SEO Service Cost in the UK: Prices Per Month, Per Hour and Per Project
SEO service cost in the UK runs from about £30 an hour for a freelancer to £20,000 a month for an enterprise agency, and almost every number in between is quoted somewhere as “typical”. This guide breaks the cost down the way an invoice does: per month, per hour, per project and per service, what each price actually buys, how agencies build a quote, what the US market charges for comparison, and a simple calculator you can run for your own business before you speak to anyone. The prices on this site are published in full, so you can check them against every range below.
- SEO service cost at a glance
- The four ways SEO services are priced
- SEO cost per month: what each tier includes
- SEO cost per hour: freelancer, consultant, agency
- SEO cost per project: audits, migrations, one-off work
- Cost by service: technical, content, links, local, ecommerce
- SEO cost calculator: estimate it yourself
- What moves the price up or down
- How an agency builds an SEO quote
- SEO service cost in the US, for comparison
- Cheap SEO: what £99 a month really buys
- Is the cost worth it? Working out the return
- What SEO services cost here
- The terms on an SEO quote, defined
- Frequently asked questions
SEO service cost at a glance
My honest one-line estimate is that most UK businesses buying professional SEO services pay between £500 and £3,000 a month, most freelancers charge between £30 and £80 an hour, most consultants charge between £75 and £150 an hour, and most agencies charge between £100 and £200 an hour or package the same time into monthly retainers. One-off projects such as a technical audit or a website migration are quoted as fixed fees, usually between £500 and £5,000 depending on the size of the site. Enterprise programmes for large ecommerce or national brands run from £5,000 to £20,000 a month and beyond. The table below is the same information laid out by pricing model. What the plans here include for those prices is set out on the expert SEO services page.
Where these figures come from: the price ranges on this page are BoltClicks’ own estimate of what the UK market typically charges. They are not taken from a published survey, and real quotes vary with the provider and the job. My own fees are listed separately further down.
| Pricing model | Typical UK range | Who uses it | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | £500 to £3,000 for most businesses; £3,000 to £20,000+ for larger sites | Agencies, consultants, most ongoing SEO | What the hours are spent on; whether reporting is written |
| Hourly rate | £30 to £80 freelancers; £75 to £150 consultants; £100 to £200+ agencies | Consultancy, audits, training, ad hoc fixes | Minimum hours, what counts as billable |
| Fixed project fee | £500 to £5,000 for audits and migrations; £2,000 to £15,000 for full builds | Audits, migrations, site launches, content batches | Scope creep, what happens after delivery |
| Performance or results-based | Varies; often a low base plus bonuses per ranking or lead | Rare among reputable providers | Nobody controls Google; bonuses reward the wrong things |
| Packages | £99 to £1,500 a month, tiered by deliverables | Small businesses, first-time buyers | Deliverables that look like work but move nothing |
Every range above hides a wide spread, because SEO is labour. The price is hours multiplied by a rate, plus whatever tools, links and content the plan needs. A £600 a month retainer at a £100 hourly rate is six hours of work a month; that is enough to run a local campaign properly and nowhere near enough to move a national ecommerce site. The rest of this guide is about matching the number to the work, so you can tell a fair quote from an expensive one and a cheap one from a worthless one.
The four ways SEO services are priced
SEO pricing models exist because different work needs different billing. A retainer suits ongoing optimisation, where the value comes from consistent monthly effort and compounding results. Hourly billing suits consultancy and one-off fixes, where the client wants advice or a specific problem solved. Project fees suit work with a clear start and end: an audit, a migration, a batch of pages. Packages suit buyers who want a fixed monthly price and a list of deliverables, and they are the model most often abused, because a list of deliverables can be padded with tasks that take minutes and change nothing.
Monthly retainers
The retainer is the standard for ongoing SEO because rankings are built over months and hold only if the work continues. A retainer covers a fixed amount of time each month, spread across technical work, content, links, local signals and reporting, and it should say in writing how that time is allocated. The fair test of a retainer is whether the hours implied by the fee at the provider’s rate match the work described. If a provider charges £1,500 a month and promises forty deliverables, either the rate is very low or the deliverables are very small.
Here, SEO packages start at £299 a month on the pricing page; the SEO monthly retainer levels start at £650.
Hourly rates
Hourly pricing is transparent but hard to budget, which is why most providers convert it into retainers or project fees. It is the right model for a technical SEO consultant fixing a specific problem, for training an in-house team, or for a second opinion on another agency’s proposal. Rates track experience and overhead: a freelancer working from home charges less than a consultant with a track record, who charges less than an agency with an office, account managers and sales staff.
