This is one of the most common questions I get, and it's one of the hardest to answer well because the range is genuinely enormous. SEO can cost £200 a month or £20,000 a month. Both exist. Neither figure tells you much on its own without knowing what's included and what results are realistic.
Let me give you real numbers and explain what they mean.
What freelance SEO consultants typically charge in the UK
Freelance SEO consultants in the UK generally charge between £400 and £1,000 per month on a retainer basis, with significant variation depending on specialism, experience, and geography.
At the lower end of that range, you're typically working with someone earlier in their career or someone doing SEO as part of a broader generalist offering. At £400-£600 a month, you should expect basic on-page optimisation, some content recommendations, and monthly reporting. That's often enough for a business in a low-competition local market with a well-structured site.
At £700-£1,000 per month, you're typically accessing more experienced practitioners with a track record across multiple clients. This level should include a thorough initial audit, ongoing technical monitoring, content strategy, link building outreach, and proper reporting tied to business outcomes.
Above £1,000 a month from a freelancer, you're usually looking at someone with a strong specialism (e-commerce SEO, technical SEO, enterprise-level experience) or a demonstrable track record of significant results in competitive markets.
Hourly rates for project work tend to run from £60 to £150 an hour for an experienced freelance SEO.
What small agencies charge
Small SEO agencies in the UK (typically five to fifteen staff, serving SME clients) generally charge between £800 and £2,000 per month.
At £800-£1,200 a month from a small agency, you'll typically get a junior or mid-level account executive running the day-to-day work, with oversight from a more senior person. The quality of what you receive depends heavily on how experienced that junior person is and how closely they're supervised. Ask who specifically will be working on your account.
At £1,500-£2,000 a month from a smaller agency, you should be getting more experienced hands on your account, a documented strategy, regular reporting, and some form of content creation or link building included in the fee.
One important note: agencies at this level often include a setup or onboarding fee, ranging from £500 to £2,000, that you pay before any ongoing work begins.
What large agencies charge
Mid-size and large SEO agencies in the UK typically start at £2,000 per month and can go well above £10,000 per month for competitive national or international campaigns.
At this level you're paying for dedicated teams, proprietary tools, and the agency's overhead and margin. The work quality at the top end of this range can be genuinely excellent. But it's also where the gap between what was promised and what is delivered can be widest, because larger agencies have more resources dedicated to winning business than smaller ones do.
For most local or regional businesses in the UK, spending more than £2,000 per month on SEO only makes sense if your market is genuinely competitive nationally and the returns from ranking justify the investment. A local solicitors firm in North Wales does not need a £5,000-a-month agency. A national comparison website does.
Why cheap SEO is a real risk
There is a market for SEO at £99 a month or £200 a month. These services exist and some businesses buy them. The problem is that at that price point, the only way to deliver anything at scale is automation, bulk content creation, and link schemes.
Bulk link schemes (paying for links from low-quality directories and link networks, building private blog networks, buying links from sites that sell them to anyone) can produce short-term ranking improvements and long-term penalties. Google's algorithms are specifically designed to detect and demote sites that use them. A manual action from Google (a penalty applied by a human reviewer) can effectively remove a site from search results entirely.
Recovering from a link penalty takes months of work and often costs more than the original cheap SEO would have saved. I've worked with businesses where the first job was unpicking the damage done by a previous provider charging £150 a month.
I worked with a North Wales hospitality business who had paid £189 a month to an SEO firm for 18 months. When I audited their site, it had 340 toxic backlinks from gambling and casino sites, a robots.txt file that was blocking Google from crawling half their pages, and content that had been auto-generated with their location name inserted at random intervals. Their rankings had actually declined over that period. The cleanup took four months and cost more than their original SEO contract. The lesson isn't just that cheap SEO wastes money. It's that it can set you back further than when you started.
Cheap SEO also typically means thin, low-quality content generated at volume. This content might rank briefly in some circumstances, but it doesn't convert visitors and it doesn't build the kind of authority that produces sustained rankings.
What a proper SEO retainer includes
A proper SEO engagement for an SME should include a technical audit at the start that covers crawl errors, indexing issues, site speed, mobile performance, structured data, and internal linking. Without this baseline, you're working blind.
Ongoing on-page optimisation means reviewing and improving existing pages: title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, content relevance, and internal link structure. This is the consistent work that accumulates over time.
Content strategy and production means identifying what your target audience is actually searching for, creating pages or blog posts that address those searches, and building topical authority in your market over time.
Link building means earning links from relevant, legitimate websites: local press, industry associations, partners, and other sources that Google treats as credible. Not buying links, not directory spam.
Reporting means monthly or quarterly updates showing rankings, traffic, and most importantly whether more of the right people are finding you and taking action. Rankings are a means to an end, not the end itself.
The thing most pricing guides don't tell you
The SEO market has a pricing paradox: the businesses that need to spend the most are often the ones that can afford the least, and the ones with large budgets often spend it on brand-name agencies who put a junior on the account. For a North Wales SME, the best value is usually a specialist freelancer who does the work themselves. You're not paying for office space, account management layers, or pitching overhead. A freelancer charging £600-£800 a month is often doing more substantive work than an agency charging three times that.
Where my pricing sits
I work primarily with small businesses in North Wales and beyond. My SEO retainers start at £500 per month. What that gets you is direct access to me (not a junior account manager), a proper technical audit to start, ongoing on-page work, content strategy guidance, and monthly reporting.
I keep my client numbers manageable so I can do the work properly. I'm not running fifty accounts on autopilot. If I can't take something on, I'll say so.
This post is deliberately the kind of transparent, useful resource that I wish existed when I was looking for this information. If you're trying to work out what a reasonable SEO budget looks like for your business, and what to expect at that budget, my SEO service for North Wales businesses is the natural next step to explore.
For help choosing the right provider once you've established your budget, read how to choose an SEO company in North Wales. For context on how local SEO fits into all of this for businesses serving a specific area, local SEO for small businesses covers the specific tactics that matter most.
