£Most UK businesses pay £500 to £5,000 a month. Where you land is set by turnover, not by ambition.
Most UK businesses pay between £500 and £5,000 a month for SEO, and where you land inside that range depends far more on your turnover, your sector and how many locations you serve than on which provider you pick.
This page is a reference, not a pitch. Every band below is a published market figure with the source named beside it, so you can check it.
What it is for is judging a quote: whether the number in front of you is normal, high, or so low that the work cannot be in there.
Key takeaways
- UK SEO retainers cluster by business turnover, not by agency size, and the bands are published.
- Local SEO and national SEO are priced differently because the work itself is different.
- A retainer, a fixed project and an hourly rate buy different things, and one of them suits you.
- Setup fees are normal, and there is a clear test for whether one is legitimate.
- Regulated sectors cost more, for reasons that have nothing to do with the agency.
- American price guides quote roughly double UK rates, and there is survey data explaining why.
- The cheapest quote is usually the most expensive one, because of what it costs to undo.
Working out where you sit before you talk to anyone is the point of this page. When you are ready to test a real quote against it, we will read it with you, including the parts that are not written down.
How much does SEO cost in the UK in 2026?
Most UK businesses pay between £500 and £5,000 a month, with the band set by turnover rather than by ambition. Below £500 a month there is rarely enough time in the budget to do the work; above £5,000 you are usually buying multiple locations, multiple languages, or a team rather than a person.
| Business size | Turnover | Typical monthly SEO spend |
|---|---|---|
| Micro | Under £100,000 | £500 to £1,000 |
| Small | £100,000 to £500,000 | £500 to £1,500 |
| Medium | £500,000 to £2m | £1,500 to £3,000 |
| Established | £2m to £5m | £2,500 to £5,000 |
| Scaling | £5m and above | £5,000 upward |
The clearest published UK breakdown comes from Whito’s agency retainer research, which aggregated rate cards and survey data between January and May 2026. Whito puts single-channel retainers, which is what most SEO engagements are, at £1,000 to £3,500 a month, and full-service marketing retainers at £3,500 to £16,750. It also reports both figures rising more than 30% since 2023.
Two things follow that most guides skip.
The first is that turnover is a better predictor than sector or city. A £300,000 business in London and a £300,000 business in Merthyr Tydfil are quoted far more similarly than you would expect, because the constraint is what the work costs to deliver, not what the postcode can bear.
The second is why the internet tells you a different number. The SE Ranking agency pricing survey, covering 260 agencies in December 2024, found that 40% of US and Canadian agencies charge over $125 an hour, against 6% of European agencies. When a UK buyer reads an American pricing guide and concludes SEO costs $5,000 a month, they are reading a real figure from a different market. The same survey found 64% of agencies worldwide price monthly retainers below $1,000 and 66% of one-off projects fall between $500 and $2,000. Those figures are in US dollars and cover agencies globally, not UK rates.
Why do SEO prices vary so much between providers?
Because the word “SEO” covers work that ranges from a monthly report to a rebuilt site, and almost nobody itemises which one they are selling.
Three quotes at £400, £2,000 and £9,000 a month are usually three different products wearing the same name.
At the bottom of the market you are buying attention, in hours
A few hours a month of someone’s time, spent on whatever looks most urgent. Reports arrive. Nothing compounds, because nothing gets finished.
In the middle you are buying a programme
A plan, content produced against it, technical work, and someone accountable for the result. This is where most UK SME spend sits and where the published bands cluster.
At the top you are buying a team
Separate specialists for technical work, content, digital PR and analytics, usually because the site is large, multi-location or regulated.
The honest way to compare is to stop comparing prices and start comparing what arrives. Ask each provider what lands in month one, month three and month six, who does it, and what happens if the agreed measure is missed. Two of your three quotes will struggle with the last question.
How much does local SEO cost against national SEO?