Project fees
Fixed fees work for defined deliverables. A technical SEO audit is priced on the size and complexity of the site; a migration on the number of URLs and the platforms involved; a content batch on the number and depth of pages; a local SEO setup on the number of locations. A good project quote lists what is included, what is excluded, how many revisions are covered and what support exists after delivery, because the most common dispute is about what happens once the fee is paid. The SEO audit consultant page sets out what a full website audit covers and what it costs here.
Performance-based pricing
Paying for rankings or leads sounds fair and rarely is. Nobody controls Google’s results, so a provider that accepts the risk either prices it in heavily, targets easy keywords that mean nothing, or counts leads generously. The reputable version is a modest base fee with a bonus tied to agreed business metrics, and even that is uncommon. If a proposal guarantees rankings, the guarantee is the reason to walk away.
SEO cost per month: what each tier includes
Monthly cost is the number most businesses actually decide on, so it is worth being specific about what each tier buys. The tiers below are how the UK market generally shapes up; individual providers sit above or below them, and the work inside each tier matters more than the label.
| Monthly fee | Roughly what it buys | Right for |
|---|---|---|
| Any fee with no counted scope | Automated reports, a few directory listings, perhaps a blog post; very little human time | Nobody who expects results; sometimes a bridge for a brand-new site |
| £300 to £750 | 3 to 8 hours: Google Business Profile, on-page fixes on key pages, a review routine, basic reporting | Local businesses, sole traders, one-location firms in light competition |
| £750 to £1,500 | 8 to 15 hours: technical fixes, service and location pages, monthly content, citations and some links, written reporting | Established local and regional businesses, small ecommerce, professional services |
| £1,500 to £3,000 | 15 to 30 hours: full technical programme, content strategy and production, digital PR and link building, conversion work | Businesses competing regionally or nationally, multi-location firms, growing ecommerce |
| £3,000 to £7,500 | 30 to 75 hours: a team across technical, content, PR and analytics, international or multi-brand work | National brands, large ecommerce, competitive sectors such as finance, legal and travel |
| £7,500 to £20,000+ | Enterprise: dedicated team, engineering support, large-scale content and PR | Enterprise ecommerce, marketplaces, publishers, multinational sites |
Two things distort the table. First, geography: a London agency’s rate is often well above what a provider in the North, the Midlands or working remotely charges for the same output. Second, packaging: some providers bundle Google Ads management, web design or social media into the “SEO” fee, which makes their monthly number look expensive for SEO alone and cheap for the bundle. Always separate the channels before comparing.
Agencies buying SEO to resell under their own name are a separate market with its own pricing: the guide to white label SEO pricing covers per-client fees, markup and margin, and who owns the accounts.
SEO cost per hour: freelancer, consultant, agency
The hourly rate is the number underneath every other number, and it is the most useful one to know when comparing quotes. UK freelance SEO rates commonly sit between £30 and £80 an hour, with experienced specialists charging more; independent consultants with a track record charge £75 to £150; agencies charge £100 to £200 or more, with London and specialist technical agencies at the top of that range. Day rates for consultants typically run from £400 to £900.
| Provider | Typical UK hourly rate | What you get for the rate | Trade-offs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | £30 to £80 | One person doing the work directly, low overhead, flexible | Capacity limits, variable experience, no cover if they are ill or busy |
| Consultant or specialist | £75 to £150 | Senior experience, strategy and hands-on work from the same person | Limited availability; larger implementation may need your developers |
| Agency | £100 to £200+ | A team with specialists, process, tools and account management | Overhead in the price; the person selling is rarely the person doing |
| In-house hire | £25,000 to £60,000 a year salary plus tools and management | Full-time attention and institutional knowledge | Single skill set; hard to justify below a certain site size |
Rate alone tells you little. A £150 consultant who fixes the right problem in two hours costs less than a £40 freelancer who spends ten hours on the wrong one. The useful question is what the provider does with the hours: which pages, which technical problems, which links, which reports. Ask for a sample month broken down into tasks and time, and you will learn more than any rate card tells you.
