How much does SEO cost? A UK agency answers honestly

Everyone who enquires about SEO asks this first, and the honest answer is the one nobody wants: how long is a piece of string. That is a terrible answer on its own, so here is the useful version. What the price actually depends on, what separates a cheap contract from a serious one, and the point at which you should not be buying SEO at all.

The short version. SEO is priced on time and expertise, so the cost is set by how competitive your market is, how big and how messy your website is, and how much work it takes to compete with the people already ranking. Industry averages exist. They are close to useless, because the only number that matters is what your competitors are spending on the keywords you want.

In Rory's words

Nobody can do SEO for £300.

The difference between a £300 and a £3,000 a month contract comes down to time and expertise.

Nobody truly knows what the Google algorithm actually does and how it works.

Go with them then. Give me a call in six months.

Rory Mason, CEO, 21 Degrees Digital

Why nobody can give you a single price

Every company is different, every market is different, and the gap between them is enormous. An agency that tells you it can get you to the top of Google for a fixed monthly fee might be telling the truth. It might also be a tenth of what the job actually needs.

The variable is not really your website. It is everyone else's. If the companies you want to outrank are spending six figures a month on the keywords you want, a few hundred pounds will not register. The same budget in a quieter market could put you top of the page.

Your competitors set your price, not your budget

Take trainers. You can spend whatever you like trying to rank for "trainers" and you are still competing with Adidas and Nike, who have more money, more links and more authority than you. That fight is not winnable at any budget you would sensibly spend.

Now take something genuinely niche, a specialist product sold to a small industry. Far fewer people are competing, the search volumes are lower, and the work needed to own that space costs a fraction of the trainers fight and is worth considerably more to you.

So the first honest question an agency should ask is not what your budget is. It is what you are trying to rank for, and who is already there.

Why nobody can do SEO for £300 a month

You can buy SEO for £300 a month. You cannot buy SEO that works for £300 a month, and it is worth understanding what you are getting instead.

Those packages usually run on old tactics. Buying links. Generating blog posts for the sake of having published something. Generic content aimed at easy wins that nobody searches for, uploaded so there is an activity report to show you at the end of the month. You can get to the top of Google for £300, as long as nobody asks which keyword you got there for.

The difference between that and a serious contract is time and expertise. Anyone can sell SEO now. Anyone can prompt a chatbot into producing fifty blog posts. What you are paying for at the higher end is someone who knows which fifty would be worth writing, and which fifty would waste your year.

Why your first month might produce nothing at all

This is the part that feels worst and matters most.

A proper start means research. Keyword research, competitor analysis, gap analysis, understanding how your market actually searches and where the openings are. That work can absorb a serious chunk of early budget without a single new page going live on your website.

It is still the better way round. For a few hundred pounds you might have had two blog posts by now, badly researched and aimed at nothing in particular. The alternative is a plan that makes the next twelve months count.

There is a way to soften the wait, and we use it. Interviewing you produces transcripts, which produce early pages built on opportunities spotted during the sales process, which can start earning while the technical audit and the keyword strategy run in the background. You get value in month one without skipping the research.

Why SEO is sold on a monthly retainer

Most agencies price SEO as a monthly retainer, and the reason is simply that SEO is slow. You do not publish a page and rank. Google needs time to recrawl your site and work out where you now sit in the market. In a world where everyone wants results immediately, that is an uncomfortable sell, and it is still how the work behaves.

Retainers are not the only option. Project-based work makes sense when you have a specific problem, usually technical: bring an agency in, fix the broken links and the structural issues, then build on that yourself. Revenue share exists too, and it rarely works out well for either side.

What a retainer buys, done properly, is research first, then a six to twelve month plan, with a quarterly pause to review the plan and check nothing has shifted underneath it.

Anyone who guarantees results is selling you something they cannot deliver

Walk away. Immediately.

Nobody outside Google knows exactly how the algorithm works, and the evidence suggests Google does not fully know either. We have ideas, evidence and research. We have read the documents that came out of Google's court proceedings in the United States. What none of that produces is certainty, partly because the algorithm changes constantly, sometimes many times within a single month.

