What SEO costs in the UK,
according to everyone selling it.
We read every page ranking for that question and wrote down what each one charges. The ranges disagree by a factor of sixty, which tells you more about the question than any single number would.
Nine publishers, checked on one day, each one linked
Every page ranking for this question, and what it says
Captured from the live UK results on one day. Each publisher is linked so you can check whether their page still says this, because pages change and a price with no date attached is not a fact.
| Publisher | What they publish |
|---|---|
| whitehat-seo.co.uk | £500 to £20,000+ a month |
| thenurtur.com | £300 to £10,000 a month |
| wolfstone.digital | £300 to £10,000 or more a month |
| seoworks.co.uk | £750 to £9,000 a month |
| rubikdigital.co.uk | £1,000 to £5,000 a month |
| tjcreative.co.uk | From £500, upwards of £5,000 a month |
| redeagle.tech | £500 to £5,000+ a month |
| consultico.co.uk | £500 to £2,000 a month |
| targetedseo.co.uk | £1,200 to £3,000 plus VAT |
The spread is the finding
The lowest floor published is £300 and the highest ceiling is £20,000, from pages answering the same question in the same month, in the same country, for the same service. That is a factor of about sixty.
They are not disagreeing about the price of one thing. They are describing different things and calling them all SEO. Three hundred pounds a month buys somebody looking at your titles and writing a blog post. Twenty thousand buys a team, a content operation and a budget for getting other websites to mention you. Both are honestly priced for what they are.
Which means the question you are actually asking cannot be answered by a number. It can only be answered by a scope, and any page that gives you a figure without asking what you are trying to rank for is quoting its own price list at a stranger.
What a smaller budget can and cannot buy
This is the version of the question most people are really asking, and the survey above is not much help with it, because the top of every range is priced for companies with marketing departments. Here is the honest shape of the bottom half.
Under £500 a month
Realistically this buys attention rather than work: a few hours of someone's time, usually spent on the parts of a website that are quick to change. It can be worth it if your site has never been looked at. It will not move a competitive term, and an agency that tells you it will at this price is either not costing its own time or not planning to spend much of it.
£500 to £1,500 a month
Enough to produce something real each month and to fix what is already there. This is where most small UK businesses sit, and it works when the terms you are chasing are narrow and local. It does not work when the pages already ranking have dozens of other websites linking to them, because no amount of writing closes that gap.
Above £1,500 a month
You are now paying for the off-site half as well, which is the part nobody enjoys pricing and the part that decides most competitive results. If a proposal at this level does not mention getting other websites to reference you, ask what the money is doing.
Whichever band you are in, the number that decides whether it works is not your budget. It is the gap between your site and the ones already ranking, and that is checkable before you spend anything. The next section is how.
The one number that decides most of the price
Search results are won on two things: what is on the page, and how many other websites reference it. The first is work anybody can quote for. The second is the one that makes an engagement expensive or impossible, and it is the one least often discussed in a proposal, because it is the part an agency cannot promise.
Search your term, privately
Use a private window so your own history does not shape it, and set the country if you are not in it. Write down the first five results that are not adverts and not directories.
Count who links to them
Any backlink tool with a free tier will show the number of referring domains for a page or a site. What you want is the middle value across those five, not the biggest one.
Count your own
The same number for your own domain. Most small business websites have between zero and a handful, and there is nothing wrong with that. Ours was one when we started, which is published on our own case study.
Compare, and price accordingly
If the middle value is close to yours, the term is winnable on writing alone and should be priced as a writing job. If it is far above yours, the difference is the actual work, it is off-site, and it is the expensive half. A quote that ignores this is a quote for half the job.
This is worth twenty minutes before any call, with us or anybody else. It turns 'how much does SEO cost' into 'how much does this term cost', which is a question that has an answer.
Three ways to pay for the same work
Most of the confusion about price is really confusion about model. The same scope costs the same to deliver under all three; what changes is who carries the risk when it does not work.
| Model | How it works | Suits you when | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | A fixed sum each month for an agreed amount of work | Predictable, and the only model that suits ongoing work like keeping pages current | You pay the same in the month nothing happens. Most of the survey above is priced this way, which is why the ranges are monthly. |
| Per page or per project | A fixed price for a defined piece of work, delivered once | You can buy one, watch what it does for a quarter, and stop. Nothing renews by itself. | It does not cover the off-site half, which is not a one-off. Suits businesses testing whether search is their channel at all. |
| Linked to results | Some or all of the fee depends on an agreed outcome | The risk sits with the agency, which concentrates the mind | Only honest when the outcome is defined tightly and measured by something you can see. Very few UK agencies offer it, and the ones that do usually attach a floor. |
Priced per page, and we will tell you when not to buy
We price per page rather than per month, so you can buy one, watch what it does, and stop if it does nothing. Nothing renews on its own.
What we will not do is name a retainer before looking at whether your terms can be won. That number would be a guess dressed up as a quote, and the check that replaces it is the referring-domain comparison above, which takes us about twenty minutes and happens before any price is discussed.
If that check says the terms you want are held by pages with far more websites linking to them than you could realistically close, we say so and we do not take the work. We publish our own search numbers monthly, including the months nothing moves, which is the same standard we are asking you to hold us to.
This is not the page for you if
What people ask alongside this
The first four are the questions Google itself lists against this search. The rest come up on calls.
How we build the pages this pays for is on the SEO and AI search page. The questions worth asking any agency before you hand over a budget are in choosing an SEO agency, including the two we fail. If you would rather we ran the gap check on your own terms and sent it over, that is the free audit. And our own search numbers, published monthly from a dated pull, are in the case study.