Local SEO usually costs less, commonly £500 to £1,500 a month against £1,500 to £5,000 for national work, because the competitive set is smaller and the winning signals are cheaper to build.
| Local SEO | National SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical monthly band | £500 to £1,500 | £1,500 to £5,000 |
| What decides the ranking | Proximity, profile, reviews, citations | Content depth, technical health, earned links |
| Where the effort goes | Google Business Profile, area content, review flow | Topical coverage across a whole subject |
| Content volume needed | Low, focused on services and areas | High, covering the full question set |
| How fast it moves | Weeks to a few months | Two to three quarters |
| Biggest cost driver | Number of locations | Competition on the head terms |
| Who it suits | A business whose buyers must be near it | A business that delivers remotely |
The difference is not a discount. It is a different job.
Most firms need some of both, and the mistake is paying national prices for a local problem. A single-site practice whose enquiries arrive through the map pack does not need a national content programme, and a provider who sells one to them is selling the wrong thing well.
The reverse mistake costs more. A business that delivers UK-wide, buying local SEO because it is cheaper, ends up with a beautifully optimised profile in one town and no visibility in the market it actually sells to. Our local and multi-location SEO work exists for the first case, and the way we approach the second is semantic SEO and topical authority.
How much should a local business spend per month on SEO?
A local business should expect £500 to £1,500 a month for one location, adding roughly £250 to £500 a month for each additional area it actually needs to rank in.
The per-location increment is the part buyers underestimate. Each area needs its own profile signals, its own citation consistency and usually its own page, and none of that is free the second time.
- One location, low competition. £500 to £750 a month. Profile management, review flow, citation clean-up, one piece of area content a month.
- One location, competitive sector. £750 to £1,500. The same plus service content built on real questions, and technical work.
- Two or three locations. £1,200 to £2,500. Separate profiles, separate area pages, grid-based reporting rather than a single city position.
- Multi-branch, five or more. £2,500 upward, at which point the work is closer to national SEO with a local layer.
⚠A local business under about £100,000 turnover is often better served buying a one-off audit and doing the profile work itself for six months than committing to a retainer it will resent. That is not a sales position, it is arithmetic.
Does the city you trade in change what SEO costs?
Less than most buyers expect. London agencies quote higher, commonly 20% to 40% above regional firms for comparable scope, but the work costs the same to deliver and remote delivery has made location a weak predictor of price.
What the city really changes is the competition, not the rate card. Ranking a solicitor in central London is harder than ranking one in Merthyr Tydfil, so the same monthly figure buys slower progress in the first case. That is a scope difference showing up as a value difference, and it is the honest reason a London firm may need to spend more.
You are not obliged to buy locally
Organic rankings depend on content and links, not on your provider’s postcode. A Cardiff consultancy can rank a Manchester business, and frequently does. The one thing that does need local presence is a Google Business Profile at a verifiable address, and that is yours, not your agency’s.
Regional rates are not lower quality
The SE Ranking survey’s regional split is about market rates, not capability. A regional firm with lower overheads charging £1,200 for the work a London agency prices at £1,800 is arbitrage, not a discount.
Local market rate matters when you are the one being quoted
A Cardiff business handed a London-scale quote for a Cardiff-scale problem should say so. Our SEO agency in Cardiff page sets out what the local market actually looks like.
How much of a marketing budget or revenue should go to SEO?
Between 5% and 10% of the marketing budget is the commonly published guideline, with Rubik Digital among the UK agencies putting figures on it, and that only helps once you know what the marketing budget itself should be.
The more useful version, for a finance director rather than a marketer, works from turnover. UK SMEs typically run marketing at somewhere between 2% and 10% of revenue depending on growth stage, and SEO takes a share of that. A £500,000 business spending 5% on marketing has £25,000 a year, and a £1,000 a month SEO retainer is roughly half of it. Stated that way, the question stops being “is £1,000 a lot” and becomes “is search worth half our marketing”.
For most professional-service firms the answer is yes, because search is where the buyer is already looking. For a business selling through relationships and referrals, it is often no, and the honest thing is to say so.
