What SEO actually costs in the UK

Seven of the twenty agencies in our study publish a figure for their own work. Four publish nothing at all, and nine address the cost question without answering it. The bands below come only from the seven, so they describe what is actually published rather than a survey we did not run. We did not ask any agency what it charges.

£1,200 to £3,000 a month. A shared team with a named contact, technical fixes, on-page work and a content plan, reported monthly. The lowest published floor in the study is £1,200. Other published starting points are £2,000, £2,600 and £3,000.

£3,000 to £8,800 a month. A named strategist on the account, content produced rather than just recommended, digital PR and technical work together, a monthly call and a live dashboard. Most growing ecommerce and B2B brands land here.

£8,000 a month and up, to around £20,000. A team with a lead and senior people named, migrations, international and AI search. The largest published package in the study runs to £19,800 a month.

Be careful with figures that look like agency prices and are not. Reading all twenty sites turned up a rank-tracking software subscription, client campaign budgets lifted from case studies, an SEO tool licence and a strategy session advertised as worth £1,000 and given away free. None of those is a fee for the agency’s SEO service.

Mostly two things: seniority and how much of the work is thinking.

At the bottom you are buying execution against a list somebody else wrote. In the middle you are buying somebody who decides what goes on the list. At the top you are buying a team who can do things that need more than one skill at once, like moving a site to a new domain across four countries without losing the rankings.

What does not change much is the tools. Every agency at every level uses roughly the same three or four, and any of them costing you extra is worth questioning.

About a day of someone’s attention, spread thin.

That is arithmetic rather than a judgement about the agency. At agency rates £300 buys a few hours, and a few hours a month cannot do technical work, content and outreach. Something has to give, and usually what gives is the part you cannot see.

If £300 is the budget, it is better spent on one good piece of work every few months than on a retainer that spreads it too thin to show.

Retainer suits ongoing work and is what most agencies want, because it is what makes their business predictable. Fine, as long as what you get for it is specified.

Project suits a defined job with an end: a migration, an audit, a site rebuild. Cleaner to judge and easier to walk away from.

Performance-based sounds fairest and usually is not. It pushes the agency towards whatever moves the agreed number fastest, which is rarely what grows the business, and the arguments about attribution are wearying.

Ask what happens in month one, and then what happens in month seven. The second answer is the revealing one, because that is when the plan runs out and the retainer either becomes strategic or becomes filler.

Ask who does the work. The person who runs the account is usually somebody else. Ask to see a report they send an existing client, with the client’s name removed.