Your rankings can move because of your backlinks, your competitors, a technical change, or the algorithm behaving in a way that makes no sense to anyone looking at it. So no honest agency can look you in the eye and promise you a position.

What we can do is show you the work, show you where it has worked before, and give you an informed estimate of where you should land and what it should be worth. If you are choosing between that and someone offering a guarantee, go with them. Then call us in six months. Nine times out of ten, that call ends with the same sentence, and it is some version of "we wish we'd gone with you".

What does an SEO audit cost?

It depends almost entirely on the size and state of your website, and the range is wide enough that quoting a single number would be dishonest.

An audit of a five-page brochure site is not a big piece of work. There is a limited amount that can be wrong with it, and we have often done that as part of the sales process at no charge. An audit of a site with 15,000 products is a different proposition entirely, running to weeks of work and producing a detailed list of everything that needs fixing.

What pushes it up: the size of the site, the platform it is built on, how much of it has been assembled quickly or generated without much thought, and how much digging it takes to find the real problems.

Why technical SEO always comes first

Picture your website as a boat. If the hull is full of holes, it does not matter how good everything else is. You can have beautiful pages and genuinely excellent content, and the thing still sinks.

That is why a technical audit comes before the content plan . Fixing the structure first means everything you spend afterwards actually floats.

How to work out your budget

The rule of thumb: spend around 10% of the revenue you want to achieve on marketing. Not the revenue you have, the revenue you are aiming at. Then put a meaningful share of that into SEO.

The reason SEO deserves that share is that it does not stay in its lane. A technical audit improves your PPC landing pages. Content made for search gets reused in outbound email. The work that makes you visible in search feeds your social output too. Put SEO at the centre of the ecosystem and the rest of the budget works harder.

When SEO is not your first move

If your entire marketing budget for the year is small, SEO is probably the wrong place to start, and we will tell you that rather than take the money.

Paid media gives you an instant return. Spend on ads, get traffic today, and if the campaign is set up properly, get back a multiple of what you put in. That is a far better use of a modest budget than a slow-burn channel that needs months before it reports anything.

The move is to let paid media fund the switch. As the returns come in, reinvest some into SEO so you stop renting your traffic and start owning it. There is also a turnover level below which the maths simply does not favour an agency retainer, and for businesses under it, a good freelance technical SEO will do more for you than we would.

Local SEO you should do yourself

If you run a single-location business, a lot of local SEO is genuinely DIY. Your Google Business Profile, your opening hours, your photos, your reviews, your location pages. None of it needs an agency, and plenty of it can be done on an evening in front of the telly.

Paying for local SEO starts making sense when you have multiple locations competing with each other, or when the local search results in your category are genuinely contested.

What pushes the price up

Scale and friction, mostly. E-commerce sites with thousands of products take longer than brochure sites. Enterprise clients come with approval chains, where work goes to one department, then another, then legal, and comes back three months later untouched while the retainer has been running the whole time. A difficult CMS can double the time every change takes.

We also price differently from agencies that only do the strategy, because we do the implementation too. Handing you a document and wishing you luck is cheaper. It is also how most SEO strategies end up in a drawer.

AI made content cheap. Attention got expensive.

The obvious objection to all of this is that AI should have made SEO cheaper. It has made producing content cheaper, which is a different thing entirely.

Everyone has the same tools now, so the internet is filling with competent, forgettable pages. Standing out costs more than it used to, because the bar for being noticed moved while the bar for publishing collapsed. A strategy that worked in 2023 looks nothing like one that works now, and the budget has to follow the work rather than the output. We have run that experiment on our own website and published what happened.

Find out what it would cost for you

We offer a free digital marketing audit covering SEO, paid media and GEO. We look at your site, your market and who you are up against, then tell you what the work would actually involve and whether SEO is the right place for your budget right now. If you are still weighing up whether you need an agency at all, we have written about that too .

Sometimes the answer is that it is not. We would rather say so than take a retainer that was never going to work.

Book your free digital marketing audit and we will tell you what the work would actually involve.