What SEO Actually Costs in the UK in 2026

Ask what SEO costs and you get a shrug and the phrase "it depends". Which is true, and useless.

So I went and collected actual published prices from UK agencies. Not estimates, not ranges from a blog post that cites another blog post. Prices an agency puts on its own website with its own name attached. Here is the whole picture, from £99 a month to £24,000, and what you get at each end.

One thing to hold in mind throughout: nearly every source of pricing information in this industry is an agency arguing that its own price point is the correct one. That includes me. So I have named who published each figure, and where a claim is self-serving I have said so.

The published UK price ladder

All fetched 25 July 2026 from the agencies' own pricing pages.

The shape is worth noticing. The gap between £399 and £799 is not really a gap in quality, it is a gap in time. Whitehat are explicit about it: their tiers are priced in hours. Five to ten hours a month at the bottom, fifty to a hundred at the top. Everything else follows from that.

What you are actually buying below £400

Almost every agency above the budget tier will tell you that sub-£500 SEO is worthless. They would say that. But look at what the budget packages themselves list, and they are not hiding anything: keyword tracking, directory submissions, a monthly report, some on-page tweaks.

That is real work. It is just mostly set up once work, plus automated reporting, sold monthly. If your site has never had any technical attention at all, the first month of that is genuinely valuable. Month seven is a different question.

The honest test is not the price, it is what changes. Ask any provider at any price: what will be different on my site at the end of this month that was not true at the start? If the answer is "you will get a report", you are paying for a report.

Sector pricing, where it gets expensive

Specialist agencies charge more, and the gap is bigger than most business owners expect.

• Dental. Dominate Dental, a dental-only agency, publish London pricing from £2,000 to £3,500 a month at entry level, rising to £6,000 to £12,000 for what they call market leading. Nationally they quote £1,800 to £3,000 entry. A cross-check from Whitehat puts smaller practices at £800 to £1,500 and three-plus dentist practices at £2,000 to £5,000, often with a setup fee of £500 to £1,500 on top.
• Legal. £500 to £5,000 a month is the published range. Aqueous Digital list packages from £1,500 plus VAT.
• Aesthetic clinics. £750 to £2,000 typical. Pure Aesthetics Marketing publish a standard fee of £1,200 a month. Aesthetic Launch Lab start retainers at £750, with full setup from £3,500.
• Accountancy. £750 to £2,500 typical, with one agency publishing packages at £450 and £750 plus VAT.
• Trades. The cheapest specialist market. SEO Bridge publish £250, £450 and £850 tiers. Trade Pixels quote £500 to £700 entry, £800 to £1,000 in competitive areas.
• Chiropractic and physio. Published figures conflict wildly, from £100 to £300 a month for single-site clinics up to £3,000. Nobody in that sector seems to agree what it is worth.
• Veterinary. Specialist agencies exist. Not one publishes a price. Make of that what you will.

The pattern is straightforward: the more a single new customer is worth, the more the sector gets charged. A dental implant patient is worth thousands, so dental SEO costs thousands. It is not that dentists get better work. It is that they can bear more.

What a one-off audit costs

Published UK prices for a standalone technical audit:

• Focused or budget audit: £300 to £800. WebPulse SEO publish a technical audit at £499.
• Small site, under 100 pages, fuller audit: £500 to £2,500.
• Medium site: £2,500 to £5,000.
• Large site, 500 pages and up: £5,000 to £15,000 and beyond.

Across every source, an audit is priced at roughly one to three months of the equivalent retainer, and it is openly positioned as a way into a monthly contract rather than as a product in its own right. That is not a criticism, it is just worth knowing which one you are being sold.

What AEO and GEO cost, and the thing worth noticing

AI visibility is the new line item. Answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation, LLM visibility, take your pick of acronym.

Whitehat SEO publish theirs openly, which is more than most do:

Now compare those bands with the same agency's SEO retainer bands further up this page. They mirror each other almost exactly.

