UK freelance SEO usually costs about £40 to £100 an hour. Agency time typically starts around £100 to £150 an hour, and published agency rates go well past £250. Most small and mid-sized firms pay £1,500 to £5,000 a month. At agency rates, £2,000 a month pays for roughly 13 to 20 hours: about two well-researched pages, with little left for anything else.
What does SEO cost a month in the UK?
The ranges are wide. Whitehat SEO, a UK agency, puts freelancers at £300 to £2,500 a month and agencies at £1,500 to £20,000 or more. Lilo, a London web agency, says £1,500 to £5,000 a month is the realistic band for most small and mid-sized businesses. Both guides were published in 2026:
- Freelancers: about £300 to £2,500 a month
- Agencies: about £1,500 to £20,000+ a month
- Most smaller firms: about £1,500 to £5,000 a month
We could not find an independent survey of UK SEO prices. These figures come from agencies’ own pricing guides, checked in November 2026, so treat them as a rough guide and ask every provider for an hourly rate as well as a monthly fee.
How many hours does a monthly fee buy?
Divide the fee by the hourly rate. Here is £2,000 a month at three points in the UK range:
Now set those hours against the work. Our estimate is that a properly researched 2,000-word page, say a guide to IR35 for firms that hire contractors, takes a writer about a working day. The ProCopywriters 2026 survey of 573 UK commercial writers puts the median freelance day rate at £440, which is why our pricing puts a 2,000-word article at about £350 from a freelance writer and about £800 from an agency.
At agency rates, 13 to 20 hours is two pages and not much more: no fixes to the service pages you already have, no technical work, no report. So put two questions to every provider: how many hours does the fee cover, and what will be new or changed on our site at the end of the month?
Should you pay by the hour, the month or the project?
Lilo’s guide gives monthly retainers from about £500 to over £10,000, and hourly consulting from about £40 to over £300. The third option is a fixed price for a single job.
- By the hourA second opinion, a review of how quote requests reach you, or one technical question.
- By the projectA job with a clear finish, such as moving to a new CMS without losing your service and location pages.
- By the monthWork that has to keep going: new service and location pages, fixes to old ones and checks on AI answers.
For a service business we would choose monthly. Services and sectors change, buyers keep asking new questions and AI answers shift from one run to the next, so the work is never really finished.
Is an in-house SEO cheaper?
By the hour, usually. Indeed’s UK salary data puts the average SEO specialist at £36,188 a year, from 400 reported salaries (updated 6 November 2026). That is about £3,000 a month before employer’s National Insurance, pension and tools. But it buys one person, who has to research, write, fix, build and report alone, and someone in your business has to manage them.
Does AI visibility cost extra?
Some agencies quote it as a separate line. Before you pay twice, read Google’s guidance on its AI features: there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” Most of what gets a law firm, an MSP or a recruiter named in ChatGPT and other AI answers is ordinary SEO done well.
The genuine extra is measurement. Tracking tools put your buyers’ questions to AI engines on a schedule and count how often you are named, for a monthly fee. They show where you stand, but someone still has to change the pages. Here is how one of them, Peec AI, compares.
What should worry you at any price?
- A promised rankingGoogle’s own advice on hiring an SEO: “If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.”
- Paid linksGoogle’s spam policies count “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as link spam, and warn that “sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
What does IndexFirst cost?
We run one plan, for UK service businesses that sell to other businesses. Each month it covers up to 12 in-depth articles, 50+ fixes to existing pages, index checks, comparison pages and free tools, tracking and fixes in AI answers, and a weekly report of what moved. We estimate that hiring all of that out costs about £22,000 a month at agency rates, or about £8,000 with freelancers you manage yourself. The working is here.
We charge £1,750 a month, or £1,500 a month on a 12-month contract. Changes go live on your site every working day, and we check each one before it does. We promise the work, not a ranking.