How Much Does SEO Cost in the UK? What 20 Published Packages Actually Charge

If you have asked two agencies what SEO costs, you have probably had two answers that cannot be compared. One quotes £399 a month for ten keywords. Another quotes £449 for five optimised pages. A third sends a feature list with no numbers on it at all and asks for a call.

You are not being dense. Those quotes genuinely cannot be lined up, and this article explains why, using what UK agencies actually publish rather than what the guides claim they charge.

In September 2026 we read the live pricing pages of eight UK SEO agencies and recorded every figure they publish openly. Twenty priced monthly tiers. No estimates, no averages, no survey data. Just what is written on the page where a buyer would find it.

What the published market actually charges

Published monthly prices run from £185 to £1,999. That is the honest range, and it is wide because the tiers at each end are selling very different amounts of work.

£185 to £399, the entry band. Technical checks, on-page optimisation, Google Business Profile work, a monthly report, and typically two to four pieces of content. Three of the eight agencies publish a tier under £400. This is real work at a real price, not a loss leader.

£399 to £999, the working middle. More content or more pages each month, link building, competitor monitoring, and usually a quarterly or monthly strategy review. Most of the published ladders spend the bulk of their range here.

£1,000 to £1,999, the published upper tiers. More pages or keywords, digital PR, a dedicated account manager, multi-location targeting. Above roughly £2,000 the published prices largely stop.

There is also a one-off option in the sample: a published SEO setup package at £699, covering keyword research, analytics setup, sitemap and metadata, and local directory submissions.

The finding: no two agencies are selling the same thing

Here is the part nobody tells you, and it is why quotes feel impossible to compare.

Of the eight agencies, only five publish any unit at all. Those five use three different units.

• Two sell keywords. Ten, twenty or fifty on one ladder. Twelve, twenty-five or forty on another.
• One sells optimised pages per month. Five, eight, thirteen or twenty.
• One sells content pieces per month. Two, four, or eight and above.
• Two publish no count of anything, just a list of features that get ticked.

So two quotes at exactly the same price can be selling completely different amounts of completely different work, and there is no conversion rate between them. Ten keywords is not five pages. Five pages is not four blog posts. Nobody publishes a rate that would let you translate.

This is the real answer to "how much does SEO cost". The price is not the confusing part. The unit is.

The unit you can see prices consistently. The one you cannot does not.

We went one step further and worked out what each extra unit costs as you climb a ladder. The result is the most useful thing in the data.

Where an agency prices optimised pages, the steps between its tiers are remarkably stable:

• Going up one tier buys three more pages, at £66.67 each
• The next step buys five more pages, at £60.00 each
• The next buys seven more, at £64.29 each

Three steps inside a seven pound band. That is a business pricing labour and being consistent about it.

Where agencies price keywords, the same maths falls apart. One ladder charges £30 per extra keyword, then £10. The other charges £53.85 per extra keyword, then £33.33. Neither is stable, and the two disagree with each other by roughly a factor of five.

The reason is simple once you see it. A page is work. Somebody optimises it, and that takes time that can be priced. A keyword is not work. It is a number on a report. Nothing anchors it, so nothing keeps its price consistent.

When we ran the same exercise on UK website maintenance plans a day earlier, the included support time priced at about £60 an hour across three separate ladders. The marginal optimised page here lands between £60 and £67. That is consistent with roughly an hour of work per page, though we would call that an observation from two small samples rather than a measured fact.

What to do with this: when you get a quote, ask what unit it is priced on. If the answer is a number of keywords, ask what work actually happens each month. If the answer is a number of pages or hours, you can compare it to something.

The £500 minimum is not what the market publishes

Search for what SEO costs in the UK and you will find guides quoting five hundred to twelve hundred pounds a month as the floor for a small or local business. That figure gets repeated a lot.

It is not what the published pricing pages say. The lowest published monthly price in our sample is £185 plus VAT, with a second agency at £199. Both include technical checks, on-page work, Google Business Profile management and monthly reporting.

