Most UK businesses pay between £300 and £2,000 a month for SEO. Future Faced starts at £700 a month, with a £400 local option for businesses that only need the map and review side handled.
This guide covers what those figures buy, what the cheaper and dearer options look like, and how long it takes before any of it pays back. Every figure here is current as of 9 September 2026.
How much does SEO cost in the UK?
An ongoing SEO retainer in the UK costs between £300 and £2,000 a month, with a small number of national and e-commerce businesses paying more. One-off work runs from £500 for a basic audit to £15,000 or more for a large site migration.
The range is wide because the work is wide. A single-location trade business and a national retailer are both “doing SEO”, and the second one needs roughly ten times the hours.
If you searched this question before landing here, Google’s AI summary will have given you a similar range. Worth knowing where that comes from: it is assembled from pricing guides published by SEO agencies, so it is the market describing its own fees rather than an independent survey. It is a reasonable guide to what people charge. It is not evidence of what the work is worth.
If you want a one-off piece of work instead of a monthly arrangement, the going rates are:
- SEO audit: £500 to £7,500, depending on the size of the site and how deep the analysis goes
- Site migration: £1,000 to £15,000, to move a site without losing the traffic it already has
- Content: £150 to £500 per optimised page or article
One thing to watch for as you read around. SEO pricing guides go out of date quickly and most of them don’t say when they were written. I checked the market range twice in the first week of September 2026 and it moved by a few hundred pounds at both ends between the two checks. Look for a date on anything you read, including this. This one says 9 September 2026 and I will update it rather than quietly leave it up.
How much is SEO per month in the UK?
Monthly SEO in the UK falls into three bands. Local SEO for single-location businesses runs £300 to £800 a month. Small business SEO for regional or moderately competitive markets runs £500 to £2,000. Enterprise and national SEO runs £2,000 to £5,000 and up.
Future Faced sits at £700 a month, which is the lower half of the small business band. The £400 local starter sits in the middle of the local band.
I’m stating that plainly because most agency pricing pages don’t. They either publish nothing and ask you to enquire, or they publish three tiers called Bronze, Silver and Gold with a list of deliverables that was written to fill the table. When one Hampshire agency’s own FAQ page answers the pricing question with “we’re rarely the cheapest option”, that is about as specific as the market gets.
What’s included in an SEO package?
It depends on what your site needs, and any provider who quotes you a fixed list of deliverables before looking at your site is selling you a package instead of a plan.
What stays the same for every client I work with:
- A diagnosis before any work starts. A technical crawl, keyword research, and a look at who currently ranks for the terms you want.
- A prioritised plan you can read, so you know what is being done and why.
- Work every month against that plan.
- A monthly report in plain English, including in the months where not much moved.
- You deal with me. Nothing is passed to juniors.
What varies is where the work goes:
- New pages, or fixing the ones you already have
- Location pages, if you serve more than one town
- Technical work: speed, structure, crawl errors, indexing
- Local SEO: Google Business Profile, reviews, citations
- Content
- Links
- AI search visibility, so you get cited in ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers as well as ranked
A plumber with a good site and no Google Business Profile needs the local work first. A consultancy with a slow site and thin service pages needs technical fixes and new pages. A retailer that already ranks needs links and content. Same monthly fee, different month.
The diagnosis in month one decides the mix. That is why I don’t publish a deliverable count. The number would either be a lie or a ceiling.
Is SEO still worth it in 2026?
Yes. AI search has made it matter more, because the signals that rank a page in Google are the same ones that get it cited in an AI answer.
When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode for a web designer in Southampton, the answer draws on pages that are well structured, clearly written, consistently described across the web, and linked to by other sites. That is the SEO checklist. Businesses that skipped SEO because “AI will change everything” are now invisible in both places.
What has changed is where the clicks go. AI Overviews answer some questions without a click, so organic traffic for informational searches is down across most industries. For commercial searches, where someone wants to hire or buy, the click still happens, and it still goes to whoever is ranked and cited. That is where the money is, and it is where the work should go.
The AI side gets its own page shortly. For now, the short version is that it is included in the monthly work at Future Faced and isn’t sold as an extra.
Is it worth paying for SEO services?
It is worth paying for SEO if customers search for what you sell and you are not showing up when they do.
The first half is easy to check. Search for your main service and your town and see who appears. If it is your competitors and not you, that is the gap. If nobody appears because nobody searches for it, SEO is not your channel and I would say so in the first call.
Revive Windows is a Southampton double glazing installer run by Mark, who has been in the trade over thirty years and will try to repair a window before selling anyone a replacement. After building their site, I spent six months on on-page improvements and links from reputable sites. Enquiries rose by more than 114% across that period. That is a business whose customers were already searching and were not finding them.
