Development
Custom theme work, PHP, Core Web Vitals and bespoke tooling.
£90 to £100per hour
- Custom post types, taxonomies and templates
- Sage themes and bespoke page builds
- Third party API integration
Rates
Published, so neither of us wastes a call finding out.
These are the real numbers. Nobody gets quoted differently based on how their website looks or how urgent they sound on the phone.
Time logged as it is spentScrapped work still shows in the ledgerFour hour minimum
Technical SEO and strategy
Schema, architecture, audits and competitive research.
£90 to £110per hour
- Indexation, canonicals and crawl control
- Entity graphs and structured data
- Hub and spoke architecture
Content and copy
SEO copy and helpful content remediation.
£50 to £70per hour
- Category and location page copy
- Rewriting thin or machine spun pages
- Copy that reads like a person wrote it
Most engagements
£95
per hour, blended
One rate when the work is genuinely both.
Real engagements mix these. A schema fix is strategy until it becomes PHP, and a speed problem is development until it turns out to be an architecture decision. The blended rate exists so neither of us has to argue about which column a given hour belonged in when the honest answer is that it was both.
It applies to retainers and to any project that crosses more than one of the categories above, which in practice is most of them.
SEO by sector
Two rate cards, because two very different jobs.
Most sectors are priced from the standard card. Adult and restricted sectors cost more, so both cards are published side by side with the reason underneath, rather than leaving you to ask and assume the worst.
Standard sectors
Everything not restricted
Ecommerce, B2B and SaaS, local and multi location, publishers and directories. No sector loading, and ongoing SEO is retained monthly rather than billed by the hour.
- Foundation, 4 hours a month
- £380/mo
- Growth, 8 hours a month
- £760/mo
- Programme, 16 hours a month
- £1,520/mo
- One off audit
- From £900
Every retainer is hours multiplied by the £95 blended rate, so you can check it. One off and project work is priced from the hourly card above.
Adult and restricted
Adult sector SEO
A different job to the same brief. The work is harder to buy your way out of, so more of it lands on structure and earned coverage, and that changes what an engagement costs.
- Foundation, 4 hours a month
- £520/mo
- Growth, 8 hours a month
- £1,040/mo
- Programme, 16 hours a month
- £2,080/mo
- One off audit
- From £1,250
Hours at £130 rather than £95, and the same arithmetic applies. Competitive at 30 hours is £3,900. Published rather than quoted, so you can compare before you call.
Monthly retainers
Ongoing SEO, priced by the hours you actually get.
Every figure is hours multiplied by the rate, so you can check the arithmetic. Standard sectors run at £95 an hour, adult and restricted at £130, and both are set out below. Nothing is bundled to hide the day rate, and unused hours do not roll over indefinitely.
4 hours a month
Foundation
£380/month
Holding ground rather than chasing it. Indexation and Core Web Vitals watched for regressions, schema kept valid, and the small fixes that stop a healthy site quietly decaying.
Suits a settled site that already ranks.
8 hours a month
Growth
£760/month
The common one. Everything above plus a working roadmap: architecture fixes, page rebuilds, copy where it is costing you, and one earned link push a quarter.
Most engagements start here.
16 hours a month
Programme
£1,520/month
For competitive sectors where several workstreams have to run at once. Technical, content and digital PR in parallel rather than queued behind each other.
Most programmes settle here.
30 hours a month
Competitive
£2,850/month
Contested national search, where the sites above you are also being worked on every month. Enough hours to hold a roadmap, ship it, and still absorb the week something breaks.
Priced inside the competitive band, not above it.
Adult and restricted
The same four tiers, at £130 an hour.
Same structure, same ledger, same arithmetic you can check. The rate is higher because the usual levers are closed: paid search is largely unavailable, mainstream press will not cover you, and earning a link to an adult domain is a different job to earning one anywhere else. More of the result has to come from technical work and coverage that is genuinely earned, and that takes longer.
- Foundation4 hrs a month
- £520
- Growth8 hrs a month
- £1,040
- Programme16 hrs a month
- £2,080
- Competitive30 hrs a month
- £3,900
Audits from £1,250. We have carried this work on an established site in the sector for years, so the number comes from experience rather than a guess at the risk.
Where these sit in the market
Published UK benchmarks for 2026 put local and small business SEO at roughly £300 to £2,500 a month, competitive national work at £1,500 to £5,000, and enterprise above that. Hourly, freelancers sit around £40 to £100 and agency consultants around £100 to £250. These are aggregated rate cards rather than one audited survey, so treat them as a sense of the market and not a price list.
