By: Ryan Walsh
Date: 06/07/2026

• Table of Contents:
• What factors influence SEO costs?
• What work can you expect to be carried out at the different price points?
• Why prices often vary by region
• What are some of the different pricing models used by agencies and freelancers?
• Should we choose an agency, a freelancer or complete the work in-house?
• What’s a timeline for progress?
• How much should we be looking to spend per month?
• What are some of the disadvantages of choosing a freelancer?

It’s a key consideration for many businesses have to make, that is how much of the marketing budget should be spent on search engine optimisation? Making this decision can feel daunting, as you will want to divide your marketing budget across multiple marketing methods and allocate it where you can get the best bang for your buck.

In search engine optimisation, the effectiveness and success of the campaign depend largely on who you hire for this important task. Therefore, businesses often carefully deliberate over what influences SEO costs and which company will offer the best value.

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Many variables

When choosing a search engine optimisation agency, it’s important to understand that a multitude of factors can influence the success of the results of the SEO campaign. For example, how competitive your business sector is ultimately dictates how much of a headwind the business faces. If you’re up against hundreds of businesses, all diligently working on important SEO accounts, you begin to realise how much work is needed in order to compete with the direct competition in your business sector.

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Level of competition

This is a very important factor to consider: when your business, or your appointed marketing agency, is working on improving your SEO, they are not operating in a vacuum. Now, what we mean is that Google’s algorithm consistently benchmarks your website against the competition.

Now, just as you want your website to rank high on Google and also appear within the AI results, so does your direct competition.

The will also be working hard on improving their own websites’ search engine optimisation. This is why a business cannot slow down or take its foot off the accelerator, as there is always a lot of competition ready to replace your business.

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How far do you intend to cast the net?

This is another key consideration that a business needs to make, how far you cast your net to gain customers will ultimately be determined by your marketing budget.

For example, competing locally is much more straightforward than competing nationally.

However, you also have e-commerce brands that often want to compete internationally and sell their products worldwide. Therefore, as you try to attract more customers across a wider much geographic area, your business will face increased amounts of competition, therefore the SEO becomes harder.

Therefore, one of the main factors which will dictate the monthly cost is how tough the competition is.

If you are looking to invest in local search engine optimisation and you only face, say, seven strong competitors locally, then this is relatively straightforward. The reason is this simpler is the amount of competition is fairly low. However, if you are competing with, say, e-commerce brands from around the world, this will mean even more work.

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More services or a wider range of products require more optimisation work

This is another really important factor to consider: the wider the product or range of services, means that more optimisation work is needed.
For example, an e-commerce website that retails a wide selection of products will need a much more intricate SEO strategy than say a local business, that offers just one service such as dentistry.

For example, each keyword will need optimising, so a content marketing strategy and inbound link building will be needed. This work is much more intensive when there is a large product range.

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Low-cost packages (Around £500 per calendar month)

If your business would like to improve your local search engine optimisation, you can typically spend around £500- £ 2,000 per month. The cost again is dependent on the business sector.

The business sector will ultimately dictate the level of competition that your business faces.

Therefore, there are also regional differences in how much agencies pay. At this price point, you can expect to pay for technical checks, on-page optimisation, and some backlink building work to be carried out within the month.

In terms of local search engine optimisation, there will often be only a limited number of direct competitors. For example, in regards to local SEO, sometimes you will compete with say 10 local competitors who are investing in this process.

However, because there is such a stark difference in the number of visitors from organic search results, businesses will fiercely compete for higher rankings.

For example, even the difference between 1st place on Google and 2nd place yields massively difference in terms of organic traffic.

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Mid-level packages £1000-£5000 per month

Businesses in this category will have enough to pay for national search engine optimisation campaigns.

However, sometimes also within these parameters businesses are paying for local search engine optimisation, that’s if the business sector is highly competitive. Between these price points, you’re typically paying for more content marketing and, for example, more time spent conducting competitor backlink research. There should also be time spent for carrying out technical audits and fixes. There should also be more time spent on keyword research.

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Competitive industries £5k+ per month

When you’re operating in fiercely competitive business sectors, the sky is literally the limit for what you can be paid per month to an agency.

The reason is that when competing nationally or internationally, you’re competing with global brands often with massive marketing budgets.

Therefore, there needs to be more content marketing produced and also PR strategies are often needed to build links. The agency will need to improve domain authority by leveraging the semantic web and building a stronger backlink profile.
Often, on the larger e-commerce sites, there will need to be more ongoing technical development and fixes. For example, checking that the pages you want indexed can be crawled and indexed by Googlebot. The good SEO consultants will also think about considerations such as better managing the businesses crawl budget.