SEO cost per project: audits, migrations and one-off work
Some SEO work is better bought once than rented monthly, and a fixed project fee is the honest way to price it. The most common projects and their typical UK costs:
| Project | Typical UK cost | What is included |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO audit | £500 to £3,000; more for large ecommerce | Crawl, indexation, speed, Core Web Vitals, structure, schema, duplicate content, prioritised fix list |
| Website migration or redesign support | £1,000 to £10,000 | Redirect mapping, pre and post-launch crawls, content and schema carried over, monitoring |
| Keyword research and content strategy | £400 to £2,500 | Keyword map, intent grouping, page plan, briefs |
| Local SEO setup | £300 to £1,500 per location | Google Business Profile build, citations, review setup, location page |
| Content production | £100 to £500 per article or page; £500 to £2,000 for long guides | Research, writing, on-page optimisation, internal links |
| Link building or digital PR | £100 to £500 per earned link; campaigns from £1,500 | Outreach, content assets, placements on relevant sites |
| SEO training | £500 to £1,500 a day | Workshops for in-house teams, process documentation |
| Penalty or recovery work | £1,000 to £5,000+ | Diagnosis, link disavow or content clean-up, reconsideration |
A fixed-price foundation project is often the right first purchase for a business that has never done SEO: an audit, the technical fixes and the on-page foundations delivered once, with a written scope, before anyone commits to a retainer. It answers the question “what is actually wrong” with a document rather than a sales call, and the retainer, if there is one, then starts from a clean base.
Cost by service: technical, content, links, local, ecommerce
“SEO services” is a bundle of different jobs with different costs, and the mix decides the price more than the tier does. A business whose site is technically sound but has no content needs a content-heavy plan; a site with strong content and no authority needs links and PR; a local trade needs the profile and reviews more than anything. Here is what each service costs on its own in the UK market, so you can see where a quote’s money is going.
Technical SEO
Audits from £500 to £3,000; ongoing technical retainers from £500 a month; large ecommerce technical programmes £2,000 to £10,000 a month. Includes crawl and indexation, site speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, site architecture, migrations and the developer tickets that fix them. Often the fastest-paying service because it removes the problems that hold everything else back.
On-page SEO and content
Page optimisation £50 to £200 per page; new service or location pages £150 to £600 each; blog articles £100 to £500; long guides and pillar content £500 to £2,000. Content strategy as a project £400 to £2,500. The spread reflects research depth, expertise and whether a specialist or a generalist writes it. Cheap content that says nothing costs more than expensive content that ranks.
Link building and digital PR
Earned links £100 to £500 each depending on the site’s authority; digital PR campaigns £1,500 to £10,000; monthly link programmes £500 to £3,000. Paid links and private networks are cheaper and are the reason sites lose rankings, so the price gap between earned and bought links is the price of safety.
Local SEO
Setup £300 to £1,500 per location; ongoing £300 to £1,500 a month for a single location, more for multi-location businesses. Covers the Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, location pages and local content. The full breakdown is in the separate guide to local SEO cost.
Ecommerce SEO
From £1,000 a month for small stores to £5,000 to £20,000 for large catalogues. Adds product and category optimisation, feed work, faceted navigation, internal linking at scale and international considerations. Priced on catalogue size and competition.
AI search visibility, GEO and AEO
Increasingly bundled into SEO rather than sold separately, because the foundations are shared. Where it is priced alone, expect £500 to £2,000 a month for visibility tracking and answer-ready content on top of an existing SEO programme. Paying twice for the same page is the thing to avoid.
SEO cost calculator: estimate it yourself
You do not need an online calculator to estimate SEO cost; you need three numbers and a table. The cost of any SEO plan is the hours it needs each month multiplied by the rate of whoever does it, plus the direct costs of content, links and tools. Estimate the hours from the work your site needs, pick the rate from the provider type, and add the extras.
| Step | How to estimate | Worked example: local service business | Worked example: small ecommerce |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Hours per month | Technical 1 to 5; profile and local 1 to 4; content 3 to 15; links and PR 2 to 10; reporting 1 to 2 | Technical 2, local 3, content 4, links 2, reporting 1 = 12 hours | Technical 5, content 10, links 6, reporting 2 = 23 hours |
| 2. Hourly rate | Freelancer £30 to £80; consultant £75 to £150; agency £100 to £200 | Specialist at £75 | Agency at £120 |
| 3. Direct costs | Content written outside the hours, earned links, paid tools you specifically want | £150 (one guest article) | £600 (two earned links) |
| Monthly estimate | Hours x rate + direct costs | 12 x £75 + £150 = £1,050 | 23 x £120 + £600 = £3,360 |
Run the same sums for any quote you receive. If a provider’s fee implies far fewer hours than the work they promise, the promises are inflated; if it implies far more hours than your site could possibly use, you are paying for overhead. The estimate is also a sanity check on the cheap packages below: £99 a month at any realistic rate is one hour of work, and one hour of SEO a month is a report, not a campaign.
