How much does SEO cost in the UK, and what you get for the money

There's a reason nearly every page on this subject opens with "it depends" and then stops. It genuinely does depend, and on more things than most people expect. Two businesses on the same street can be quoted a decimal place apart and both figures can be fair, because the word SEO is covering a different job in each case.

What you shouldn't have to accept is the refusal to say anything at all. So here are real numbers, Consultico's included, with the conditions attached. Read every one of them as indicative. None of them is a quote, because a quote has to know what it's quoting for.

The UK market pays somewhere between £500 and £2,000 a month for SEO, according to pricing collected by Whito in the first quarter of 2026, and above that it runs a very long way.

The short version.

UK market figures, Q1 2026 (Whito). Assembled from published rate cards and platform pricing, not from a survey.

How much does SEO cost in the UK?

Most UK businesses pay between £500 and £2,000 a month for ongoing SEO. Treat that as the shape of the market and not a census. Nobody surveyed anybody: the figures are assembled from published rate cards, UK freelancer platforms and forum pricing, and they carry the wobble that implies. Every UK market number on this page comes from that one source, which is worth knowing before you quote it at anyone.

The one proper survey we can find points the same way. When Ahrefs polled 439 SEO service providers, the most common monthly rate was $501 to $1,000, and 68.8% of them charged $2,000 or less (Ahrefs, 2024). That's US dollars, worldwide, and two years old, so it isn't a UK price list. What it tells you is that the middle of this market sits lower than the headline numbers suggest, and a four-figure monthly fee is the middle rather than the entry point.

The spread is real, though. Two firms can quote £900 and £9,000 for something they both call SEO, and both can be fair. The word covers a technical clean-up, a content programme, digital PR, and the work of making a site convert once people arrive. What almost nobody tells you is which of those is inside the fee.

What do freelancers, consultants and agencies charge?

Who you hire moves the number more than the size of your business does. The same source breaks UK pricing down this way.

UK provider pricing, Q1 2026 (Whito).

Two things in that table are worth pausing on. The consultant row is strategy only, so it buys thinking and direction and not delivery, which is why it can sit below the small-agency row while costing more per hour. And the hourly rates only exist for the individuals: agencies mostly don't publish one, because a retainer isn't sold by the hour even when it's costed that way internally.

Why do SEO prices vary so much?

Five things move the number more than anything else. Two of them are about you, and you can settle both before anyone quotes.

• The state of the site you're starting from. No analytics, no Search Console, a migration nobody redirected: that's a month of unglamorous work before anything can even be measured, and you pay for it once.
• How contested your market is. Getting a heating engineer found in one town, and getting an e-commerce brand found nationally, are jobs of a completely different size. The gap is measured in multiples, not percentages.

The other three are about the fee, and they're the ones that make two quotes incomparable.

• Whether content is inside it. The biggest hidden variable by some distance. Ask how many pieces a month, who writes them, and whether it's on top.
• Whether anyone does off-site work. Getting mentioned and linked to by places that matter in your industry is slow, and it sits outside most fees.
• Your regulatory position. In health, finance, a regulated profession or a safety-critical trade, Google's search quality rater guidelines tell raters to apply the highest quality standards, on the grounds that bad information there can damage someone's health, finances or safety. So the content has to come from or go past someone genuinely qualified. That costs more and it should.

One more that people don't expect. If you already have a budget and want to put more into search, the thing to increase first is usually the off-site work rather than the hours. Extra hours on a site that's already sound tend to come back as extra reporting.

What does SEO cost with Consultico?

Consultation on its own is currently £75 an hour at Consultico, and a lot of our ongoing work starts around £750 a month. Neither is a promise. The first is a rate that can move, and the second is where a good number of engagements begin rather than a floor we hold everyone to, because £750 doesn't describe the same job twice.

It's worth saying that a monthly fee isn't the hourly rate multiplied up. The software licences behind the work sit inside it, so they don't turn up as a separate line, and there's no ad budget underneath any of it, so what you're paying is what the channel costs.

Most of what we do at the start is work out where a budget should go, which is why the plan comes first and the figure comes out of it. Think First exists for people who want that decided ahead of spending anything.