Two tests worth running before you set a figure. First, what proportion of your enquiries already start with a search? If you do not know, that is the first thing to measure, and it costs nothing. Second, what is one new client worth over their lifetime? A firm whose average client is worth £6,000 can justify a very different spend from one whose average sale is £300.
Monthly retainer, fixed project or hourly: which pricing model should you choose?
Choose a retainer when the work is ongoing and compounding, a fixed project when the scope has an end, and an hourly rate only when you need a specific problem solved and you already know what it is.
| Monthly retainer | Fixed project | Hourly or day rate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical UK figure | £500 to £5,000 a month | £1,000 to £10,000 | £50 to £150 an hour |
| Best for | Ongoing visibility building | Audits, migrations, rebuilds | A defined problem, a second opinion |
| What you are buying | Continuous progress | A deliverable | Time |
| Risk you carry | Paying for months where little moves | Scope stops before results start | The clock rewards slow work |
| Cancel terms | Usually 30 days | On completion | None |
| Suits a buyer who | Wants it handled | Has someone to execute | Knows exactly what they need |
The SE Ranking survey found 45% of agencies globally set hourly rates between $50 and $100, and 60% charge below $100 an hour. UK freelance rates sit broadly in that band, agencies higher.
The model matters more than most buyers think, because it decides what behaviour gets rewarded. Hourly billing rewards hours. Fixed-project billing rewards finishing. A retainer priced against an agreed measure rewards the measure. Ask which one your provider uses and you learn what their reports will be full of.
What do UK SEO freelancers charge per hour and per day?
UK SEO freelancers commonly charge £40 to £100 an hour, or roughly £300 to £700 a day, with experienced specialists in technical SEO or digital PR charging above that.
The range is wide because the label covers very different people. Someone two years in, doing on-page work and reporting, sits near the bottom. Someone who has run recovery projects for a decade and can diagnose a traffic collapse from a crawl sits at the top, and is usually cheaper per outcome despite being dearer per hour.
Day rates are the better unit for most buyers. An hour is not long enough to do anything meaningful to a website, so hourly engagements tend to fragment into reporting and email. A day gets a real piece of work finished.
Worth knowing: freelance rates and agency rates are not comparable line for line. A freelancer’s day rate is their time. An agency’s retainer includes tooling, quality control, cover when someone is ill, and usually more than one person’s attention. Neither is better value in the abstract.
What is an SEO setup fee, and is it legitimate?
A setup fee, commonly £500 to £2,500, covers the audit, keyword and competitor research, technical fixes and strategy that have to happen before monthly work can begin. It is legitimate when it produces something you keep, and a red flag when it does not.
A legitimate setup fee produces artefacts
A technical audit, a keyword and competitor analysis, a topical map, a prioritised fix list, tracking that works. Those survive the relationship. You can hand them to someone else.
An illegitimate setup fee produces access
The provider sets up their own tools, connects their own tracking, and if you leave you leave with nothing. Ask what you own at the end of the setup period before you pay it.
Setup work also varies enormously. A three-page brochure site needs very little. A ten-year-old ecommerce site with three migrations behind it can absorb weeks before a single new page is worth publishing. A provider quoting the same setup fee to both is not looking.
What do individual SEO services cost on the UK market?
Bought separately rather than inside a retainer, the common UK market bands look like this.
| Service | Typical UK market price | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO audit | £500 to £3,000 | Site size, platform, migration history |
| Full audit with strategy | £1,500 to £5,000 | Whether a topical map and competitor analysis are included |
| Link building, per placement | £150 to £800 | Publication authority and whether it is earned or paid |
| Digital PR campaign | £2,000 to £10,000 | Whether it includes original research |
| SEO content, per page | £150 to £600 | Research depth, sector regulation, word count |
| Topical map | £500 to £3,000 | Breadth of the subject |
| Landing page optimisation | From £800 per page | Click Intelligence publishes this figure |
| Local citation clean-up | £200 to £800 one-off | Number of inconsistent listings |
What does an SEO audit cost on the UK market?
