How Much Does SEO Cost in the UK?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) pricing is famously opaque. One agency quotes £150 a month, another £3,000, and both sound plausible. This note sets out what SEO typically costs in the UK, what drives the difference, and how to tell whether what you are being offered is worth the invoice.
Typical SEO costs in the UK
Broad market bands, based on what agencies and freelancers publicly charge:
- £100 to £300 a month. Entry-level plans. Usually automated fixes, basic reporting and minimal human attention. Fine for a hobby site; rarely moves a commercial one.
- £350 to £1,500 a month. The serious small-business range. Real technical work, content production, on-page optimisation and someone who looks at your data every month.
- £2,000 a month and above. Competitive sectors, larger sites, national ambitions, or agencies with premises and teams to fund.
One-off audits sit separately: typically £300 to £2,000 depending on site size, paid once for a deep snapshot of what is wrong and what to fix first.
Why the prices differ so much
Three things drive the number on the quote.
What is included. Some plans are software with a logo on it. Others include technical repairs, content writing, internal linking, structured data and monthly human judgement. The first is cheap because nobody is working on your site. The second costs more because somebody is.
How competitive your market is. A plumber in a small town competes with a handful of local sites. A solicitor in central London competes with firms spending more on SEO each month than many businesses spend on salaries. Same work, different volume.
Who is doing the work. A solo consultant has low overheads and a ceiling on capacity. An agency has a team and a reception. Both can be excellent or poor. The price tag does not tell you which.
What a fair monthly programme includes
Whatever you pay, the work should cover the whole system, not one slice of it:
- Technical SEO: crawlability, redirects, page speed, mobile behaviour, duplicate content
- Content: useful pages built around what people actually search for
- On-page optimisation: titles, descriptions, headings, internal links
- Measurement: Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 connected and watched
- Reporting: a monthly account of what shipped, why, and what it achieved
If a plan cannot show you all five, you are buying a part and being told it is the whole.
The honest version of our own pricing
CoreLane SEO charges £400 a month with a £200 setup fee. The first month is £600, a six-month minimum applies because that is how long the foundation takes to build, and after six months it rolls monthly with 30 days’ notice. There is one plan and no tiers: every client gets the full programme, and what varies is which improvements ship first. The full breakdown, including what is deliberately excluded, is on the SEO pricing page.
Warning signs at any price
Promised rankings by a date
No one controls Google. A guarantee of position one by Friday is a promise nobody can keep, and the businesses that buy one tend to pay twice: once for the promise, once for the cleanup.
No named work, just "SEO services"
Ask what will physically change on your website this month. If the answer is a list of activities with no deliverables, there is no way to hold anyone to anything.
Reporting that is only a traffic graph
Visits are an input, not a result. A proper report tells you what was done, what improved, and what it means for enquiries or sales.
How to spend less without wasting money
The cheapest useful first step is an audit. It tells you whether the site has technical problems worth fixing before anyone sells you a retainer. A free mini-audit gives you the headline picture; a full audit gives you the itemised one. Either way you learn whether the £150 plan or the £3,000 plan is the right neighbourhood before committing. You can request a free mini-audit here.
Price is a poor proxy for quality in this market. Included work, measured results and plain-English reporting are the real tests.