How much does SEO cost in the UK?

It’s the first thing nearly everyone asks me. Fair enough. You wouldn’t book a plumber without asking roughly what it’ll cost, and SEO shouldn’t be any different. The trouble is the prices out there are all over the place. I’ve seen people offer it for £50 a month and agencies quote £5,000. So here’s the honest version from someone who’s been doing this for nearly 20 years.

How much does SEO cost a small business in the UK?

Most local businesses I speak to have been quoted somewhere between a few hundred pounds and a couple of thousand pounds a month. Freelancers usually sit at the lower end. Agencies with offices, account managers and sales teams sit higher up.

That’s a big range, and the number on its own tells you very little. Two quotes at the same price can be for completely different amounts of work. One might be real hands-on work every week. The other might be a monthly PDF and not much else.

What do I charge?

£125 a week. That’s about £18 a day. It covers your SEO, your Google Business Profile, AI visibility and looking after your website. It runs on a 30 day rolling basis, so there’s no long contract.

I went with one simple price because most local businesses need the same core things done well. A plumber in Bootle and a salon in Southport have different customers. They still both need a sorted Google listing, decent service pages, reviews coming in and a website that works on a phone. You can see exactly what goes into it on my SEO campaigns page.

What makes SEO cost more?

Mostly the amount of work it takes to beat whoever’s already at the top. How busy your searches are makes a big difference. “Solicitor Liverpool” is a real fight. “Dog groomer Maghull” is much quieter. How many places you want to cover matters too. One town is simpler than the whole North West.

Then there’s the state of your website. If it’s slow or broken, that has to be fixed before anything else sticks. I’ve covered that in why a slow mobile site costs you customers. Last is what the price includes and who you’re paying. Some quotes cover real work and some cover a report. With bigger firms you’re also paying for the office and the people selling to you.

National ecommerce sites and big multi-location brands are a different game. They often do need bigger budgets. Most of the people I work with aren’t in that boat.

Is a freelancer cheaper than an agency?

Usually, yes. A freelancer doesn’t have the same overheads, so more of what you pay goes on the actual work. The flip side is that one person can only do so much. That’s why I’ve got a small in-house team behind me, while you still deal with me directly.

Doing it yourself is the cheapest of all, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. If you’ve got the time, you can get a lot of the basics sorted on your own. I’ve written about whether you actually need an SEO company if you want to weigh that up. Most business owners I speak to have tried it themselves and found there’s never a spare evening.

Is cheap SEO worth it?

In my experience, rarely. Good SEO takes time every single week. Someone has to look at your site, fix what’s wrong, write pages, sort your Google listing and keep at it. At £50 a month there simply isn’t time in that to do much.

What you tend to get is an automated report, a pile of links from sites nobody reads, or nothing at all. The links are the bit that worries me. Poor links can drag a site down, and I’ve spent plenty of hours cleaning up after that kind of thing. It often costs more to fix than it would have cost to do. More on that in backlinks: quality over quantity.

Is expensive SEO always better?

No. At the top end you often pay for things a local business doesn’t need. Strategy decks, monthly meetings, a dedicated account manager and a 12 month contract you can’t get out of.

For a garage, a salon or a roofer, most of the gains come from a handful of things done well and kept up. A big monthly fee doesn’t make Google rank you any faster. Consistent, sensible work does.

What should you get for your money?

Whoever you go with, I’d expect a careful look at your site before they start, not a generic tool report. Your Google Business Profile should be set up and looked after. Speed, mobile and technical problems should get fixed. And there should be pages written for the searches your customers actually use, which I explain in how to choose the right SEO keywords.

You should be able to see what’s going on without chasing anyone. With me that means a live reporting portal you can log into any time, plus a plain-English update on what’s been done. Everything should be in your name, so you keep it if you leave. And there shouldn’t be a long tie-in.

I go into the month-by-month side in what you get for a monthly SEO fee.

How do you know if SEO is paying for itself?

Count the jobs, not the rankings. Work out what an average customer is worth to you. Then look at how many extra calls, forms and bookings come in from Google each month. For a lot of trades, one or two extra jobs a month covers £125 a week comfortably.

That’s why I set up call and form tracking with Google Analytics at the start. Without it you’re guessing. Those numbers feed into your reporting portal, so you can check them yourself whenever you like.

What isn’t included in the price?

Two things are separate with me, and I’d rather say so up front. The first is Google Ads. With ads you pay Google for every click, so that money can’t come out of an SEO fee. If you want to run them, my PPC campaigns page explains how I manage them.

The second is hosting. It’s an optional extra, from £15 a month for managed hosting, or from £20 a month for larger ecommerce sites. All of my hosting is done with Hostinger on dedicated UK servers, backed up every hour. If you’re happy where your site is now, you don’t have to move it. Whoever you talk to, ask what’s in the price and what’s extra before you agree to anything. A cheap headline number with a pile of add-ons isn’t cheap.

Questions people ask me about SEO prices

Keep reading

If you want to know why I don’t do long contracts, read no contract SEO: why I work 30 day rolling. If someone’s quoted you by the hour, how many hours of SEO you should get each month explains why that number can mislead. And when you’re comparing quotes, how to choose the right SEO company has the questions to ask.

Hi, I’m Pete

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