Between £500 and £3,000 for a technical audit, and £1,500 to £5,000 once strategy and competitor analysis are included. The gap between those two is the difference between a list of faults and a plan.
A cheap automated audit is a tool export with a logo on it. You can run the same tool yourself for the price of a monthly subscription. What you are paying a person for is the judgement about which twelve of the four hundred flagged issues actually matter for your site, and in what order. If you want that done properly, our SEO audit service is built around the ordering rather than the list.
What does link building cost, and what are you paying for?
Between £150 and £800 for a single placement, and £2,000 to £10,000 for a digital PR campaign, with the price tracking the authority of the publication and whether the link was earned or bought.
This is the line item where buyers get hurt most often. A £150 link is almost always paid, usually on a site that exists to sell links, and it carries risk that arrives later rather than now. A £600 placement on a genuine publication, earned because there was something worth covering, is a different asset entirely. We only do the second kind, which is why our earned link building services look expensive per link and cheap per outcome.
Ask any provider quoting for links two questions: which specific sites, and what happens if Google devalues them. A provider who will not name sites in advance is selling you a lottery ticket.
What does SEO content writing cost per page?
Between £150 and £600 a page in the UK, driven by research depth and sector regulation far more than by word count.
A 1,500-word page about a plumbing service and a 1,500-word page about a regulated financial product cost very different amounts to produce, because the second needs sourcing, compliance review and someone who understands the subject. Pricing content by the word encourages length rather than depth, which is the opposite of what earns rankings now.
Cheap content has become the most expensive line on this list, because thin mass-produced pages actively weaken a site. That is the argument in why pages drafted entirely by AI rarely earn the citation back, and it is the reason page count is a poor thing to buy.
What does SEO cost for a law firm, an accountancy practice or a dental clinic?
Regulated and high-value sectors run roughly 30% to 100% above the general market, commonly £1,500 to £6,000 a month, because the competition is denser, the content needs qualified review and the value of a single client justifies more spend from every competitor.
| Sector | Typical UK monthly band | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Accountancy practices | £1,000 to £4,000 | Dense, poorly differentiated, niche terms winnable |
| Law firms | £1,500 to £6,000 | Highest competition, practice-area content needs review |
| Dental practices | £800 to £3,000 | Treatment plus area terms, heavy review dependence |
| Healthcare providers | £1,000 to £4,000 | Content accuracy standards raise production cost |
| Financial advisers | £1,500 to £5,000 | Compliance review on every published claim |
| Estate and letting agents | £300 to £1,500 | Convert Digital publishes packages at £299, £799 and £1,500 a month plus VAT |
| Hotels and hospitality | £750 to £3,000 | Aggregators own the head terms, so spend goes to destination content |
| Ecommerce | £1,000 to £5,000 | Scales with catalogue size, not with turnover |
| Automotive | £600 to £2,500 | Service plus area terms, map pack decides most enquiries |
Property is the outlier and it is worth explaining. Estate and letting agency packages are published lower than most professional services, partly because the sector buys on volume and partly because branch-level local work is more tractable than national competition. It also remains one of the softest markets to compete in, which means the published band understates what a firm willing to invest can take.
There are roughly 30,000 accountancy and audit firms in the UK, and most describe themselves identically. That is why niche-led work usually beats head-term work in these sectors, and why the cost question and the strategy question cannot be separated.
How much does white label SEO cost the agency reselling it?
White label SEO commonly costs the reselling agency £250 to £1,500 a month per client, against a retail price of £500 to £3,000, which is where the reseller margin lives.
This is the most searched question on this page that almost nobody answers properly, and the reason is that most published guides are written for the end buyer rather than for the agency in the middle.
| What the reseller pays | What they typically charge | Working margin |
|---|---|---|
| £250 to £500 a month, basic local package | £500 to £1,000 | 50% to 60% |
| £500 to £900 a month, full service | £1,000 to £2,000 | 45% to 55% |
| £900 to £1,500 a month, competitive or multi-location | £1,800 to £3,000 | 40% to 50% |
Three things decide whether that margin survives contact with reality.