What moves the price up or down
Six factors explain most of the spread between two quotes for what sounds like the same service.
| Factor | Pushes the cost up | Keeps it down |
|---|---|---|
| Competition | Finance, legal, insurance, travel, national ecommerce, London searches | Local trades, niche B2B, market towns, specialist products |
| Site size and condition | Thousands of URLs, old platforms, migrations, technical debt | A small, clean site on a modern platform |
| Scope | National or international targets, many locations, many services | One service area, a focused set of pages |
| Content needs | Expert or regulated content, large volumes, translation | Existing good content that needs optimising rather than replacing |
| Authority gap | New domain, no links, no reviews, competitors with strong profiles | An established brand with mentions and reviews to build on |
| Provider overhead | Central London office, large team, account management layers | Remote specialist, small team, the person selling does the work |
One factor that should not move the price is your budget. A provider who quotes after asking what you can afford is pricing the client, not the work. Ask for the plan first, priced on the work, and then decide whether the budget fits.
How an agency builds an SEO quote
Understanding the quote from the inside makes it easier to judge. A proper proposal starts with an audit of your site and your competitors, which produces a list of problems and opportunities. Those are grouped into workstreams, technical, content, authority, local, measurement, and each workstream is estimated in hours per month over the first three to six months. The hours are multiplied by the provider’s rate, direct costs are added, and the result is usually rounded into a retainer with a written scope of what is done in month one, month two and beyond. Reporting and a monthly review are built in. What a proposal should not do is quote a price before the audit, promise rankings, hide the hours, or bundle unrelated services into the fee.
When you compare proposals, compare the work, not the price. Line up the workstreams, the hours implied, the content volume, the link approach, the reporting format, the contract terms and who does the work. Two quotes of £1,200 a month can describe completely different months; two quotes of £800 and £2,000 can describe almost the same one. The written scope is the product; the price is what it costs.
SEO service cost in the US, for comparison
The US market prices higher across the board, partly because rates are higher and partly because the searches are more competitive. Freelance SEO rates commonly run from $50 to $150 an hour, agencies from $100 to $300, and monthly retainers for small and mid-sized businesses from $1,000 to $5,000, with enterprise programmes well above $10,000. Local SEO for a single location typically costs $300 to $2,000 a month. Project fees follow the same pattern, with technical audits from around $1,000 to $10,000 depending on site size. UK businesses buying from US agencies, or US businesses buying from UK providers, should compare on the work and the time zone rather than the currency; a remote specialist on UK hours working with US clients is often the best value in either market, and the international plans on this site are priced in dollars for exactly that reason.
Cheap SEO: what £99 a month really buys
Packages at £99, £149 or £199 a month exist because the number sells. At any realistic rate they buy one to three hours of work, so they consist of automated reports, a handful of directory submissions, template blog posts and, too often, links from networks that eventually cost the site its rankings. They are not always dishonest; some are a fair price for a single, narrow task such as maintaining a Google Business Profile. The problem is the expectation attached to them. A business that pays £99 a month and expects to outrank competitors paying £1,500 is not buying a bargain; it is buying a report. The cheaper honest option is a one-off foundation project, done once and done properly, and then deciding whether ongoing work is worth funding.
Is the cost worth it? Working out the return
SEO cost only makes sense against what a customer is worth. The arithmetic is short. Take the gross profit of an average customer, multiply by the number of extra customers a month the work could realistically bring at each stage, and compare that with the fee. A solicitor whose average client is worth £2,000 in profit needs one extra client a month to justify a £1,500 retainer; an ecommerce store with £20 margins needs seventy-five extra orders. That is why local services and professional firms are usually the best SEO investments and why low-margin ecommerce needs scale before it pays. Build in the timeline as well: most campaigns show early movement in three to six months and pay back over twelve, and a fee that looks high in month two can look cheap in month twelve when the same leads arrive without an ad spend behind them. The free PPC calculator on this site does the same sums for paid search, which is the usual comparison.
What SEO services cost here
The prices on this site are published in full, which is rare enough in this industry to be worth stating. SEO packages start at £299 a month on the pricing page: Basic £299 ($379), Standard £449 ($579) and Professional £649 ($829), each a counted scope of keywords and blog posts. Monthly retainers start at £650: SEO as a single channel on the Starter retainer is £650 a month in the UK and $800 internationally, covering technical fixes, on-page work, content, local signals and a written report every week. Two channels together, SEO plus Google Ads or SEO plus landing pages, are £1,200 a month or $1,500. The full stack, ads, SEO and pages from one operator, is from £4,000 a month or $5,000. A one-off SEO Foundation package, the audit and the technical and on-page foundations delivered once with a fixed price, is £850. Fees are paid monthly in advance, contracts run month to month with one month’s notice, everything is built in accounts you own, and nothing is priced as a percentage of ad spend. The same question answered by business size, with the trade-by-trade detail, is in the guide to SEO cost by business size; and the SEO services page explains what the monthly work contains.
