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
SEO pricing
SEO pricing, published so neither of us wastes a call finding out.
What SEO costs here, in numbers, with no form to fill in. Monthly packages start at £380 and the hourly rate is £95. 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 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 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, so you are not left to ask and assume the worst.
Standard sectors
Everything not restricted
- Ecommerce, B2B, SaaS, local, publishers and directories
- No sector loading on the rate
- Retained monthly, not 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
- Harder to buy your way out of
- More weight on structure and earned coverage
- Foundation, 4 hours a month
- £880/mo
- Growth, 8 hours a month
- £1,760/mo
- Programme, 16 hours a month
- £3,520/mo
- One off audit
- From £2,100
Hours at £220 instead of £95, and the same arithmetic applies. Competitive at 30 hours is £6,600. Published openly, so you can compare before you call.
SEO packages
SEO packages, priced by the hours you get.
Four monthly SEO packages, from £380 to £2,850. 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 £220, 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, not chasing it. Indexation and Core Web Vitals watched for regressions, schema kept valid, and the small fixes that stop a healthy site slowly 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, not 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 £220 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 earned, and that takes longer.
- Foundation4 hrs a month
- £880
- Growth8 hrs a month
- £1,760
- Programme16 hrs a month
- £3,520
- Competitive30 hrs a month
- £6,600
Audits from £2,100. We have carried this work on an established site in the sector for years, so the number comes from experience, not a guess at the risk.
By what you sell
The same hours, spent very differently.
There is no separate price list for local, small business or ecommerce SEO packages here, because the rate does not change with your sector. What changes is where the hours go, and you should know that before you pick a tier. Below is what a month looks like in each case.
Local SEO packages
One area, one map pack
- Most of the result comes from the profile
- Foundation at four hours covers one location
- Consistent details, real reviews, pages per service area
From £380 a month. Multi location needs Growth, because each branch is its own fight.
Small business SEO packages
Finite budget, so priorities are ruthless
- Four senior hours aimed at your bottleneck
- Not a bundle covering twelve areas badly
- The first month is often diagnosis
From £380 a month, and see small business SEO for when the answer is to spend nothing.
Ecommerce SEO packages
Templates, not pages
- Thousands of URLs from a handful of templates
- Hours go on category templates, not single products
- Faceted navigation and indexation dominate early on
Growth or Programme in practice. See ecommerce SEO.
On affordable and cheap SEO packages
To be direct, because these are things people search for and the answer is uncomfortable. £380 a month is affordable in the sense that it is four hours of senior time at a published rate with nothing hidden in it. It is not cheap, and there is a floor below which this work stops being worth buying at all.
If you find monthly SEO packages at £99 or £150, the arithmetic tells you what they are: at any UK rate that is one to two hours, so either the work is offshored, automated, or the package is mostly a report. None of those move a ranking. If that is the budget, you are better off spending nothing for six months and then buying one properly scoped month than paying twelve token ones.
The market
How much does SEO cost in the UK?
The answer is a range, not a number, and anyone giving you a single figure without seeing the site is guessing. Here is the range, where these rates sit inside it, and the case against hiring anyone at all if your budget is thin.
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, not an 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, not 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 answer it.
The 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 instead of twelve token ones.
Why the adult rate is £220, not £95
It is a specialist rate, and at more than twice the standard one it is worth setting out why, so you are not left to assume it is a risk premium. The usual levers are closed here. Paid search is largely unavailable, most mainstream press will not cover you, and a lot of the 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. Attribution is harder too, so more of the work goes into things we can verify directly instead of inferring from analytics. That pushes the result onto technical work, site architecture and earned coverage, all of which are slower than the shortcuts this sector is usually sold.
To be clear, because this number sits a long way above what you will see quoted elsewhere. 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 run from roughly £16 an hour to £120, which largely tells you who is offshoring volume work. That is a different service to this one and it would be misleading to price as though it were the same. This is continuous work in the sector, not something taken on occasionally, carried on an established site for years, which is where the number comes from. It is not a guess at the risk.
If the cheaper end of that range is what you are shopping for, it does exist, and you should buy it there, not here. We would rather lose the enquiry at this point than after an invoice.
The detail
How the money works.
An open ledger
- Time logged as spent, and visible to you
- Scrapped and reverted work included
- Wrong turns stay in, 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, instead of hours spent on whatever shouted loudest that week. Suits sites where things keep changing and you want one team accountable for the technical side.
Before you hire anyone
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 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, not 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, not a pitch, and a reasonable number of them end with us saying you do not need to hire anyone.
FAQ
Questions about money
How much does SEO cost in the UK?
For small business and local work, roughly £300 to £2,500 a month. For competitive national campaigns, roughly £1,500 to £5,000. Hourly, freelancers sit around £40 to £100 and agency consultants around £100 to £250. Those are aggregated published rate cards, not an audited survey, so read them as the shape of the market.
On this site the hourly rate is £95 and monthly SEO packages run from £380 for four hours to £2,850 for thirty. Every package is simply hours multiplied by that rate, which is why the arithmetic is printed in full.
What is included in an SEO package?
Hours against an agreed roadmap, not a fixed checklist. In practice that means indexation and Core Web Vitals watched for regressions, schema kept valid, architecture and page work where it is costing you, and earned link work on the larger packages.
What it never includes is a report generated by a tool and emailed to you as evidence of activity. The ledger shows what the hours went on, including the hours that went nowhere.
Is this an SEO retainer or a package?
Both words describe the same arrangement here, so use whichever you prefer. A set number of hours each month against a roadmap we agreed, invoiced monthly, cancellable with a month of notice.
The distinction people usually mean is that a package implies a fixed list of deliverables and a retainer implies bought availability. This is closer to the second. You are buying senior hours aimed at whatever is costing you that month, which is why the tiers are named by hours, not by a feature list.
Do you work to a fixed price?
Yes, where the scope can 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 runs out halfway. Hourly is fairer 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 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, not 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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