Who fields the client’s questions
An arrangement where the reseller handles all client communication looks cheaper and costs more, because the reseller absorbs hours nobody priced. One where the supplier joins client calls under the reseller’s brand costs more per month and less overall.
What happens when a result is missed
Ask before you sign, not after. The answer separates a supplier from a subcontractor.
Whether the reporting is yours
Reports carrying someone else’s tool branding tell your client exactly who is doing the work.
Web studios and agencies reselling search work will find the delivery side of this on our white label SEO, AEO and GEO services page.
In-house SEO hire or an outsourced consultancy: what does each really cost?
An in-house SEO hire costs roughly £45,000 to £70,000 all-in once salary, employment costs and tooling are counted, against £12,000 to £36,000 a year for an equivalent outsourced retainer. The comparison only favours hiring above a certain scale.
| In-house hire | Outsourced consultancy | |
|---|---|---|
| Salary or fee | £35,000 to £55,000 | £1,000 to £3,000 a month |
| Employment costs | Roughly 20% on top | None |
| Tooling | £200 to £500 a month | Included |
| Annual total | £45,000 to £70,000 | £12,000 to £36,000 |
| Breadth of skill | One person’s strengths | Technical, content and strategy covered |
| Cover when absent | None | Built in |
| Ramp-up | Three to six months | Weeks |
| Suits | £5m+ turnover, or search as the primary channel | Almost everyone below that |
The hidden cost of hiring is that SEO is three or four disciplines and one person is rarely strong at all of them. A brilliant technical SEO who cannot write, or a strong content lead who cannot read a crawl, leaves half the work undone at full salary.
The hidden cost of outsourcing is context. Nobody outside your business will ever understand it as well as someone inside it. The arrangement that usually works best below £5m is an outsourced programme with one internal owner who is not an SEO but does know the business.
What does SEO cost after a penalty or a traffic collapse?
Recovery work commonly costs £2,000 to £15,000 as a project, or three to six months of retainer at the upper end of your normal band, because diagnosis has to happen before any of the usual work is worth starting.
Recovery is priced differently for a reason. Ordinary SEO adds. Recovery has to first find out what went wrong, which can be a manual action, an algorithmic devaluation, a migration fault, a link profile problem or simply a competitor doing better work. Those have different fixes and the wrong one wastes a quarter.
Expect the first phase to be diagnostic and to produce a finding rather than a ranking. Any provider quoting a recovery timeline before they have looked at the data is guessing. The technical and on-page work is usually where recovery starts, because a site that cannot be read properly cannot recover regardless of content.
⚠Some traffic collapses are not recoverable to the previous level, because the previous level depended on something that no longer exists. A good diagnosis says so.
Is cheap SEO worth it, and what are you actually buying at £99 a month?
At £99 a month you are buying about an hour of someone’s attention, usually spent generating a report. It is not a smaller version of real SEO. It is a different product.
Work through the arithmetic. £99 a month, at a UK freelance rate of £40 to £100 an hour, buys between one and two and a half hours. In that time a person can run a tool, format the output and send it. They cannot audit a site, write a page, build a citation set or earn a mention.
So the money has to come from somewhere else, and it usually comes from automation and volume: the same template applied to hundreds of clients, automated directory submissions, spun content, and links from sites that exist to sell links. None of it is malicious. It is simply what £99 buys.
The SE Ranking survey found 30% of agencies globally charge under $500 a month, so cheap SEO is not rare. It is a genuine market segment. The question is not whether it exists but whether it does anything.
What does cheap SEO cost you to undo?
Undoing cheap SEO commonly costs more than the original engagement, because you pay to remove the work, then pay again to do it properly, then wait out the recovery.
Toxic link profiles
Links bought from link farms have to be identified and disavowed, and the site then has to rebuild authority from a lower base. That is a recovery project, priced as one.