The backlink profile will also need managing. This is another important consideration, that is the larger the website, in terms of pages and links, will require more management.
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Regional pricing differences

There is also often a strong contrast in monthly prices depending on where the agency is based in the United Kingdom. There has always been a large difference in pricing between agencies and freelancers. However, the geographic area where the agency is based often also dictates the price point.

However, it may seem like a good idea at first to choose an agency that’s perhaps farther away and charges less per month. Business often believe that cost savings can be made this way, however, that logic is often a false economy.

What you have to remember is that businesses often invest in search engine optimisation services over the long term. For example, we have worked with some clients for over 10 years.

The point is that it’s often a good idea to hold meetings in person, therefore ideally you will want the agency based in the same city or town as where your company is. Often, it’s inconvenient to have to take buses and trains to meet with your marketing agency regularly. Therefore, it’s often better to choose a local agency.

Of course, there is always the opportunity to hold online meetings with the agency. However, often it’s always best to meet in person and discuss your marketing strategy.

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The different SEO pricing models are explained.

Monthly retainer

The most common SEO pricing model that’s used by businesses is paying through a monthly retainer. Most agencies, including freelancers, will then assign certain tasks throughout the calendar month. The work carried out should be a mix of content marketing, link building, and on-page work. It’s important to remember that organic SEO requires long-term work and commitment and therefore this is often why a monthly retainer works best for most businesses.

Therefore, different agencies will take different approaches to the work; however, it should include both on-page and off-page optimisation.

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Project-based work
Sometimes an agency or, indeed, a freelancer will be hired to carry out a certain amount of work for a specified period. For example, the business may have “toxic” or “spam links”.

This may have triggered an alert in the businesses Google Search Console account. For example, a “Manual Action Penalty” may have been applied. Therefore, a specialist might be brought in to fix the toxic links, get the penalty removed.

Therefore, a specialist might, for example, work on a set area, such as disavowing links; this project might only last a set amount of time until the SEO issue is rectified.

Therefore, sometimes some agencies and freelancers work on a set piece of work for say a few weeks. This could also be for fixing say duplication issues that are causing keyword cannibalisation on an e-commerce website.

 

Freelancer vs agency- which option is best?

Now this is a question that so many businesses ask themselves: should they hire an agency or a freelancer to do the work?

When you search Google for a local marketing company, you’ll often find a good mix of freelance marketing experts and agencies.

Let’s look at some of the pros and also the cons of hiring each of these different business types:

 

Freelancer

You can hire a massively talented freelancer who can help get your business to the top of Google’s organic and map results (Google Business Results).

However, there is often a large disadvantage to hiring a freelancer to manage your company’s SEO. The disadvantage is that they often can only take on a limited number of clients and can quickly become fully booked or over stretched.

For example, fixing technical SEO glitches, let’s say, implementing 301 permanent redirects on an e-commerce website, well this work is time-consuming. This therefore means a freelancer often only has so much time to offer.

 

How much does a local SEO freelancer typically charge?

This often depends on their level of experience that they have.

We would say that a highly experienced freelancer often doesn’t charge below £500 per month to manage low-competition local SEO accounts.

For national search engine optimisation, the cost will be much higher for e-commerce SEO as more work in involved. We would estimate that a good freelancer charges between £500 and £3,000.00 per month for managing e-commerce or national SEO accounts.

However, again, the distinct drawback with hiring freelancers is the amount of time they can offer.

Because there are only so many hours in the working week, a freelancer can often become fully booked up. Therefore, obtaining more work, or taking on massively time-consuming work, is sometimes not feasible for some freelancers.

 

 

How much does it cost to hire an agency?

Here in the U.K there are a lot of agencies for you to choose from.
Now you can hire an agency for various types of SEO work, for example there will be agencies which specialise in local, national, or international businesses.

The great part about choosing an agency is that if you hire a really good one, they will often have staff who specialise in different aspects of search engine optimisation.

For example, they have a dedicated team for link building, and then another dedicated PR and content marketing team.

The point being made here is that you have some really highly talented staff working at many agencies that specialise in different aspects of the SEO process.

For example, you might hire an agency that has some of the best link-building and PR experts in the whole country. This can mean that they build for your business a very strong backlink profile.

The backlink profile could be so strong in matter of fact, that it is far stronger than your nearest competitor.

What happens then is, when Google’s algorithm sees that you have an extremely strong backlink profile, for example, over 100 quality links have been built, this can have a dramatic impact on your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

That link equity can then feed into content marketing, including the main pages as well as the blog posts.

This means that because the website has strong authority (DA) and powerful backlinks, you can start ranking much higher than your direct competitors.

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A timeline for SEO progress

Rectifying past issues

It’s important to remember that sometimes a website is not handed to an agency ready for optimisation work to begin straight away.

