SEO pricing, honestly
How much does SEO cost for a small business?
There's no fixed industry price, because SEO work varies hugely by competition and scope. As a transparent example, our own ongoing SEO runs at £395/month for Growth and £695/month for Scale, kept separate from £49/month Managed Hosting & Care — but the right figure for your business depends on the market you're actually competing in.
Our figures, as an example
Two retainers, used here to show where the money goes.
Growth SEO is £395/month and covers ongoing on-page optimisation, technical checks, local search work where relevant and up to one substantial new page a month. Scale SEO is £695/month, for businesses that need broader research, more frequent content and a deeper competitive strategy.
Neither includes Managed Hosting & Care, which sits at £49/month separately, because keeping a website running and improving its visibility are genuinely different jobs.
The full breakdown of what each retainer includes is on our pricing page — we're using our own numbers here to be concrete rather than vague about "it depends".
What actually changes the price
Why market rates vary so much.
Competition
Ranking above three sleepy competitors is a different job to ranking above twenty who are already doing the work properly.
Location
A national campaign covering dozens of towns takes more research and content than one focused, well-defined local area.
Number of services
Each genuine service you sell usually needs its own page, its own research and its own ongoing attention.
Website condition
A technically sound site with existing rankings starts from a stronger position than one with years of neglect to undo first.
Current authority
A newer or lesser-known site typically needs more groundwork before it can compete for the same terms as an established one.
Content requirements
Some strategies need one strong page a month; others need a steady stream of new, well-researched content.
Technical work
Sites with structural problems — slow pages, indexing issues, messy architecture — need that fixed before anything else pays off.
National vs local targeting
Chasing a national keyword is a longer, more resource-heavy campaign than earning visibility in a defined local area.
Cheap SEO, calmly
Why very cheap SEO struggles to fund meaningful work.
Genuine SEO work — research, content, technical fixes, monitoring — takes real hours every month. At a very low monthly price, there usually isn't enough time available to do much beyond a light check-in, whoever is providing it.
That doesn't mean every low-cost provider is acting in bad faith, or that cheap SEO is automatically harmful. It usually means the scope is narrower than the price tag might suggest — worth knowing before you judge the results.
The honest question to ask any provider, at any price, is simply: what will you actually do for that each month?
What should happen each month
A reasonable ongoing SEO retainer should include this.
- Reviewing Search Console data and current performance
- Checking what competitors are doing differently
- Improving existing pages rather than only building new ones
- Tightening titles, metadata and internal links
- Running technical checks so nothing is quietly holding the site back
- Working on local visibility and Google Business Profile where relevant
- Researching and building new content where the strategy calls for it
- Reporting back in plain English, with recommendations for next month
If a business only needs work in a defined area, our local SEO service sets out what that looks like specifically.
Before you ask
SEO cost questions, without the mystique.
Not sure what your site needs yet? Start with an SEO audit, or read about technical SEO and on-page SEO. Full package details on our pricing page.
Next step
Not sure what you'd actually need?
Tell us about your market.
Send us your website and a sense of who you're competing with. We'll give you an honest read on what ongoing SEO would realistically involve.