For a single-location UK business in 2026, ongoing SEO costs £500 to £1,500 a month, a one-off technical audit with the fixes carried out starts around £1,200, and a Google Business Profile overhaul starts around £450. Below £500 a month not enough gets done to move anything. Above £1,500 you are usually paying for a multi-location or national campaign. The figure matters far less than what is actually delivered for it, so the useful question is how many hours of real work the fee buys.
The price bands, honestly
SEO pricing looks arbitrary because the same words describe wildly different amounts of work. These are the bands we see across the UK in 2026, with what each realistically buys.
| What you pay | What it usually is | Worth it when |
|---|---|---|
| £100–£300 a month | Automated reports, a few directory submissions, occasional small changes. Often resold from a white-label supplier. | Almost never. At this price the fee barely covers the account management. |
| £500–£1,500 a month | A named person doing real work: content published, technical faults fixed, profile and reviews managed, results measured. | The realistic band for a single-location business that wants to compete locally. |
| £1,500–£3,000 a month | Multiple locations, a larger content programme, competitive markets, or ecommerce with a big catalogue. | Multi-site businesses, or competitive city markets. |
| £3,000+ a month | National campaigns, large ecommerce, in-house team augmentation. | Rarely relevant to a local business. |
| £1,200+ one-off | Technical audit with the fixes actually carried out, not a PDF. | A good first step when you are not sure ongoing work is justified. |
| £450+ one-off | Google Business Profile overhaul: categories, services, areas, photos, review routine set up. | Almost always. The highest-return single piece of local SEO work. |
The bands that should make you nervous are the cheapest ones. There is a floor below which a monthly fee cannot cover a competent person's time, and the work quietly becomes automated reporting.
Why £500 is the floor
It is arithmetic rather than opinion. At a modest UK agency rate, £500 buys somewhere between three and six hours of a specialist's month once overheads are covered. Three to six hours is enough to write and publish one good page, or fix a handful of technical faults, or manage a profile and chase reviews. It is not enough to do all three.
Below that, something has to give, and what gives is the work. A £150 monthly SEO package is not a smaller version of a £750 one; it is usually a different product, in which an automated tool generates a report and nothing on your website changes.
This is the same reason we say in our article on website costs that a cheap website is rarely cheap. The pattern repeats.
One-off or ongoing?
Not every business needs a retainer, and a good agency will tell you which you are.
A one-off is right when your site has clear technical problems, or your Business Profile has never been finished, or you are in a thin market where doing the basics properly is enough. Buy the audit, have the fixes made, set up a review routine, and see where that leaves you before committing to anything monthly.
Ongoing is right when you are competing against businesses that are also investing, when you need a steady stream of content, or when the market is competitive enough that standing still means going backwards. SEO compounds; stopping and restarting loses momentum twice.
Neither is right when nobody searches for what you sell, or when your problem is conversion rather than traffic. If people are arriving and not enquiring, the money is better spent on the website itself — our article on traffic but no enquiries works through that case.
What the fee should buy
The fee is not the thing to compare. Two agencies quoting £800 a month can be selling completely different amounts of work. Ask for the specifics before you sign anything.
- Named deliverables. How many pages written a month. How many hours. What happens to the hours if you do not use them.
- Who does the work. The person you meet, or a junior, or an offshore team. Neither answer is wrong, but the price should reflect it.
- Whether fixes are included. Some agencies audit and then charge separately to implement, or hand the list to your developer. Know which you are buying.
- Account ownership. Search Console, analytics and the Business Profile in your name, with the agency added as a user. Never the other way round.
- The minimum term. A written scope is reasonable. A twelve-month lock-in with no break clause is a transfer of risk from them to you.
- What the report contains. It should name pages published and faults fixed, not just show a rank-tracker screenshot.
The costs people forget
SEO quotes often exclude things that then arrive separately.
- Content production. If the agency writes it, that should be in the fee. If you write it, be realistic about whether you will.
- Photography. Real photographs of real work matter for local trust, and stock images actively hurt. Budget for a half-day.
- Development time. If your site is on a platform the agency cannot change directly, someone has to make the changes, and that is a cost.
- A site that cannot be fixed. The uncomfortable one. If the platform is the ceiling, two years of retainer spent working around it costs more than rebuilding once.
Is SEO worth it? The arithmetic that matters
Forget positions. The number to run is what an enquiry is worth to you and how many the work needs to produce.
Our Dudley client offers a concrete version. Before the rebuild, enquiries came through Google Ads at £1.86 a click. A year later, organic visits from Google had reached 366 a month, and the ads were switched off entirely on 30 April 2026. Those 366 free visits would have cost roughly £680 a month at the old rate. Against a retainer in the £500 to £1,500 band, the sum is straightforward, and it keeps working after you stop paying in a way that advertising does not.
That is the honest case for SEO: it is not cheaper than ads in month one, and it usually is by month twelve. The case study has the full figures.
Where to go next
If you are comparing quotes, the most useful question you can ask each one is: what will you publish and what will you fix in the first month? A specific answer that arrives quickly tells you more than any proposal document.
If you would like an honest read on whether your market justifies a retainer at all, tell us about it. We publish our own figures on the SEO in Stourbridge page, and how long SEO takes covers what to expect once you start.
If you are weighing the retainer against an ad budget, SEO or Google Ads runs the comparison properly.