Sometimes there are penalties, such as link penalties, that might need to be fixed first.

Sometimes there is, for example, an e-commerce website where most of the pages are duplicated or written via an AI tool. Now, this means the website is not ready for optimisation work.

The pages will have a low Google EEAT score and this area of the SEO will need to be improved first.

Also, an algorithmic or manual penalty could have been applied to the website.

Now, we always refer to this as if the “handbrake is applied” and needs to be released before you can move forwards.

 

Then the on-page work can begin

Depending on the website’s size (number of pages), the next stage for our agency would be to improve the website’s on-page elements. For example, our consultants will often begin by conducting keyword research using, say, SEMrush and Moz Pro. We then use this information to start optimising the H1 tags, meta titles, internal links, alt text, and content marketing.

Generally speaking, on-page SEO is an ongoing process that needs to be carried out each month. For example, as new pages get added, such as blog posts need will need the on-page elements improved. Then older posts, such as older blog posts, these will need updating from time to time. However, within the first 3 months, we would be looking at our agency to fix any on-page SEO issues, such as duplicate content that might be present.

 

On-going work

After areas such as text duplication, content thin pages, and any backlink issues have been resolved, it’s then a matter of ongoing work and starting the optimisation work.

What’s important to remember is that whether you hire a freelancer or an agency, the ongoing search engine optimisation work never really ends. The reason is that there will always be competitors willing to overtake you and also looking to get stronger and better SEO.

Therefore, it requires ongoing effort to improve and maintain a business’s ranking.

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Be wary of agencies / freelancers offering guaranteed rankings.

 

In business, it’s great to have certainty; we understand why many businesses would want to hire an agency or freelancer that makes such guarantees. However, it’s important to note that often the very best agencies in the world, with the very best staff, don’t make such guarantees.

And the reason for not making these guarantees is very simple: Google algorithm makes algorithm changes practically every single day.

Therefore, no matter how good the agency or freelancer is, there will often be areas outside the agency’s control, such as Google rolling out algorithm changes.

For example, some businesses have their websites redesigned without following the agency’s advice.

What can sometimes happen is 301 redirects are incorrectly implemented; a mass of broken links could also occur (generating 404 errors).

Also, negative SEO attacks are still a thing. Then you also have, for example, other people working on the account. For example, a new product range might be added to an e-commerce website, and the internal copywriting team uses AI or duplicate content, causing organic rankings to drop.

The point being made here is simple: there are often many factors outside the agency’s direct control. Therefore, some of the country’s best agencies don’t guarantee rankings because there’s just so much outside the agency’s control.

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No substitute for experience

In regard to getting any business ranked in the top 3 positions on Google, you need to have a really good and clear understanding of how Google’s various algorithms work.

Now, you may have noticed we used the wording “various algorithms.” The reason is that the way the Google Business algorithm works is very different and distinct from Google’s organic algorithm which works completely differently.

Therefore, the consultant, whether freelance or part of a large team at an agency, needs an in-depth understanding of how Google’s various algorithms work.

Now, for this to happen, the consultant will need to have experience in implementing a lot of work. Then, using various tools such as Google

Analytics to monitor organic traffic and other marketing tools such as Moz Pro.

Then you can start implementing the work and gain an understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

This is why we say there is no substitute for experience.

This is why the best agencies, with the most talented and experienced staff, charge far more than other agencies. Because hiring really talented staff with in-depth SEO experience, well, that’s often harder than you might think.

Plus, by learning from mistakes, you know what works and what doesn’t. A common mistake, a massive pitfall that many agencies and freelancers fall into, for example, is building spam links.

Often, a business will want more links and falsely believe that more is better. However, this is not the right logic to apply when building a backlink profile for your company.

As too many businesses end up building spammy links. In that case, the business incurs a penalty.

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When should a business not invest in SEO?

There are circumstances when it wouldn’t be suitable for some businesses to invest in search engine optimisation.
For example, when a business needs to generate immediate leads and sales. Especially if the website is brand new and needs to increase sales straightaway, then often SEO wouldn’t be right for that business.

The reason is simple: to improve a business’s organic search engine optimisation. Well, the amount of time this takes is considerable. Often, it takes many months to start seeing tangible results; therefore, it is sometimes better for a business to invest in PPC or Google AdWords for a certain period.

The reason is simple: as soon as you have set up and configured your Google AdWords account, you can start increasing sales.

Therefore, many digital marketing agencies set up a blended approach. That is, they work on improving organic ranking factors to improve the company’s organic search engine optimisation. However, to start bringing customers in straightaway and ramp up sales, they often invest in Google AdWords. This, therefore, allows you to generate revenue whilst working over the long term to improve your organic search engine optimisation.