Thin duplicated content
Hundreds of near-identical pages published to cover keyword variants have to be consolidated and redirected. Every consolidation is a decision, and decisions cost time.
Ownership problems
Profiles, accounts, tracking and content sitting in the provider’s name. Some of it can be recovered. Some of it cannot, and gets rebuilt.
There is a fourth that is harder to price: the year. A business that spent twelve months on £99 a month did not stand still, it fell behind competitors who spent that year building. You cannot buy the year back at any rate.
How long before SEO spend pays back?
Expect early movement inside twelve weeks, competitive positions between month six and month twelve, and payback on the total spend somewhere between month nine and month eighteen for most UK SMEs.
Cost and time are the same question asked twice, and separating them is how buyers end up disappointed. A £500 a month engagement is not a cheaper version of a £2,000 one. It is a slower one, and slower changes the arithmetic, because you pay for more months before anything compounds.
That is the strongest argument against the bottom of the market. Twenty-four months at £500 costs more than twelve months at £1,000 and usually delivers less, because momentum matters and the smaller engagement never reaches it.
How do you measure the return on SEO spend?
Track non-branded clicks filtered to the United Kingdom, enquiries logged against source, and the pipeline value of those enquiries. Rankings and impressions are leading indicators, not returns.
The filters do the work. Branded searches flatter every report they appear in, and an unfiltered country setting can show a position that produces nothing where your buyers are. A ranking that fails the country filter is not a ranking you can spend against.
Then attach value. If you know an enquiry is worth £600 on average and search produced eleven of them last month, the retainer is answerable arithmetic rather than a matter of faith. Most disputes about whether SEO is working are actually disputes about whether anyone wrote the enquiries down.
Set the measure before the engagement starts, in writing, with the review date agreed. Any provider who resists that is telling you something.
Two-minute band finder
Which UK price band should your quotes be landing in? Five questions.
1. What is your annual turnover?
2. How many locations or areas do you need to rank in?
3. How competitive is your sector?
4. What condition is your website in?
5. Can anyone internal publish content or make site changes?
Your likely band
Rather skip the questions?
What should you do when one quote is a wild outlier?
Ask the outlier to explain the gap in deliverables rather than in price. A quote that is triple the others should be able to name what it includes that they do not, and a quote at a third should be able to say what it leaves out.
Outliers are not automatically wrong. A high one may be scoped for a migration the others missed. A low one may be a genuine specialist with no overheads. But both should survive one question: what specifically am I getting for the difference?
Watch for the two answers that end the conversation. “We use a proprietary system” describes nothing. “We can match their price” means the first number was invented, and if the price was invented, so was the scope.
A practical move: send all three providers the same one-page brief with your site, your target queries and your target areas, and ask each to price against it. Most quote variance is scope variance in disguise, and a shared brief collapses it.
When should a business spend nothing on SEO yet?
When the site cannot convert the traffic it already has, when nobody has looked at Search Console, or when the business does not yet know which service it wants to be known for. In all three cases SEO spend arrives too early and wastes.
This is the section most pricing guides leave out, so it is worth being direct.
- If your site takes six seconds to load and has no clear enquiry route, more visitors will not help. Fix the route first. That is a web build question, not a search one.
- If nobody has opened Search Console, you may already be ranking for things nobody expected, and the free answer is sitting there. Look before you buy.
- If the business is still deciding what it sells, SEO will optimise you towards whatever you said last, which is expensive to change later. Positioning first.
- If your enquiries all come from referral and you are at capacity, you may not need this at all. Some businesses do not.
None of that is a reason never to invest. It is a reason to invest in the right order, and a provider who tells you to come back in three months is usually worth returning to.
What do you need to give a provider for an accurate quote?
Give them the site, the services you want to be found for, the areas you serve, your Search Console access and an honest number for what a client is worth. Everything else is guesswork dressed as a proposal.