Those guides are quoting market averages and industry surveys. We are quoting the price written on the page. When they disagree, the page is the thing you can actually buy.

That does not mean £185 buys the same outcome as £1,500. It clearly does not, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. It means the entry point to the market is roughly a third of what the guides suggest, and a small business is not priced out before it starts.

Where the published prices stop

Three of the eight agencies publish a full ladder and then go quiet at the top. Their highest tier is priced on application. One of them does this to its own flagship package, the one it labels most popular.

A fourth publishes only a starting figure, from a thousand pounds plus VAT a month, with nothing above it. A fifth publishes no prices anywhere, offering a range of three hundred to five thousand pounds and an invitation to get in touch.

To be fair to the sample, two agencies publish every single tier including their most expensive. So this is a tendency rather than a rule. But the tendency is clear enough to plan around: the more you are likely to spend, the less likely you are to find out what it costs before you are on a call.

Contract length has nothing to do with price

This one surprised us.

• The agency with the highest published tier in the sample, at £1,399 a month, asks for no minimum term at all and describes itself as monthly rolling.
• An agency whose entry tier is £799 asks for a minimum of six months.
• Another, from £499, also asks for six months.
• One at up to £999 asks for thirty days notice.
• One at up to £850 asks for a two month minimum.

The cheapest tier in the sample carrying a six month tie-in costs more than the most expensive tier carrying no tie-in at all. Paying more does not buy you flexibility, and paying less does not cost you it. The two are simply unrelated, which means a tie-in is a choice the agency has made, not a price you are paying for.

If you are comparing two quotes, the contract term is worth as much attention as the number.

So what actually drives your cost?

Three things, in roughly this order.

How competitive your market is. Ranking a niche B2B service in Cheshire and ranking a solicitor in central Manchester are not the same job, and no package price can pretend otherwise.

How much needs fixing before anything can work. A site with a clean technical foundation starts earning from month one. A site with crawl problems, thin pages and a broken internal link structure spends its first two months getting to the starting line. This is why a technical audit is usually the honest first step rather than a retainer.

How much content the plan involves. Content is the largest variable cost in almost every published ladder we looked at, and it is the thing that most reliably moves the price between tiers.

Notice what is not on that list: the number of keywords you are "targeting". That number is chosen by the agency, it costs them nothing to raise, and as the data above shows, it is priced inconsistently even by the agencies that use it.

What to ask before you sign anything

Five questions. The answers tell you more than any proposal will.

1. What unit is this priced on? Pages, hours, content pieces or keywords. If the answer is keywords, ask what work happens each month.
2. What happens in the first ninety days? A good answer is specific and front-loads the technical work. A vague answer is a vague plan.
3. How do you report, and how often? You want to see what changed and why, in words you understand.
4. What is the minimum term, and what happens if I leave? Ask what you keep. The content, the reports, the access.
5. What would you do if you were not being paid to say more is better? The best answers to this are the ones that talk you out of something.

The limits of this survey, said plainly

Eight agencies and twenty priced tiers is a useful sample, not a census. Only one agency in it prices by the page, so the £60 to £67 figure rests on a single ladder. The agencies that publish prices are self-selecting: firms confident enough to put numbers on a page may not price like firms that will not. And every figure was correct on the day we read it, which was September 2026.

We have not named any of the agencies. The point is the pattern, not a league table, and a price on a page today can change tomorrow.

The short answer

UK SEO is published between £185 and £1,999 a month, most of it between £399 and £999, with one-off setup work around £699 and the genuinely large numbers hidden behind a phone call.

But the number matters less than the unit. Before you compare two prices, make sure you know what each one is actually buying, because in this market the odds are they are not buying the same thing.

If you want a straight answer for your own site rather than a band, the useful first step is almost always finding out what is currently stopping it ranking. That is a fixed piece of work with a fixed scope, and it tells you whether you need a retainer at all. Have a look at our SEO services and get in touch, and we will tell you honestly if you do not need us yet.