What does a smaller SEO budget actually buy?

Roughly £750 to £2,000 a month is where a budget has the most say in what happens to it. People often arrive expecting the lower end of a price list to be the consolation prize. In practice it's some of the best value we can offer, because there's no large programme to carry and almost the whole fee goes into the work itself.

At that level you can have the technical state of the site sorted out properly, the handful of pages that actually have to earn enquiries written or rewritten to go after something specific, tracking that records what came in rather than what got clicked, and a monthly conversation about where the next block of effort goes. A focused site in a market you can name will go a long way on that. We'd rather put a modest budget somewhere it visibly moves than spread it thin enough to make a package look full.

What it won't stretch to is everything at once. Where a proposal at the lower end promises weekly publishing, an outreach programme and a technical rebuild together, the question to ask is which of the three is actually getting the time.

What do bigger SEO packages include?

The figure climbs when the job does, and the job gets bigger for reasons you can usually name in advance. A harder market, or several of them. Publishing on a schedule you actually hold to. Serious off-site work, which is slow and expensive and is where a lot of the ceiling quietly sits. Someone whose whole attention is the gap between a visitor arriving and an enquiry landing.

There's no step change at any particular figure, which is why you won't find one published here. Scope moves in increments and so does the fee, and where any given business lands depends on the site, the market, the content, the off-site work and the regulatory bar.

Our larger engagements carry things a smaller one can't. Someone coming to see you where you are, wherever that is, so the work isn't all happening down a phone line. A named account manager with a handful of accounts and specialists behind them. Enough dedicated time that your business gets thought about between the meetings. That, more than any particular tactic, is what the bigger numbers are actually buying.

None of it means a smaller engagement gets a lesser relationship. You get the same people, the same directness about what's actually working, and the same willingness to say when the answer is to stop spending. The larger packages buy more of that, at closer range. They don't buy a better version of it.

The free audit sits before any of this: twenty to thirty minutes, your site put through the tool we built for it, and a walk through whatever it flags. If the read is that we can't help you, we'll say so on the call.

When you should not buy SEO yet

There are three situations where we'd tell you to keep your money.

You need customers this month. Search is slow. If the business needs enquiries in three weeks, that's a paid media question, and buying SEO instead will feel like nothing is happening, because for a while nothing will be.

Your enquiries aren't converting. More traffic multiplies whatever already happens after someone gets in touch. If that part is broken, you'll pay to make the problem bigger.

Nobody is searching for what you sell. It happens more than you'd think, particularly with new products and with businesses whose customers come through referral. Half an hour with a keyword tool settles it before you commit to a year of anything.

We've talked ourselves out of work on all three, and it costs us occasionally. If you'd rather reason it through yourself, we've written up how to check the maths before buying search.

What should an SEO quote include?

Whatever number lands in your inbox, four questions tell you what you're looking at. If you want the longer version of this conversation, we've written separately about what to ask an SEO agency before you hire one.

1. What's the scope, in units? Hours, pieces of content, or named deliverables. "Ongoing SEO" is not a scope.
2. Who does it? The person in the meeting, or someone you'll never speak to. Both are fine, but you should know which.
3. What's excluded? Content, off-site work and any development time are the three that most often sit outside the fee and appear later.
4. Who owns it at the end? The site, the content, the Google accounts. Get it written down at the start, because otherwise the day you find out is the day you try to move.

An agency that can answer those four in plain English is usually a safe bet, whatever it's charging. If you can't get a straight answer to them before you sign, that's worth finding out while it's still easy to walk away.

How do you decide your own SEO budget?

Start from what a customer is worth to you rather than what feels affordable this quarter. A customer worth £2,000 over a year, with search bringing you two a month, makes almost any of the figures on this page cheap. If a customer is worth £40 and buys once, the maths gets hard fast, and you want to know that before anyone sends a proposal.

For an actual figure, our SEO service starts with the free audit, and what comes back is a number with a scope attached instead of another range. We work across the UK from Glasgow, and if you're in one of the trades or professions we've built pages for, SEO by industry shows what the work looks like in your sector. Or send us a message describing the business, and we'll come back with something specific to it.