Date: 14/10/2025

Subject: U.K. SEO Costs

 

Introduction

For many businesses today, it does go without saying that they need to be highly visible on Google.co.uk to gain customers.
Without this, some businesses might cease trading!

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is therefore vital to many British businesses- yet, of course, having a physical location on a prominent road within the United Kingdom also helps.

However, with huge mounting costs, not many businesses can afford that central office location with luxury office space, complete with bean bags spread across the office floor!

In this article, we are going to look at some of the factors you need to consider when deciding how much to pay for search engine optimisation here in Blighty per month.

 

Business size and industry competitiveness

It’s just a fact that sometimes it’s much easier to get some businesses from specific industry sectors onto the first page of Google.

This stands to reason: some businesses selling certain products or services often can’t afford to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds in search engine optimisation because it simply isn’t worth it in terms of return on investment.

A local window cleaning business, for example, can’t spend as much per month as a group of solicitors’ practices can in the city centre. The price of the product or service and the demand for those items ultimately dictate how competitive the business sector is and how much businesses spend per month on improving their SEO.

If your business is in a sector where direct competitors are forking out a ton of money per month, well, in short, they will be harder to beat.

For some businesses, they may therefore be spending upwards of 5k per month, and in key business sectors — insurance, clothing, and holiday companies could be spending millions per year.

Therefore, the point we are getting at is that SEO prices vary primarily based on how competitive your industry is.

 

Check your current visibility.

When a builder builds a new slate roof on a house, it often involves a lot less work than building the whole house from scratch (we are stating the obvious, yet stay with us)

This concept should be applied when considering SEO services, because sometimes the website is on page 3 of Google for a very competitive term.

Now, page 3 of Google —well, that is a good starting point for improving the businesses on-page and off-page ranking factors and bumping the company onto page 1.

That’s because, with some magic being performed by a good SEO consultant, you can start to move onto page one faster than a business that’s started off being ranked on page 7 of Google.

However, if the website is brand-new and beyond page 14 of Google, that’s a hell of a lot of work — a considerable amount — and therefore it needs to be incorporated into the price.

 

Local SEO / national/ international campaigns

Let’s take another example: it’s much simpler to get the website to rank locally in just one city, like Bristol, than to get the same website to attract business on a national scale.

However, when you expand those keywords to reach customers nationally, or even internationally, you increase the competition you face.

This means that instead of 1000 competitors, you might be up against 10,000!

Therefore, given the high level of competition at the national or international level, the price will need to reflect the competition the SEO company faces.

 

Scope of work (technical, content, marketing, link building, reporting)

Some businesses might require, let’s say, one piece of content marketing, some link building, and some on-page SEO each month.

This work might be pretty straightforward —perhaps even run-of-the-mill — and can be implemented with ease. Therefore, the monthly retainer should reflect this.

However, some other businesses will need a completely different, scalable solution, with much more link building, content marketing, and reporting to various stakeholders.

Again, it’s the amount of work needed that will dictate the price.

 

Freelancer /SEO agency/In-house team

When you’re searching on Google to find a company to help you with your SEO, you’ll see many different descriptions of SEO businesses that can be used to find an agency. The cheapest will be a “freelancer,” and the most expensive will be a large “SEO agency” with offices in the city centre.

You can also always hire an in-house team; however, many businesses find that hiring an external agency is more accountable for bringing in better results.

 

Let’s get brass tacks- how much does SEO cost per month?

 

Freelancers / small business / local SEO: ~£300–£600/month

Freelancers, some of whom work from home, might not employ any staff and therefore incur significant cost savings that can then be passed on to the customer.

These cost savings can be substantial; therefore, this is why many people choose freelancers.

However, as with everything, there are pros and cons.

The pros are that you can save money, and the cons are that there are so many hours in a day, and a freelancer can sometimes get overwhelmed if they take on too much work.

Therefore, a freelancer often has to wear many hats, including those of a link builder, content marketing writer, and on-page SEO expert.

So, could your freelancer get overwhelmed?

Will the freelancer be burning the midnight oil, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and perhaps becoming a bit wired?

Therefore, you need to assess whether freelancers have sufficient free time to dedicate to your project.

 

SME SEO campaigns: £500–£1,500/month

Then you have your small-to-medium campaigns, which a local agency handles typically.

Within the agency, there will often be dedicated staff, some of whom focus on local search engine optimisation tasks, such as creating business citations / NAP listings.

At another part of the office, there might be a highly talented link builder, someone responsible for PR, and someone responsible for social media.

 

You get the picture.

By hiring various SEO agencies, you can bring in a range of staff members who can help improve the business’s search engine optimisation.

