How much does SEO cost in the UK? The 2026 numbers.

In October 2026, UK SEO packages published by small-business providers run from £99 to £2,500 a month, and most small firms pay £300 to £1,500. Entry tiers cluster around £185 to £400 a month; the top tiers from the same sellers sit around £600 to £2,000. Freelancers charge an average of £374 a day. A one-off audit is £500 to £3,000. Larger agencies working for bigger firms charge £3,000 to £7,000 a month and usually do not publish a price. The number that matters is not the monthly fee but how many hours of real work it buys, and that is what most price lists leave out.

What UK SEO providers actually charge

Most SEO cost guides are written by agencies that do not publish their own price. These nine do. They are small-business providers, the ones a firm of one to twenty people is likely to be quoted by, listed cheapest entry tier first.

Prices read from each provider's own page on 5 October 2026. Where a page says "from", the figure is the floor. Not a recommendation of any of them, and not a complete list: these are the ones that publish.

Two things stand out. The middle of the entry tiers is about £200 a month and the middle of the top tiers is about £850, so “how much does SEO cost” has at least two honest answers even from the same seller. And the contract column varies more than the price does: from cancel any time to a six-month lock-in at a similar monthly figure. That column changes what you actually pay more than a hundred pounds either way on the fee.

SEO costs by provider and business size

Published price lists only cover the sellers willing to publish. Larger agencies quote after a call. Putting the price pages together with the UK research from Whito and Whitehat SEO, this is the market as a buyer meets it.

By business size, the same research lands in roughly the same place: a local service business with one location spends £300 to £1,200 a month, a growing small firm £1,000 to £3,000, and a mid-market B2B company £2,500 to £5,000. E-commerce sits higher at every size, because every product and category page is something to rank.

What your money buys, in hours

Here is the part almost no price list shows. SEO is time: someone researching what buyers search, writing or rewriting pages, fixing what is broken, and earning links. So divide the fee by what that time costs.

YunoJuno's 2026 data puts the average UK SEO consultant day rate at £374, about £50 an hour over a seven-and-a-half-hour day. Agency packages work out nearer £100 an hour once account management, reporting and margin are inside the fee; Whitehat's own figures put a £500 to £1,200 local package at five to ten hours a month, which is the same thing said another way.

That is why a £99 package cannot do what a £500 one does, and why a £2,000 quote for a seven-page local site deserves the question “what are the other thirty hours for?” Ask any provider how many hours a month you are buying and who does them. A good one answers straight away.

How much does SEO cost for a small business?

For a UK firm of one to twenty people with a five-to-twenty-page site, £300 to £1,500 a month covers almost everyone, and the sensible middle is about £500 to £800. That buys enough hours for the three things that move a small site: improving the pages that are already nearly ranking, adding a properly researched page or two, and keeping the technical side clean.

What pushes the figure up is the market, not the business. In law, lettings, cosmetic dentistry or anything with “London” in the search, the firms above you are buying links every month, and a well-written page alone will not move past them. There the honest budget is £1,500 and up, or a narrower target.

How much does local SEO cost?

Local SEO, ranking in the map pack and for “service plus town” searches, is the cheapest kind, because most of the work is in your Google Business Profile, your reviews and consistent listings. Published local tiers run £185 (DPOM, Design for Online) to £495 (neometa), and setup-only packages around £250 to £800 one off.

A lot of local SEO you can do yourself in an afternoon a month: fill in every field of the Business Profile, post to it, ask every happy customer for a review and reply to all of them. When I checked which Suffolk firms AI assistants name, the named firms carried several times the Google reviews of the rest, in every sector. Volume beat rating. The Suffolk study has the numbers; the local SEO page says what I do for it.

What does AI search work cost, and is it separate?

Being named by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews is mostly ordinary SEO done carefully: pages that answer the question in the first lines, facts that are easy to quote, structured data, a named author. Some providers now sell it as a separate line, often called AEO or GEO. Whitehat's research puts a basic add-on at £400 to £800 a month.