The other test is arithmetic. If a new customer is worth £1,500 to you and £700 a month brings in one extra a month by month six, it has paid for itself twice over. If a customer is worth £80, the sums need volume that a local business rarely has, and I would point you at something cheaper than me.
How much should I expect to pay for SEO?
Expect to pay £500 to £2,000 a month for SEO done by a person who looks at your site. Below £300 a month, be careful. Above £2,000, you should be a national business or in a competitive industry.
What each price point tends to buy:
Under £200 a month. Avoid this bracket. Do the arithmetic: SEO is hours of manual work, and £200 buys three or four hours of anyone’s time. Nobody audits a site, writes content, fixes technical problems and builds links in four hours a month. What you get instead is an automated report, content generated in bulk, and links from sites you would not want your business associated with. I have taken over sites that spent two years in this bracket and the first job was undoing the damage. It is the bracket that gives SEO its reputation.
£300 to £800 a month. Local SEO done properly. Google Business Profile optimisation, reviews, citations, map visibility, some on-page work. Enough for a single-location business in a normal market. The Future Faced local starter at £400 sits here and covers that local layer only, with no technical work.
£700 to £1,500 a month. The full process described above, applied to a small or regional business. Technical fixes, new pages, content, local work and links, in whatever order the diagnosis puts them. This is where Future Faced’s £700 sits, and it is the fee most Hampshire businesses that come to me end up on.
£2,000 and up. National or e-commerce, competitive niches, large sites. More hours, more content, more link work. If that is you, £700 a month with me won’t be enough, and I will say so before taking the fee.
Should I hire an SEO company or do it myself?
You can do some SEO yourself, and if money is tight you should. The question is whether your hours are worth more doing that than doing your actual job.
The parts you can do yourself:
- Claiming and filling in your Google Business Profile
- Asking happy customers for Google reviews
- Making sure your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear online
- Writing a clear page for each service you offer
Do those four things and you will be ahead of a lot of your competitors. It is the work I would do in a first month anyway, and it is yours for free.
The parts you can’t: technical audits, keyword research with real data, deciding which pages to build and which to leave, link acquisition, and knowing which of last month’s changes worked. Those take tools that cost money and judgement that takes years. That is what you are paying for.
If you want to try the DIY route first, do. Come back when you have done the four things above and want to know what is next. I would rather work with someone who has done the basics than charge them for it.
How long does it take to see SEO results?
Three to six months for measurable movement, six to twelve for meaningful traffic. Anyone promising rankings in 30 days is either lying or working on a site with no competition.
The first month is diagnosis and quick technical wins. Months two to four are the priority work, usually new or rebuilt pages, which then take a few weeks to be indexed and start ranking. From month four or five the early work starts compounding, and by month six there is usually enough data to see what is working and adjust.
Inamigo helps executives, founders and senior professionals build their personal brand on LinkedIn, with clients across private healthcare and cyber security. Their site brought in over 4,400 clicks from Google in its first five months. That is a fast result and I would not promise it to everyone. It came from a site built properly from the start and a market with a clear gap in it.
This timeline is why the Future Faced initial term is six months. The expensive work is front-loaded: the audit, the technical fixes, the rebuilt pages. A client who stops at month two has had most of that work and none of the results, and I have done the hardest months for a fraction of the fee. Six months covers the period where the work pays back. After that it is rolling monthly and you can stop with a month’s notice.
I’m telling you that here instead of in a contract because you should know the terms before you get in touch.
How much should SEO cost for a small business?
A small business in Southampton, Hampshire or anywhere else in the UK should expect to pay £400 to £1,000 a month for SEO done by someone who has looked at their site. Here is what SEO from Future Faced costs.
SEO: from £700 a month. The full process. Diagnosis, plan, monthly work across technical, content, local, links and AI visibility, and a monthly report. Fixed price agreed before we start, based on the diagnosis. Six-month initial term, then rolling monthly. You can move up to a larger scope at any point.
Local SEO starter: £400 a month. The local layer only. Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, map visibility. No technical work, no new pages. For a single-location business whose site is already in good shape.
Larger scopes: priced on the work. A fixed monthly figure agreed before starting. No hourly billing, no surprise invoices.
Three commitments on every arrangement:
- You own everything. Google Analytics, Search Console, your Business Profile, every page and every piece of content, all in your name.
- The monthly price is fixed before we start and doesn’t change without your agreement.
- You work directly with me from the first call onward.
No guaranteed rankings, because nobody can promise what Google does. The three commitments above are the ones I can keep.
Next step
If you want a figure for your business instead of a range, get in touch or message on WhatsApp. I will look at the site, tell you which band it is in, and tell you if it isn’t worth doing.
If you are weighing this up against the cost of a new website, the website cost guide covers that side.
