SEO Costs UK: Monthly Fees, Audits and Budget Examples

SEO costs in the UK start below £200 a month for narrowly scoped local packages, while specialist agency retainers can start above £1,000. DPOM advertises local SEO from £185 a month and Terrier starts at £1,250, both excluding VAT. These buy different services. Compare the work included, the extra costs and the commitment before choosing a monthly fee.

This guide uses published supplier prices to help you build a budget. It also shows how to compare an audit with ongoing work, calculate your full spend and work out how many extra customers would cover it. For a combined SEO, advertising and social budget, use our digital marketing agency cost guide.

How much does SEO cost per month?

The examples below are current public asking prices, not an average of what UK businesses pay. A small local package may cover a limited set of tasks. A larger retainer may fund specialist work across the website. Neither the price nor the provider label proves that a proposal is suitable for your business.

DPOM requires a custom quote and gives 31 days’ cancellation notice. Terrier publishes no minimum term, 60 days’ notice and no setup fee. Those are different commitments. Ask each supplier to show the earliest cancellation date and final payment in an example based on your intended start date.

Whitehat lists a separate SEO and content package from £2,967 a month. This illustrates why the contents of a retainer matter as much as its headline price. The providers here are pricing examples, not a ranking or a claim that we have tested their services.

What should you budget for local, national and ecommerce SEO?

For a local business, begin with the places you actually serve and the services that pay the bills. Ask whether the quote covers your Business Profile, important service pages and accurate business details. A cheap package loses its appeal if the pages you need are all treated as extras.

National campaigns need a brief built around the customers you can serve across the country. Ask which existing pages will be improved, which new pages are needed and who supplies the evidence that makes them useful. A national keyword list is not a delivery plan.

For an online shop, request a review of category pages, product information and the way filters create URLs. Confirm who can change the shop and test those changes. Content production cannot substitute for fixing a fault that prevents important products from being discovered.

There is no sensible budget based only on employee count. A small specialist firm selling across the UK may face a harder search market than a larger company serving one town. Send suppliers your website, target customers and priority services so they can price the same job.

Should you pay monthly, by the hour or for a project?

An audit is a diagnosis. Before buying one, check whether the fee includes fixes, testing and a handover to your developer. Whitehat publishes an Essential website audit at £2,500 excluding VAT. Its scope includes technical SEO, speed and mobile experience, so it should not be compared with a free automated score report.

If you already employ a developer and a writer, specialist advice may be the missing part. If nobody can implement recommendations, ask for a proposal that includes delivery. Otherwise you can pay for a detailed report and still have the same website at the end.

For hourly work, buy a capped task before agreeing an open-ended arrangement. Ask the consultant to explain what can be completed within that cap, what they need from you and what would trigger a revised estimate. A higher hourly rate can still produce a lower total bill when the task is well defined.

What costs sit outside the SEO retainer?

Use the proposal to separate included work from work someone still has to pay for. The following questions are worth resolving before the first invoice, especially when an agency is advising and another supplier controls the site.

• Who makes and tests changes to the website, and is that labour included?
• Who writes, checks, approves and publishes content?
• Are analytics setup, call tracking and any required subscriptions included?
• Does the price cover all agreed locations, languages and websites?
• What happens to the fee during a migration or redesign?
• Are VAT, setup fees and the final notice period included in the total?

If you are already planning a redesign, brief the SEO specialist before the structure and URLs are fixed. Agree who owns the redirect plan and who checks the launch. Keep control of your domain, website and analytics accounts so changing suppliers does not become a second project.

Our digital marketing agency comparison can help you build a shortlist. Use the same written scope for each quote. A lower fee with several unpriced exclusions is not yet a cheaper offer.

Worked example: the full cost of an SEO budget

Suppose a business is considering the following fictional proposal. These are chosen assumptions to show the calculation, not supplier quotes or typical market prices. The example excludes VAT and any separate advertising budget.

The cash budget is £9,000 before VAT. Adding the assumed value of staff time brings the economic cost to £9,720, or £1,620 per month across the six-month period. If content or development is already included in the agency fee, remove the duplicate allowance.

A six-month planning window is not a prediction that SEO will pay back in six months. Use a period you can fund, agree review dates and keep an allowance for work that the initial investigation uncovers. Do not borrow a supplier’s most successful case study as your own forecast.

How many extra customers would cover the spend?

Start with the money an extra sale leaves after its variable costs. Revenue is too generous a measure. A sale that brings in cash also creates delivery costs, and those costs still have to be paid.

In the fictional budget above, suppose each additional customer leaves £300 after variable costs. The £9,720 total needs 32.4 extra customers, so the business would need at least 33 over the six months. If one in four qualified enquiries becomes a customer, that implies about 132 extra qualified enquiries.

These assumptions describe the hurdle the spend must clear. They do not predict traffic, enquiries or sales. Replace them with your own margin and conversion figures. If you include repeat purchases, use a defined time period and evidence from existing customers rather than an optimistic lifetime-value estimate.

Agree how the extra business will be measured. Separate enquiries about your existing brand from customers finding you through new searches. Check lead quality with the person who handles sales. An increase in visits can be useful evidence, but it is not proof that the campaign has paid for itself.

What should an SEO quote promise?

Ask for work the supplier controls and evidence you can inspect. That includes the pages to change, the reason for changing them and the way results will be tracked. Google’s guidance on hiring an SEO warns against guaranteed first-place rankings and recommends checking previous work and client references.

• A starting assessment of your website and the business problem the work addresses.
• A prioritised plan showing who implements each change.
• Clear costs, exclusions and a process for approving extra work.
• Reporting on completed work, relevant search performance and business outcomes.
• Written ownership, access and exit arrangements.

At review meetings, ask to see completed work on the site. If recommendations are waiting for your approval, resolve that delay. If an agreed task was not delivered, ask why. Keep those delivery questions separate from ranking changes, which can move for reasons outside either party’s control.

Does AI search mean you need another SEO fee?

Ask what additional work an AI search service includes. Google says its existing SEO practices remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode and does not require special optimisation to appear in those features. That guidance concerns Google, not every AI product.

A separate proposal might include research, content work or monitoring across other services. Ask which tasks overlap with the SEO retainer and how success will be measured. A report listing mentions without showing the questions, dates and sources gives you little basis for judging progress.

If you need enquiries sooner, compare the role of paid advertising in your budget using our SEO versus PPC guide. Keep advertising spend separate from SEO fees. Paying for Google ads does not buy an improvement in organic rankings.

How we checked these prices

We checked the linked UK supplier pages on 12 September 2026. The table records their published starting prices or stated minimum budgets. It is a small, deliberately varied sample, not a representative market survey, and we did not obtain private quotes or test agency performance.

We also reviewed Ahrefs’ survey of SEO providers. Its international dollar figures are not treated here as current UK pound prices. The worked budget uses explicit fictional inputs, and its calculations can be repeated with your own numbers. Confirm current scope, VAT and contract terms in a written proposal.

Olivia Grant

Head of Research & Insights

Olivia covers workforce management and people technology for UK businesses, including HR software, time and attendance systems, business mobile contracts, and digital marketing services. With over 8 years in market analysis and digital communications, she translates complex HR tech and procurement decisions into clear, actionable advice.

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Reviewed by

Sarah Mitchell

B2B Commerce & Finance Reviewer