What UK SEO costs right now
The most useful recent figure I've found comes from Whito, who recorded the monthly prices UK SEO providers publish on their own websites. Across 45 published prices in June 2026, the median was £799 a month.
Treat that as a rough guide, not "the market rate". It only includes providers who put a price on their website, which is a particular slice of the market. Most consultants and agencies quote after they've looked at your site, so they don't show up in figures like this at all. It's a small sample too.
Still, it's a useful sense check. If someone quotes you a fraction of that for "full SEO", it's worth asking what's actually being done each month.
What I charge, and why it's a range
My ongoing work typically costs between £500 and £3,000+ a month. Where you land depends on scope, the size of your site and how competitive your market is.
I don't quote off a price list. I scope every engagement with a proper audit first, so you know exactly what the money covers before you commit to anything. And there are no lock in contracts: it's monthly rolling.
What pushes the price up
The size of your site
A 20 page brochure site and an online shop with 15,000 products are different jobs. Bigger sites mean bigger crawls, more templates to fix and far more pages that can go wrong, especially once filters and faceted navigation start creating URLs of their own.
How competitive your market is
Ranking a local trades business in one town isn't the same fight as ranking an online retailer nationally against household names. The tougher the competition, the more content, technical work and link building it takes to move.
How much gets done for you
Some clients want strategy and recommendations their own team can act on. Others want the work done: the fixes implemented, the content written, the outreach run. The more hands on it is, the higher the monthly figure.
The state the site is in
A site with years of technical debt, a messy past migration or pages cannibalising each other needs a lot of fixing before it can grow. That front loaded work costs more in the early months.
Who's actually doing the work
With some providers you meet a senior person at the pitch and a junior does the work. Experience costs more. It's also usually the difference between a report full of warnings and a plan that fixes the thing that's actually holding you back.
Freelancer, agency or a £200 package?
A freelancer normally costs less than an agency for the same work, because there's no account manager layer and fewer overheads built into the price. You also deal directly with the person doing the work.
An agency makes more sense if you need lots of disciplines under one roof. I only do SEO, so if you want someone running your PPC, social and email as well, I'm not your person.
And yes, you can find SEO for £200 a month on Fiverr. You'll get what you pay for. At that price there simply isn't time for anyone to look properly at your site, let alone fix it.
What you should get for the money
Whatever you pay, you should be able to point at three things. A proper audit of where your site stands. A prioritised plan where every recommendation names a specific URL, a specific change and what's expected to happen. And regular reporting that tells you what was done, what moved, what didn't and what's next.
If you can't say where your money went last month, that's the problem, whatever the invoice says.
Red flags before you sign
Guaranteed rankings. SEO takes time. Anyone promising page one in a month is either having you on or targeting keywords nobody searches for.
Long lock in contracts. A provider who's confident in their work doesn't need to tie you in for 12 months.
Links sold by the bucket. "50 links a month" usually means quantity over relevance. One link from a site your customers actually read is worth more than a pile from sites nobody visits.
Reports with no actions in them. Rankings charts with no mention of what was done, or what's next, tell you very little about what you're paying for.
So what should you budget?
If you're a small business with a simple site in a fairly quiet market, you'll usually sit towards the lower end of my range. A large online shop, or a business up against national brands, should expect to sit towards the top of it. Either way, a proper audit before anyone quotes is the only way to get a number that means anything.
SEO is ongoing, not a one off cost. Most sites see ranking improvements within three to six months, and some technical fixes can show results within weeks. If you want to know where your site would sit, book a free consultation and I'll give you an honest view, including whether SEO is worth the money for you right now.