Without Search Console, any quote is priced from the outside, which means it is priced for the average case rather than yours. Providers who quote without asking for it are pricing a package, not your problem.
Be ready with: your top three competitors, whether you have had SEO work before and what happened, any migrations or redesigns in the last two years, and whether you have anyone internal who can publish content. That last one changes the scope more than anything else on the list.
When you have those to hand, a scoped SEO quote takes very little time to produce, and it will be a number rather than a range.
What else changes the number on the invoice?
Three things that rarely appear in the headline price and routinely change what you pay: VAT, the notice period, and who owns the work.
VAT
Most UK agencies quote excluding VAT, most freelancers below the registration threshold quote including it because there is none to add. A £1,000 quote and a £1,000 quote can be £200 apart. Ask which it is before you compare two numbers.
The notice period
A twelve-month minimum term is common and it changes the real cost of a wrong decision. Six months into a bad engagement, a thirty-day notice period costs you one more month and a twelve-month term costs you six. Price that risk into the comparison, because it is real money.
Who owns what
Content, profiles, tracking accounts and reporting should be in your name from day one. Where they are not, the exit cost is hidden inside the monthly fee, and you only meet it when you leave. This is the single most expensive term in most SEO contracts and almost nobody reads it.
A fourth, less common but worth asking about: what happens to the price when scope changes. A provider who re-quotes every time you launch a service is charging by the deliverable while calling it a retainer.
This page deliberately carries market rates rather than ours, so it stays useful whoever you hire. True SEO Consultants Ltd publishes its own tiers separately.
Frequently asked questions
How much does SEO cost in the UK per month?
Most UK businesses pay between £500 and £5,000 a month, banded by turnover. Whito’s 2026 UK agency retainer research puts micro businesses under £100,000 turnover at £500 to £1,000 a month, medium businesses between £500,000 and £2m at £1,500 to £3,000, and businesses above £5m at £5,000 upward.
Why do American SEO price guides quote so much more?
Because they describe a different market. The SE Ranking survey of 260 agencies found 40% of US and Canadian agencies charge over $125 an hour, against 6% of European agencies. A UK buyer reading an American guide is reading real figures from a market with different rates.
Is local SEO cheaper than national SEO?
Usually yes, commonly £500 to £1,500 a month against £1,500 to £5,000, because the competitive set is smaller and the winning signals, profile, reviews and citations, are cheaper to build than the content depth national terms need.
What is a reasonable SEO setup fee?
Between £500 and £2,500 is normal. The test is not the amount but what you keep: a legitimate setup fee produces an audit, keyword and competitor research and a prioritised plan that survive the relationship. One that only produces access to the provider’s tools does not.
How much does SEO cost for a small business in the UK?
A small business turning over £100,000 to £500,000 typically spends £500 to £1,500 a month. A single-location local business sits at the lower end, and a business competing on national terms in a professional sector sits at the upper end or above it.
Is £99 a month SEO worth it?
At UK freelance rates of £40 to £100 an hour, £99 buys one to two and a half hours a month, which covers running a tool and sending a report. It is not a smaller version of a real programme, and the cost of undoing what cheap providers typically do usually exceeds what was spent.
Where this leaves you
The number in front of you is judgeable. Compare it against the turnover band, check the pricing model matches the work, ask what arrives in month one, and ask what you own if you leave. Four questions, and most quotes answer them badly.
True SEO Consultants Ltd works from Startup Stiwdio, University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN, under company number 16563516. We work with businesses across the UK from that Cardiff base and onboard clients worldwide through a fully remote digital onboarding and delivery process, so these bands apply whether you trade in Cardiff, Manchester or London. We bill against agreed KPIs rather than hours, with no minimum term and thirty days’ notice.
UK market rates, Cardiff based, worldwide remote
Bring the quotes you have already had
The first thirty minutes cost nothing. We read the quotes with you, tell you which band your business actually sits in, and say plainly where the numbers do not add up. You are under no obligation to buy anything from us at the end of it.