Others fold it in: DPOM, Design for Online and Muffin Marketing's top tier all list AI search work inside the package price. I think that is the right way round. Paying twice for the same pages is the trap. Ask whether the AI work is a separate deliverable you can see each month, such as a set of buyer questions checked in ChatGPT and Gemini, or a new name for work the SEO package already claims to do.

One-off SEO costs: audits, setup and migrations

An audit is only worth paying for if someone fixes what it finds. A forty-page PDF of problems you cannot fix yourself is a bill for a to-do list. Run a free automated check first, then pay for the fixes rather than the findings. A migration, moving a site to a new platform without losing its rankings, is the one-off job where cutting corners costs most: every old address needs a redirect to its new one. That is the whole of my migration service, and it is included in every redesign.

Can you do SEO yourself? What it costs

For a small site, yes, if you have four to eight hours a month and the patience to wait three months for results. The tools are the cheap part:

Tool prices from each vendor's UK pricing page, monthly billing, 5 October 2026.

Most small businesses need nothing beyond the free three for the first six months. The cost of doing it yourself is your hours, and the risk is spending them on the wrong things: rewriting a homepage nobody searches for while the page that is sitting at position eleven goes untouched. Start in Search Console with the queries where you already appear on page two. Those are the cheapest wins a site has.

Contract terms that change the real price

Two packages at £500 a month can cost very different amounts. Read these before you sign:

• Minimum term. Six months at £799 is a £4,794 commitment before you can judge it. A rolling month at the same price is £799.
• Setup fees. £195 at DPOM, nothing at most others. Fine if stated; a flag if it appears on the first invoice.
• VAT. Most published prices exclude it. £599 + VAT is £718.80.
• Notice period. 30 days is normal; 45 days means paying for a month and a half after you decide to stop.
• Who owns the work. Pages written for your site, the Business Profile and any accounts should be in your name, and stay yours when you leave.
• Links. Whether they are in the fee, a separate line, or links from sites the seller owns, which you lose, or worse, when you stop.

Red flags in an SEO quote

• A guaranteed ranking or “page one in 30 days”. Nobody controls Google. Anyone promising a position by a date is guessing with your money.
• No access to your own data. You should own the Search Console and analytics accounts and be able to log in to both.
• Reports full of impressions and keyword counts, without clicks or enquiries. Impressions are not visits. Ask for clicks next to every impression figure.
• A fixed number of links a month, cheaply. Ten links for £99 come from somewhere, usually a network Google already ignores.
• Nobody can say who does the work or how many hours it is.
• A twelve-month lock-in on a small site. A provider confident in the work does not need it.

What I charge, and what you get

From £500 a month, rolling, cancelled by email, no setup fee. One person, me, does the work. A month includes researched pages (how many is set by the scope), links earned or bought out of the fee and named in the report, a technical sweep fixed in the month, the AI-visibility layer with a set of buyer questions checked each month, Search Console watched weekly, and a one-page report in plain English. A bigger site or a crowded market costs more; I say how much on the call and write it down before the first month. Not included: paid ads, social media and any promised ranking. The full list is on the SEO pricing page.

In the hours terms above, £500 from one person with no account layer is about ten hours of work, all of it on your site. The catch, stated: nobody can guarantee a ranking, so unlike my website sprint there is no refund guarantee here. The rolling month is the guarantee instead. Stop when the report stops earning the next one.

The proof I can point to is the ChatGPT citation above, and clients like Matt Henderson, who had an SEO and AI search audit and called it “a game changer for my business”. The proof I cannot yet point to is a page-one ranking on my own site for a competitive term, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Is SEO worth it in 2026?

For a business whose buyers search before they call, yes. AI answers have made it more useful, not less: ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews draw on the pages that rank and answer clearly, so the same work now earns two kinds of visibility.

It is not worth it, at any price, in three situations. When the site is too slow or too thin to rank, fix the site first; a month of SEO on a weak site is the worst-value month there is. When your buyers do not search for what you sell, because it is new or bought through referrals, spend the money on being referred. And when you need enquiries next month, SEO is a three-to-twelve-month bet; ads or outreach will be faster.