How much does SEO cost in the UK?

Most UK small businesses pay between £500 and £2,000 a month for SEO from an agency, and local-only work starts from around £300 a month, according to Whito's 2026 UK SEO pricing study. Freelancers tend to sit lower than agencies. Our own plans start at £99 a month for a small, fixed amount of work. The table below shows what each level of spend realistically buys.

Monthly spend	What it usually buys	Who it suits
Under £100	A small fixed scope: a few tracked searches, one article, basic fixes. Or, from the wrong provider, automated reports and bought links.	A local business with a healthy site and a short list of searches
£100 to £500	A handful of hours: local work, Business Profile, an article or two a month, light technical fixes	Local trades and services selling within a few towns
£500 to £1,500	Ongoing content, technical maintenance, local work and proper reporting	Most small businesses selling regionally or in a niche
£1,500 to £3,000	Serious content production, active technical work, some outreach, a strategist who knows your market	Businesses where search is the main source of customers
£3,000 and up	National or ecommerce campaigns, several people, PR built in	Competitive national markets

The bands are our reading of the UK market for small and medium businesses, not a quote. Scope varies so much that two proposals at the same price can contain very different amounts of work, which is why the rest of this article is about what sits inside the fee.

Our SEO prices

We price by how many searches we target and how many articles we publish. Every plan includes the monthly report and our AI Visibility Monitor, which checks what assistants like ChatGPT say when asked about your trade.

Plan	What you get	Price
Local	5 keywords, 1 article a month	£99 a month
Growth	15 keywords, 4 articles a month, plus schema, llms.txt and entity work	£249 a month
Authority	30 keywords, 8 articles a month, plus a quarterly strategy review	£495 a month

Prices are plus VAT. There is no setup fee. Plans run for a three month minimum, then carry on month to month, so you can stop if it is not working for you. Every position in the report comes from real Google results in a stated location, never Search Console's average, which tends to make a site look higher than it is.

We do not promise rankings or leads. Nobody controls Google's results. What we commit to is the work on the plan every month, with a report you can check.

Why SEO quotes vary so much

Ask five UK agencies what SEO costs and you will get five different numbers with no easy way to compare them. SEO is a label stuck on about five separate jobs, and the price depends on which of them you are buying and how much of each.

Most proposals include some of the jobs below. Very few include all of them, and the ones that claim to at a low price are usually doing each one thinly.

Technical work

Making sure search engines can crawl the site, understand it and rank it: site speed, mobile behaviour, indexing, structured data, internal linking, fixing errors and broken redirects. This is front-loaded. There is usually a chunk of work in the first two months, then maintenance.

Content

Writing and improving pages so they answer the questions you want to be found for. This is where most of the ongoing hours go, and it is the part that does most of the moving. A month with no new or improved content is usually a month where nothing changed.

Digital PR and links

Earning mentions and links from other websites. It is the slowest and most expensive part, and the hardest to do honestly. If a proposal promises large numbers of links cheaply, they are being bought from places you would not want your business's name next to.

Local

Google Business Profile, local listings, reviews, location pages. For a business that sells within a fifty mile radius, this often brings more enquiries per pound than anything else on the list.

Reporting and strategy

Someone senior looking at what happened, deciding what to do next, and explaining it to you in language you can act on. Cheap SEO usually cuts this first, which is why so many people get a monthly PDF full of graphs and no decisions.

What cheap SEO gets you

We sell a £99 plan, so we should be straight about this. Low cost SEO can work when the scope is small and written down: five searches, one article a month, the basic fixes, a report. For a plumber or a physio who sells across a few towns, that is often enough to make steady progress on the searches that matter to them.

What £99 a month will not buy, from us or anyone else:

• A competitive national campaign. Ranking for "accountant" across the UK takes far more content and links than a small budget pays for.
• Link building. Earned links take hours of outreach. Cheap links are bought, and bought links are a risk to your site.
• A strategist on call. At this level you get a report and a plan, not a monthly meeting.

The cheap offers to avoid look different. They promise page one, quote "hundreds of backlinks", lock you into a twelve month contract, or cannot name a single thing they will deliver in month one. At the bottom of the market the sums only add up if the work is automated or sent offshore, and you usually find that out around month six.

Cheap SEO spread too thinly is often the expensive option. Six months of hours that never finish anything leaves you at month seven with no results and nothing built. The same money spent on a small, clear scope, or a concentrated three month push, usually leaves you with pages that keep working.

Monthly retainer, audit or one-off project?

Most UK SEO is sold as a monthly retainer, because the work is ongoing. Two other ways to buy it are worth knowing about.

One-off audits run from a few hundred pounds to a few thousand, and suit a business with someone in-house to act on the findings. Our Full Audit Suite is £295, credited in full against any project over £995.

Project work, such as a site migration or a batch of new pages, is priced as a fixed piece and is a sensible way to start before committing to a retainer.

The question that shows up a bad proposal

Ask this: what will you do in month one, and what will I see at the end of it?

A good answer is specific. An audit, a fixed list of technical issues, two new pages targeting named searches, the Business Profile filled in properly. A weak answer talks about optimisation, monitoring and ongoing improvements without naming a single deliverable.

Three more worth asking:

• Who does the work? The person in the meeting, or someone else entirely? There is nothing wrong with a team, but you should know who is writing your content.
• What do you need from me? Anyone who says "nothing" is not planning to write about your business in any depth. Good SEO needs your knowledge.
• What happens if I leave? Do you keep the content, the pages, the accounts? The answer should be yes to all three.

And one clear warning sign: anybody who guarantees a position in Google. Nobody controls the rankings, so nobody can guarantee them. In our experience it is the most reliable sign you are talking to a salesperson rather than someone who does the work.

How long before it pays for itself

For most small businesses, expect early movement at around three months, meaningful change between six and nine, and the compounding benefit after a year. New websites and competitive sectors sit at the slower end. None of that is guaranteed, and anyone who gives you a date for page one is guessing.

To judge whether a fee makes sense, work out what one new customer is worth to you over their lifetime. If a customer is worth £3,000, one extra customer a month would justify a serious budget. If a customer is worth £150, the sums point to a much smaller spend, probably focused on local visibility rather than a full campaign.

Where AI search changes the sums

More people now ask an assistant for a recommendation instead of scrolling a results page. That does not replace search spending, but it does change what the work has to cover. Being quotable matters: clear answers under clear headings, structured data, consistent details across the web, and a site an AI can read without guessing.

Most of this overlaps with good traditional SEO. The proposals to be wary of are the ones charging extra for "AI optimisation" as a separate product, when in practice it should be part of how the work is done anyway. We fold it into SEO and GEO as one job rather than two invoices.

Common questions

How much does SEO cost a month for a small business?

Most UK small businesses spend between a few hundred pounds and £1,500 a month. A local business with a healthy site can do well at the lower end. If you sell nationally against big competitors, expect to spend more. Our plans are £99, £249 and £495 a month plus VAT.

Can I do SEO myself?

Parts of it, yes, and you should. Nobody knows your customers' questions better than you. Writing useful pages, keeping your Business Profile fresh and collecting reviews are all within reach. The technical work and the strategy are where outside help earns its fee.

Should SEO be tied into my website build?

Ideally yes. Structure, speed, headings and schema are cheaper to get right during the build than to retrofit afterwards. A site launched without them starts every campaign behind.

Want a straight answer for your business?

We will look at your site, your market and what a customer is worth to you, then tell you what we think is sensible to spend and what we would do first. The first look is a free opportunity audit. No guarantees, no jargon. Ask us, see our SEO plans, or read more about how we run search, social and content together.