Most people searching for the cost of SEO want a number.
Fair enough.
The problem is that a useful number depends on what’s actually wrong, how competitive the market is, and how much of the work you want someone else to do.
So I’d be wary of anyone who can give you a very precise monthly price before they’ve looked at the site.
My own work can start from £150 for smaller pieces of advice or defined jobs. Ongoing work costs more, depending on the scope.
These are the things that usually move the price.
The size of the site
A 20-page service business and a 10,000-product ecommerce site are not the same job.
There’s simply more to inspect on the larger site.
More URLs.
More templates.
More internal links.
More chances for redirects, canonicals, duplicate pages and indexing issues to go wrong.
And if recommendations need implementing across thousands of pages, that obviously takes more time too.
That doesn’t mean a bigger site automatically needs a huge retainer. It does mean a package priced exactly the same for both businesses should make you ask what is actually being checked.
How difficult the market is
Your competitors matter as much as your own site.
If you’re a local business competing with five similar firms, the amount of work needed may be fairly modest.
If you’re trying to outrank national brands, publishers, marketplaces and comparison sites, that’s a very different problem.
I’d want to look at the live results before quoting properly.
Who is ranking?
What kind of pages are winning?
How strong are those sites?
Are you trying to move from position 12 to 5, or from nowhere into a result dominated by brands with years of history?
That affects the amount of work and, just as importantly, how realistic the opportunity is.
What condition the site is already in
Some sites need growth work.
Others need repairing first.
If the structure is sensible, pages are indexed properly, redirects work and tracking is reliable, you can get into content and visibility fairly quickly.
If the site has years of duplicate pages, broken redirects, crawling problems, old migrations and missing tracking, there’s more groundwork.
You often don’t know which situation you’re in until someone has looked properly.
That’s another reason I don’t like quoting from a URL and a two-line brief.
How much can your own team do?
This can change the cost a lot.
If you already have a developer and someone who can write, you may not need an SEO consultant to implement everything.
You might need someone to:
- work out what matters
- put it in the right order
- write the briefs
- review what your team produces
- measure what happens afterwards
That can keep the arrangement fairly lean.
If you want the SEO consultant or agency to write the content, make technical changes, build pages and handle everything else too, the scope gets bigger.
Neither model is better by default.
You just need to know which one the quote assumes.
How many countries and languages are involved?
This gets underestimated quite a lot.
SEO for the UK, US and France is not one piece of keyword research copied three times.
Search behaviour changes.
Competitors change.
Language changes.
The result pages change.
Even where the language is shared, such as the UK and US, people often search differently and expect different wording.
So every additional market adds work.
Sometimes quite a lot of it.
What are you actually being quoted for?
This is probably the biggest one.
Two businesses can both quote £1,000 a month and be selling completely different things.
One might include strategy, technical work, content briefs, implementation and reporting.
The other might include a monthly report and a call.
So I’d compare scope before price.
For any quote, I’d want to know:
- what is included
- what I’ll actually receive
- what I’m expected to do myself
- who is doing the work
- how progress will be measured
- whether there’s a minimum term
- how I leave if it isn’t working
The monthly number means very little without that.
Project, monthly support or advice?
Not every SEO job needs a retainer.
A technical audit, migration plan, traffic investigation or strategy usually has a natural end, so project pricing often makes more sense.
Ongoing SEO is different.
If there’s a steady stream of pages to improve, content to create, technical work to review and results to monitor, a monthly arrangement can be useful.
Then there’s advice-only work.
Sometimes a business already has capable developers and marketers and just needs a second pair of eyes, a plan or help with a specific problem.
I’ve gone into that in more detail in independent SEO consultant or agency, project or retainer.
Why I don’t publish fixed SEO packages
Because I don’t really believe in pricing the average website.
A local service business with a clean 30-page site shouldn’t automatically pay the same as an ecommerce business with several thousand URLs.
And I don’t think someone with a good internal development team should pay me to duplicate work they can already do.
I’d rather look at the site first, work out where the problem or opportunity is, then price the work around that.
That’s what the free assessment is for.
Sometimes the answer will be that there’s enough work to justify ongoing support.
Sometimes it’ll be a defined project.
And sometimes I’ll tell you I don’t think you need me yet.
For my own work, monthly arrangements have an initial three-month commitment and then continue month to month with one month’s notice.
Project work is agreed at a fixed price before it starts.
The pricing page and terms have the practical details.
A few things that would make me cautious
Guaranteed rankings are the obvious one.
Google explicitly warns against anyone promising a number-one position.
I’d also want to ask more questions if I saw:
- a precise quote before anyone had looked at the site
- no clear list of deliverables
- a long contract with a vague scope
- reporting based entirely on rankings or traffic
- pressure to sign quickly
None of those automatically means the work is bad.
They’re just things I’d want explained before committing.
So what should SEO cost?
Enough to cover the work your site actually needs.
That sounds like a non-answer, but it’s genuinely the useful one.
The cost moves with:
- the size and state of the site
- the market you’re competing in
- how many countries or languages are involved
- how much your own team can implement
- what is actually included in the scope
If you want a useful quote, I’d rather look at the site first and tell you what I think is worth doing.
You can request a free assessment or get in touch.
FAQ
How much does SEO cost in the UK?
It depends on the size of the site, how competitive the market is, the state the site is in and how much your own team can do. I don’t publish a price list because a figure before anyone has looked at your site is a guess. My work can start from £150 for smaller defined jobs.
Is a monthly SEO retainer worth it?
It can be, where there’s a steady stream of content, fixes and monitoring. I’d start with a project so you know what needs doing, then move to a monthly arrangement once the scope is clear.
Why do SEO quotes vary so much?
Because they often cover different things. Scope, who does the implementation, the number of pages and markets, and the assumed state of the site all differ. I’d compare what’s included before the monthly figure.
Can I pay for SEO by the project instead of monthly?
Yes. Audits, strategies, migrations and builds are often priced as projects with a fixed fee agreed first. Ongoing work is usually monthly for an agreed scope.
Should I be wary of cheap SEO?
I’d be wary of any quote, cheap or expensive, that doesn’t say what you’ll receive or how it will be measured. Cheap isn’t automatically bad, but a very low price with a guaranteed ranking isn’t credible.
Sources
- Do you need an SEO?, Google Search Central, last updated 5 June 2026, accessed 21 October 2026. Supports: caution about anyone who guarantees rankings.
- Paul Myers, pricing and terms, 2026. Supports: work starting from £150, no packages, engagement types and commercial terms.