Against that, £95 an hour is a senior rate at the very top of the freelance band and below what most agencies charge for the same seniority. Foundation through Programme sit under the typical agency equivalent, and Competitive lands inside the competitive band rather than above it. That is not us being cheap, it is what is left when there is no account manager, no reseller margin and no one relaying your question to the person who will actually answer it.
The honest caveat: you will read that anything under £1,000 a month cannot buy real SEO. For a bundled agency package that is broadly fair. It is not the same thing as four senior hours spent directly on your site. What is true either way is that thin budgets spread thin do nothing, so if yours is small, spend it on one good month rather than twelve token ones.
Why the adult rate is £130 rather than £95
It is not a surcharge for the sector. It is that the usual levers are closed. Paid search is largely unavailable, most mainstream press will not cover you, and a lot of link sellers in the space are selling the exact networks we refuse to touch. Earning a link to an adult domain is a different job to earning one anywhere else, and it is the single biggest reason the same brief takes longer here. Attribution is harder too, so more of the work goes into things we can verify directly rather than infer from analytics. That pushes the result onto technical work, site architecture and genuinely earned coverage.
Worth saying plainly, because you will see both extremes when you shop around. There is no reliable published benchmark for adult SEO. The agencies that specialise in it mostly do not publish rates at all, and the figures that are public range from roughly £16 an hour to £120, which tells you nothing except who is offshoring and who is not. We would rather put the number on the page and explain it. This is work we do continuously in the sector, not something we take on occasionally, so it comes from experience rather than a guess at the risk.
The detail
How the money actually works.
An open ledger
Time is logged as it is spent, against what it was spent on, and you can see it. That includes work that got scrapped or reverted. If we spent three hours going down the wrong path, those three hours are in there with a note saying so.
Scope before work
For anything beyond a quick look, you get a written scope with the cost, the risk and the rollback path before we start. You approve it first. Nothing gets built on the assumption that you probably would have said yes.
Retainers
A set number of hours a month against a shared roadmap, rather than hours spent on whatever shouted loudest that week. Suits sites where things keep changing and you want one team accountable for the technical side.
Worth saying
When you should not pay these rates.
These are specialist rates and there are plenty of situations where paying them would be a poor decision. Here are the common ones.
Your site is brand new and has no traffic. Technical SEO is not your bottleneck yet. You need content and you need people to know you exist. Come back when there is something to diagnose.
The job is genuinely simple. If one oversized hero image is what is slowing your site down, that is an afternoon for whoever already has access. You do not need a specialist and we will tell you so on the first call.
You need volume rather than depth. Forty product descriptions or a large content programme is not what we are set up for. A content team will do it better and considerably cheaper.
You want links bought. We do link building, but only by earning it: digital PR and manual outreach, plus backlink audits and disavow calls. We have advised clients to decline paid link and PBN networks that approached them. We do not buy links and we do not use PBNs, so if buying is the plan we are not a fit.
The free first call exists partly to find this out. It is a diagnosis rather than a pitch, and a reasonable number of them end with us saying you do not need to hire anyone.
FAQ
Questions about money
Do you work to a fixed price?
Yes, where the scope can genuinely be pinned down. A schema consolidation or a migration can be quoted as a fixed piece of work because the shape of it is knowable in advance.
Diagnostic work is different. If neither of us knows what is wrong yet, a fixed price is either padded to cover the worst case or it quietly runs out halfway. Hourly is more honest for that, and the free first look usually tells us which of the two situations we are in.
What if the estimate turns out to be wrong?
We tell you as soon as we know, not at the end. If something takes longer than we said it would, you hear about it while there is still a decision to make about whether to continue.
Work that gets scrapped or reverted still appears in the ledger. Hiding it would make the numbers look better and the relationship worse.
Is there a minimum?
Four hours. Below that the context loading costs more than the work itself, and neither of us gets value from it. If you have a genuinely tiny job, it is often cheaper for you to point your existing developer at it.
Do you charge agencies a different rate?
The rate is the same. What changes is the shape of the engagement. Agencies usually want a technical layer under their own strategy, often white labelled, with less client facing time. That tends to mean the hours go further because someone else is handling the relationship.
Do you take a deposit?
For a defined project, yes, typically a portion up front with the rest on completion. For retained work it is invoiced monthly. For a small first piece of work we usually just invoice at the end, because the point of a first engagement is that we are both finding out whether this works.
Why publish rates at all?
Because the alternative wastes both our time. If £95 an hour is well outside your budget you should be able to work that out in ten seconds rather than after two calls and a proposal.
It also means nobody is quoted a different number based on how their website looks.
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