That does not automatically mean the work is fake. Prompt research and citation tracking are genuinely new, and somebody has to do them. But look at what sits underneath: schema markup, entity consistency, answer-shaped content. Every one of those is a long-standing SEO task with a new label on it.

So the question to ask is not "do you do AEO". It is: which parts of this are things you would not have done for me under an SEO retainer, and what are they? A good supplier will answer that happily. It is a fair question and there are real answers to it.

Worth adding: no UK provider I could find publishes outcome-based pricing for AI visibility. Nobody charges per confirmed citation. Everything is time and retainer, structured exactly like legacy SEO. Which is sensible, because nobody can control what an assistant says, but it does undercut the idea that this is a fundamentally different product.

What UK small businesses actually spend on marketing

I wanted to give you a proper benchmark here and I could not, and the reason is more interesting than the answer would have been.

There is no authoritative UK survey of small-business marketing spend. I checked. The Longitudinal Small Business Survey, the government's own SME survey, does not ask the question at all. It covers performance, finance, exporting, innovation, obstacles, training and technology. Marketing spend is not in it. The FSB's Small Business Index does not break it out. Neither does the British Chambers of Commerce Quarterly Economic Survey, which is the largest independent business survey in the country. Nor Xero Small Business Insights.

The figures that circulate, things like "7.7% of revenue" or "58% spend under £250 a month", trace back either to Gartner's CMO survey, which samples marketing leaders at much larger and largely American organisations, or to vendor content with no survey behind it at all. One widely repeated figure is attributed to the Longitudinal Small Business Survey, which as established does not ask about marketing spend.

So if someone shows you a benchmark for what businesses like yours spend, ask where it came from. There is a decent chance the honest answer is nowhere.

What Google itself says about hiring an SEO

Google publish guidance on this and hardly anybody reads it. The useful parts:

• Nobody can guarantee a number one ranking. Google says this outright.
• No SEO has a special relationship with Google. Google states plainly that it never accepts payment for better organic ranking or for inclusion, and that appearing in organic results is free.
• Expect four months to a year between making changes and seeing benefit. Anyone promising fast guaranteed results is contradicting the search engine they are optimising for.
• Vague approaches are singled out as a warning sign. The test Google effectively sets is whether someone can tell you something specific and checkable about your actual site, or whether they are reciting the same pitch they send everyone.
• Give read-only Search Console access during an audit, never write access.
• Link schemes and mass search-engine submission services are described as typically useless.

If a pitch conflicts with any of that, the pitch is wrong and Google's documentation is the thing you can point at.

A note on cost per click, since it comes up

People often compare SEO cost against paid ads. Fair enough, but the CPC figures floating around are shaky. Three UK sources I checked give legal services as £8.25 average, £5 to £20, and £5 to £50. Healthcare and dental come out at £2.80, £2 to £10, and £3 to £25. Even the supposed overall UK average ranges from £1.50 to £3.65 depending on who you ask, a spread of nearly two and a half times.

None of them publish a checkable dataset. Use them as a rough shape, not a number to plan around.

What I would do about it, and what it costs

Here is what those price tables do not show you. Whatever tier you buy, none of it works if the technical layer underneath is broken. Content cannot rank on a site engines struggle to crawl. AI assistants cannot describe you correctly if the facts on your pages contradict your listings. Ads send traffic to pages that then have to convert. Businesses spend thousands a year on the visible half while the foundation quietly costs them enquiries. You never hear about those. There is no bounced visit to review and nothing in any report to tell you it happened.

That foundation is what I do, as one job rather than five line items: SEO, AI search, answer engine and generative engine optimisation together. Site structure and crawlability, structured data, metadata, canonicals, sitemaps and AI crawler access, set correctly and kept right every month. No content writing, no paid ads, no link building, which is exactly why one person can do it properly at this price.

It is £100 a month. First month free, no contract, and you deal with me directly rather than an account manager. Start here, or email me your website address and I will tell you exactly what is holding it back.