The terms on an SEO quote, defined
SEO proposals are full of vocabulary that hides what is being bought, so here is a plain-English key to the words you will see on most quotes. Search engine optimisation is the work of making a website appear higher in the organic (unpaid) results of search engines; search engine results pages, or SERPs, are the pages of results themselves, and organic traffic is the visits that come from them. Keyword research finds the searches your customers make, with volume and difficulty, and maps them to pages; search intent is why someone searched. Technical SEO covers crawling, indexation, site speed, Core Web Vitals, site structure, structured data or schema markup, broken links and redirects. On-page SEO is the optimisation of individual pages: title tags, meta descriptions, headings, content and internal linking. Off-page SEO is authority built elsewhere: link building, digital PR, brand mentions, reviews and local citations. Domain authority is a third-party estimate of a site’s link strength; topical authority is depth of coverage on a subject. Local SEO is visibility for location-based searches through the Google Business Profile, citations and reviews; national SEO, international SEO and ecommerce SEO describe scope rather than different disciplines. Ranking factors are the signals search engines use; keyword rankings are your positions for tracked searches; conversion rate is the share of visitors who enquire or buy. AI Overviews, AI Mode and the answer engines are the generative layer of search, and AI visibility or generative engine optimisation is being cited inside them. Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 are the free measurement tools every honest report is built on. Monthly reporting should mean a written document, not a dashboard login; an account manager is the person between you and whoever does the work, and the price includes them. When a quote uses these words, ask which pages, which hours and which numbers they refer to.
Frequently asked questions
How much does SEO service cost per month in the UK?
Most businesses pay between £500 and £3,000 a month. Local businesses commonly pay £300 to £1,500, regional and national businesses £1,500 to £5,000, and enterprise sites £5,000 to £20,000 or more. The fee is essentially hours multiplied by a rate plus direct costs, so the work behind it matters more than the number.
How much does SEO cost per hour?
UK freelancers commonly charge £30 to £80 an hour, consultants £75 to £150 and agencies £100 to £200 or more. Day rates for consultants run from around £400 to £900. In the US the equivalent ranges are roughly $50 to $150 for freelancers and $100 to $300 for agencies.
How much does SEO cost for a small business?
Typically £300 to £1,500 a month in the UK, depending on competition and how much of the site needs building. A one-off foundation project of £500 to £1,500 is often the better first step. The separate small-business guide on this site goes trade by trade.
Is there an SEO cost calculator?
The most reliable calculator is the one in this guide: estimate the hours your site needs each month across technical, content, links, local and reporting, multiply by the provider’s hourly rate, and add direct costs for content and links. Online calculators do the same sum with assumptions you cannot see.
What is the cheapest way to buy SEO?
A fixed-price audit and foundation project, done once, followed by doing the routine work in-house with a written process. It costs more up front than a £99 package and far less over a year, and it produces something that lasts.
Why do SEO quotes vary so much?
Different hours, different rates, different scopes and different overheads. Two quotes at the same price can describe entirely different months of work. Compare the written scope, the hours implied, the content volume, the link approach and the reporting, not the fee alone.
Should I pay for SEO per project or per month?
Per project for defined work with an end: audits, migrations, foundation builds, content batches. Per month for ongoing optimisation where results compound. Many businesses do the project first and decide on the retainer with the audit in hand.
Are performance-based or guaranteed SEO services worth it?
Rarely. Nobody controls Google, so guarantees are either priced in, aimed at meaningless keywords or backed by tactics that risk the site. A modest base fee with bonuses tied to agreed business metrics is the only reputable version, and it is uncommon.
How long before SEO pays for itself?
Early movement in three to six months for most sites, with payback commonly inside twelve months for local and professional services businesses, longer for competitive national markets and low-margin ecommerce. Judge it on leads and revenue, not rankings.
Do SEO costs include tools, content and links?
Usually the provider’s standard tools are included and content and links are either inside the hours or quoted separately; ask which. Advertising budget, hosting and domains are never part of an SEO fee and should stay in your own accounts.
Want a straight number for your business?
Send your website and what a customer is worth to you, and you will get a written estimate built the way this guide describes: the hours your site actually needs, at a published rate, with the work listed month by month, and a plain answer if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.
Send the details through the contact form, or message me on WhatsApp at +44 7853 133869.