed-scope and tied to traffic and lead goals rather than vanity keyword rankings. If you want a brutally honest second opinion on what your current agency is or isn't delivering, the audit is the place to start.