Growing/mid-sized businesses: £1,200–£4,000/month

Competitive, hungry, ambitious businesses—then you can start thinking about increasing your budget quite substantially to the parameters outlined above. The agency can then put in more work—for example, on link-building tasks—and believe us when we say you can literally spend hundreds of hours per month building links for clients! Link building is tedious and time-consuming.

 

Large/enterprise SEO: £5,000+/month

Now we are starting to think about your more competitive industries — such as retailing bathroom suites nationally or, perhaps, for U.K. car insurance companies.

Prices for national SEO vary widely, from $5k a month to companies spending millions to hold on to their top Google spots.

What this means is that you can literally have a group of businesses in the United Kingdom that are sometimes ploughing in excess of £1 million per year into digital marketing. The figure above is actually not that uncommon; that’s when we start thinking of large e-commerce shops retailing clothes, electrical items, or perhaps insurance services.

 

One-off audits/projects: £1,000–£5,000+

Many companies will offer free one-off audits. If the audit is provided for free, it’s often generic, hastily put together, and full of colourful graphs that sometimes amount to complete and utter nonsense.

If you really want expertise, you need an SEO consultant who really knows the trade and applies this expertise when writing the SEO audit report.

This means the SEO consultant will often have to review page by page (the most essential main pages), focusing on the most critical elements, in a way that AI bots usually cannot.

This means casting their eyes over the business’s content marketing, the website’s look and feel, whether the UX needs improvement, and, perhaps, the backlink profiles.

Therefore, a one-off audit can cost between £ 1,000 and £ 5,000 to complete.

 

Hourly rates: £75–£300+

There are a lot of SEO agencies cropping up; some, like those in the fantastic city of Bristol, offer hourly rates for SEO work and a breakdown of what has been completed.

This is great because the company knows precisely how much they are getting for their money.

The downside is that companies charging an hourly fee often don’t need to charge a higher price; when they charge per hour, as we all know, businesses/clients rarely stick to that timeframe and end up wanting more. There will always be time required to liaise with clients via email, phone, and questions; therefore, hiring an SEO per hour is usually more expensive than a retainer.

 

 

What work do agencies carry out?

Content creation/optimisation

We often create content for content marketing by writing blog posts or reworking certain pages, which might be deemed content-thin.

 

Link building & outreach

There’s no point building links to low-quality pages, so improving the content marketing often needs to come first; later, you may want to start a link-building campaign.

 

Technical SEO fixes

Technical SEO fixes might reveal aspects that are holding the website back —let’s say broken links, a slow website, or a design that’s simply tricky to use and might not work on specific devices, such as an Apple iPhone!

These all need to be fixed; otherwise, the bounce rate can be shockingly high, and all that SEO will have been for nothing if the technical SEO fixes are not addressed.

Assess goals (traffic, leads, conversions, revenue)

So, businesses will have different goals, and some try to make the process too complicated by setting unrealistic demands—for example, that the website be in the top 10 for, let’s say, seven keywords by a specific date, a few weeks away.

Now, this might sound really reasonable.

Yet for those SEO experts out there, they will know that many agencies/SEO businesses can optimise their websites for “low-volume keywords” that generate practically no business and are a complete waste of time.

In our opinion, it’s far better to hire a company with highly experienced staff, and one that offers transparency into the work they implement.

This means they set out every month what they have done for a fee. It’s then just a process of sucking and seeing whether that agency delivers.

 

Red flags to watch for:

Guaranteed #1 rankings

A guaranteed first-page ranking should be a red flag for any business owner. The ultimate aim of search engine optimisation is to get the business on page one of Google, so you might immediately think when reading this —perhaps while sipping on a nice, refreshing pint- what on earth are they talking about?

Surely that’s the name of the game? To get a business onto the first page of Google — and to guarantee that —well, that’s even better.

However, as we alluded to earlier, getting a business onto the first page can transform its profitability, bringing in perhaps millions of pounds in extra revenue.

However, you can also get the business onto the first page for keywords that no shoppers are searching for, with such low search volume that the sales phone line starts gathering dust.

 

Good SEO does take time.

We always like to refer to the famous Guinness advert, which states “that good things come to those who wait”. This is definitely the same with search engine optimisation, which often takes a long time to deliver results and more business.

The reason for this is simple: you will be up against direct competitors — your rivals — who could have been investing for longer and investing a lot more.

Businesses that think they can cut these competitors down to size in a couple of months by throwing a few hundred quid at a freelancer are often being naive.

Therefore, you need to carefully consider which agency you’re going to use, and, just as when you’re repairing a car, use quality parts and quality work to ensure the longevity of what you’re doing.

What you don’t want is to hire a company that does quick fixes and a website, only for everything to break down and need repairs a few months later.