It is the first question almost every business asks us, and it is the one most agencies dodge. You get sent to a contact form, or you get three tiers called Bronze, Silver and Gold that tell you nothing about what actually gets done.
So here is a straight answer, with the market rates, what sits behind them, and how to tell whether what you are being quoted is fair.
The short answer
Most UK businesses buying SEO from an agency pay somewhere between £500 and £3,000 plus VAT a month.
Local businesses competing in one town sit at the lower end. National ecommerce brands and anyone in a genuinely competitive sector sit well above it. Published UK agency pricing research this year puts single-channel SEO retainers at £1,000 to £3,500 a month. Separate UK benchmarks put small and local work at £300 to £1,200, with most businesses landing between £1,000 and £3,000.
Those ranges are wide for a reason, and the reason matters more than the number.
Why the range is so wide
SEO is not a product with a fixed unit cost. It is a fixed number of hours pointed at a moving target. Four things decide how many hours you need.
How competitive your search terms are. Ranking a plumber for one town is a different job to ranking a law firm nationally. The second needs more content, more authority and more time, so it costs more.
Where you are starting from. A site with a clean technical setup, decent content and some existing authority needs less remedial work than one built on a template five years ago and never touched since. Sometimes the first two months are just undoing damage.
How much content the plan needs. Content is usually the single biggest line in an SEO budget. A plan built on twelve pages a year costs less than one built on four a month, and both can be correct depending on the market.
Whether link building is included. Earning links properly takes outreach time, and outreach time is expensive. Agencies that quote cheaply have often stripped this out, or replaced it with links you would rather not have.
Retainer, project or hourly
You will be offered one of three models.
Monthly retainer. The standard, and for good reason. SEO compounds, so the work only pays back if it keeps happening. One survey of 260 agencies found 53% of providers prefer the retainer model. Expect rolling monthly terms from a good agency and a twelve-month tie-in from a bad one.
One-off project. Sensible for a defined piece of work: a technical audit, a migration, a set of new service pages. UK project costs typically run from £1,000 to £20,000 depending on scale. It is not a substitute for ongoing SEO, and anyone selling it as one is selling you a report.
Hourly. Freelancers in the UK generally sit between £40 and £100 an hour, agency consultants between £100 and £250. Useful for advice and second opinions. Impractical for delivery, because you end up managing the work yourself.
What you actually get at each level
£500 to £1,000 a month. Realistically this buys a focused local campaign. Technical fixes, Google Business Profile work, a handful of well-built location and service pages, and steady on-page improvement. Enough to win a town or a city if the competition is normal. Not enough to take on a national term.
£1,000 to £2,500 a month. Room for a real content programme alongside the technical work, proper internal linking, and some link earning. This is where most growing SMEs sit and where SEO starts to look like a channel rather than a chore.
£2,500 a month and up. Competitive national terms, ecommerce catalogues, multi-location businesses, or anything where the search results are already full of well-funded competitors. At this level you should be getting a named strategist, not a shared account manager.
The cheap end, and why it does not work
You will find offers at £99 or £149 a month. The arithmetic is worth doing. At an agency cost of even £30 an hour, £149 buys you five hours, and that is before anyone has covered software, management or profit.
Five hours a month cannot deliver technical work, content and links. So something gets dropped. Usually it is everything except an automated report, which is why those arrangements tend to run for six months, produce nothing, and put the business off SEO for years.
Paying nothing is better than paying £149 a month for a report nobody reads.
How to tell whether you are getting value
Price on its own tells you very little. These questions tell you more.
What am I actually getting each month? You should get a specific answer. Pages, posts, technical work, links, hours. “Ongoing optimisation” is not an answer.
How is success measured? Rankings alone are a vanity metric. Enquiries, calls, form fills and revenue from organic search are the ones that matter, and they should be reported.
Who is doing the work? Ask whether it is done in house or subcontracted, and who you speak to when something needs changing.
What is the contract? If an agency needs twelve months to keep you, ask yourself why. Rolling monthly terms mean the agency has to keep earning the fee.
What happens if I leave? Your site, your content, your accounts. All of it should be yours, and it should stay live.
How long before it pays for itself
Budget for three to six months before you see meaningful movement, and around twelve before you can properly judge the return. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either misunderstanding the work or misrepresenting it.
That timeline is also why the cheapest option so rarely wins. You are paying for a year of compounding effort, so the question is not what it costs this month, it is what the whole year buys you.
What we charge
We do not publish packages, because we have never met two businesses with the same problem. Our retainers start at £500 plus VAT a month, billed monthly on a rolling basis with no tie-in. Full detail is on our SEO and PPC pricing page.
If you are a local business weighing this up, our SEO services in Swansea page sets out what a local campaign covers, and our main SEO services page covers the wider technical, content and local work.
If you want a straight answer on what your own site would need and what it would cost, get in touch and we will tell you. If SEO is not the right spend for you right now, we will tell you that too.
SEO cost questions we get asked
Is SEO cheaper than PPC?
Over a year, usually yes, because the traffic keeps coming when you stop paying. In the first three months PPC is almost always better value, because it starts working immediately. Most businesses we work with end up running both, with PPC covering the gap while SEO builds.
Do I have to sign a twelve-month contract?
Not with us, and you should not have to anywhere. Rolling monthly terms are increasingly standard. A long tie-in protects the agency, not you.
Is a cheap SEO package ever worth it?
Occasionally, if the scope is honest and narrow. A £300 a month local package that only claims to do Google Business Profile and a few pages a year can be fair value for a very small business. The problem is packages at that price that claim to do everything.
How much should a small business in Wales expect to pay?
For a single-location business competing locally, £500 to £1,000 plus VAT a month is a realistic budget. Below that you are usually buying a report rather than the work.
Can I do SEO myself?
Some of it, yes, and the basics are worth doing whatever else you decide. Google Business Profile, page titles, useful content on your own services. The technical work and the link earning are where most people run out of time rather than ability.
