How much does SEO cost in the UK?

How much does SEO cost per month in the UK?

Most SEO is bought as a monthly plan, because the work that moves a site up is done month after month: new pages and articles, fixes, and checking what changed. Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO providers and found the most common monthly retainer was $501 to $1,000, chosen by 20.4% of them. That survey is worldwide and priced in dollars.

The firmer UK figure is the day rate. ITJobsWatch puts the median daily rate for SEO contract work in the UK at £468 over the six months to 9 November 2026, up from £350 a year earlier. The best way to judge any monthly fee is by the work it delivers each month.

With Fixr Systems the monthly price is published and fixed: SEO and AI search is £500 a month for SEO Growth or £300 for SEO Essentials, with what each month includes written down before you start.

How much does SEO cost per hour in the UK?

SEO is rarely sold by the hour, but the day rates translate. At the ITJobsWatch median of £468 a day, an hour comes to about £62 across a seven and a half hour day. YunoJuno, a freelancer marketplace, puts the average day rate for a freelance SEO consultant at £374.

Hourly billing suits a one-off job, such as fixing a problem a report has found. For the ongoing work that grows a site, a monthly plan with fixed deliverables is easier to budget and easier to hold to account.

What should a monthly SEO fee include?

A monthly SEO fee should buy work you can see. The three things to look for are new content, fixes and reporting.

New content means pages and articles written for the searches your customers make, because that is what gives Google more to show. Fixes means somebody checking the site every month for technical problems and correcting them, not just listing them. Reporting means a plain monthly report on where you appear, how many people found you and what was done.

Each of our plans includes all three: SEO Growth is 6 SEO articles a month, SEO Essentials is 3, and both come with a technical health check every month, the fixes it finds, and a full monthly report.

What changes the price of SEO?

How hard your searches are to win comes first. A national search with established competitors takes more work than a local one, which is why local SEO for the towns you cover is the usual starting point for a business that serves an area.

How many services and places you want to be found for comes next, because each needs a page. Then the state of the site: a site with technical problems or very few pages needs that put right before new content can do its job.

The last is how fast you want to move. More articles a month means more searches covered sooner, which is the difference between our two plans.

Retainer, project or hourly: which do you need?

A monthly retainer is for growing a site over time, and it is how most SEO is sold. A one-off project suits a defined job, such as a new site built with SEO in from the start, which is how every Fixr Systems website is built. Hourly suits a small fix.

If you are not sure where you stand, our free SEO audit scores your site on screen and shows what to fix first, before you spend anything.

How to compare two SEO quotes

Put the quotes side by side and ask the same five questions of each: what exactly is delivered each month, who does the work, whether there is a minimum term and what leaving costs, who owns the content once it is written, and whether the price includes VAT.

A quote that cannot answer the first question in writing is hard to judge, because you have nothing to check the months against. With Fixr Systems the answers are published: the articles and fixes each month are on the pricing page, the owner does the work himself, the plans are rolling monthly with no minimum term and 30 days' notice to stop, the content is yours, and there is no VAT to add.

What SEO costs with Fixr Systems

SEO Growth is £500 a month for 6 SEO articles, for a business that wants to grow faster than its competitors. SEO Essentials is £300 a month for 3 SEO articles, for a business that wants to keep climbing on Google. Both include a technical health check every month, with the problems it finds fixed on the work we look after, and a full monthly report, and both are rolling monthly with no minimum term.

Every plan covers AI search as well as Google, because the same pages that rank are the ones AI assistants quote. Local SEO is the same plans aimed at the towns and services you cover, with your Google Business Profile looked after.

Is paying for SEO worth it?

Yes, when your customers search before they buy, because it puts you in front of them at the moment they are choosing. It is measured in enquiries, not just positions.

SV Autos, a mobile mechanic whose site we built, reached position 1 on Google for van servicing 16 days after launch and had its first enquiry through the site about a week after going live, measured in Search Console. That is what a site built for search, and kept growing every month, is for.

Can I do SEO on my own?

You can do the basics yourself: keep your Google Business Profile complete, ask every customer for a review, and make sure each service you sell has its own page.

What takes the time is the monthly work after that: researching what people search, writing the articles, finding and fixing technical problems, and tracking what moved. That is what a plan takes off your hands, so the time goes back into running the business.

Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?

SEO is evolving, not dead. People still search on Google, and more of them now ask AI assistants too, which build their answers from pages they can find and trust.

That makes the same work count twice. Two sites we built, UK Homesteading and Asbestos Specialists UK, were cited by Microsoft Copilot more than 36,000 and 24,393 times in under four months from launch, measured in Bing Webmaster Tools. That is why our plans are SEO and AI search together.