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Nobody publishes this, which is why you are reading a blog post about it instead of a price list. So here is the short answer before anything else: for a UK small business, monthly SEO work generally costs between £500 and £1,500 a month. Underneath that you are buying a few hours of one person's week. Above it you are usually buying a small team, and a bigger scope to keep them busy.
That range is wide enough to be almost useless on its own, and the width is the real subject of this article. Two businesses can pay £800 a month and get completely different things, and neither of them has been cheated. What separates them is scope, seniority and how the month is actually spent.
The three price bands, and what each one buys
Under £500 a month
This is one person, part time, usually a freelancer with several other clients. At £300 a month you are buying roughly two to four hours of somebody's attention, which is enough to keep a small site tidy and slowly improve a handful of pages. It is not enough to move a competitive term, and anyone promising that it is has either misunderstood the work or is counting on you not checking.
It is a perfectly reasonable place to start if your market is small and local. It is a bad place to be if three well funded competitors are working the same terms, because you will spend a year finding out that you were outspent rather than outthought.
£500 to £1,500 a month
Most small business SEO in Britain lives here. It buys a few days of work a month: research, changes to the pages that matter, writing, and somebody reading the numbers and deciding what happens next. At the top of this band you should also be getting new pages written rather than just existing ones improved.
This is the band where the question stops being how much and starts being who. A senior person doing three days is worth more than a junior doing eight, and the price will not tell you which you are getting.
£1,500 and above
Now you are paying for a team, or for a specialist working nearly full time on you. It makes sense when there is enough to do: a large site, several locations, a shop with thousands of products, or a market where the top three results are all agencies working hard. It does not make sense as a way of trying harder at a small site. There is a point past which more money buys more activity rather than more result.
What a month actually contains
It helps to see where a monthly fee goes, because the shape is fairly consistent whoever you buy from. Roughly a fifth of it is research and deciding what to do. Around a third is on-page and technical work, which means changing your actual website. The largest slice is usually writing. What is left is reading the numbers and working out whether last month was worth it.
Hourly, monthly, or by the project
UK SEO is sold three ways and they suit different situations.
- Monthly retainer. The common one, and the right shape for work that compounds. Search results move over months, not weeks, so a month is the smallest unit in which anything can be judged.
- By the project. Sensible for a defined piece of work with an end: a migration, a technical repair, a set of pages written once. Ask what happens afterwards, because a project with no follow-through often decays.
- By the hour. Rare now, and usually a sign that neither side has agreed what the work is. It also rewards slowness, which is a strange thing to build into a contract.
One thing worth knowing about hourly rates: an agency will quote you a rate that has to cover the person doing the work, the person managing them, the office and the sales cost of finding you. A sole trader's rate covers one person. That is most of the difference between £45 an hour and £150 an hour, and neither figure tells you who is better.
Why almost nobody publishes a price
You will have noticed that finding this out took effort. There are two reasons, and only one of them is respectable.
The respectable one: scope genuinely varies, and a bad published price can misprice both sides. A shop with four thousand products and a plumber with six pages are not the same job.
The other one: a price you only hear after a discovery call is a price set partly by what you said on the call. If a supplier learns your turnover, your funding and how badly you need this before they quote, the quote is about you as much as it is about the work. That is legal, it is common, and it is worth naming.
A price that depends on how you answer a discovery call is a price set by how much you look like you can pay.
How to tell a fair quote from a bad one
Price is the last thing to look at, not the first. Five questions separate a fair quote from an expensive one, whatever the number says.
- What arrives each month, in writing, before the work starts?
- Who does the work, by name, and are they the person you have been speaking to?
- How long am I tied in, and what does leaving involve?
- Is the fee separate from any advertising spend, on the invoice?
- What happens to the pages, the content and the accounts if we stop?
The last one catches more people than the others combined. Work you paid for should stay yours when the relationship ends, and it is much easier to establish that at the start than to argue about it later.
What we charge, since we are asking you to trust the rest
It would be a strange article about hidden prices that hid its own. Ours are on the page and they do not move after a phone call.
| Plan | A month | Roughly what it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | £445 | The smallest month that still moves something |
| Growth | £950 | Working depth: more pages, more writing, quarterly review |
| Harvest | £2,250+ | Weekly cadence, scope agreed page by page |
No minimum term, no notice period, and no percentage of any advertising spend. What is quoted is what is invoiced.
The reason we can print those is that there is no contract behind them. If a month is not worth what it cost, the next one does not happen, so we have to earn each one rather than hold anybody to a year of them. That is also the honest answer to the price question underneath the price question: what protects you is not paying less, it is being able to leave.