The honest answer is that SEO costs between nothing and thirty thousand a month, and the word “SEO” does not narrow it down at all. What narrows it down is hours and seniority — so that is what these benchmarks are built from.
Figures below are typical Western European rates as of 2026. Expect US pricing roughly 20–40% higher and Central and Eastern European delivery meaningfully lower for the same seniority.
What you are actually buying
Almost every SEO price resolves to a number of hours at a level of experience. A £3,000 monthly retainer might be:
- 40 hours of a junior executive following a checklist, or
- 8 hours of a senior strategist who has solved your exact problem before
Same invoice, completely different product. Before comparing any two quotes, ask how many hours and whose.
The benchmarks
Under £500 / €600 per month
At this price the supplier has perhaps two to four hours a month to give you after overheads. That buys an automated audit forwarded by email, a templated article, and some directory submissions.
This is not fraud — it is arithmetic. Nobody can put experienced attention on your account for the price of a phone contract. It is occasionally worth it for a very small local business that needs basic listings maintained, and almost never worth it for anything else.
Freelance specialist: £400–£900 / €450–€1,000 per day
One experienced person, usually deep in a single discipline — technical, content, or digital PR. Excellent value for a defined problem with a clear end.
The risk is concentration. Holidays, illness and better-paying clients all stop your work entirely, and there is no bench behind them.
Fractional consultant: £1,200–£3,500 / €1,400–€4,000 per month
One to three senior days a month setting direction while your own team executes. The cheapest route to genuinely senior judgment, and the best value available if you have people who can ship.
If you do not have execution capacity, this is the wrong purchase — you will get an excellent roadmap and no capacity to act on it. We break the maths down against a full-time hire in fractional vs full-time SEO.
Small agency retainer: £2,000–£6,000 / €2,300–€7,000 per month
A small team covering strategy, content production and link acquisition, typically with one strategist spread across several accounts. This is the default answer for an SMB with no internal SEO capability, and the band where most of the market sits.
Large agency retainer: £8,000–£30,000+ / €9,000–€35,000+ per month
Dedicated pods, enterprise tooling, formal process, and reporting that survives procurement. Genuinely necessary at enterprise scale with many stakeholders and complex sign-off. Substantially overkill below that, where you are largely paying for account management.
In-house hire: £55,000–£95,000 salary
Add 30–40% for the fully loaded cost once employment taxes, tooling, benefits and equipment are counted — so £75,000–£130,000 all in. Then add three to six months of ramp-up before meaningful output.
Right once SEO is a primary acquisition channel and you can keep someone busy. Expensive as an experiment, and a single hire cannot cover technical, content and outreach equally well.
Fixed-scope projects: £950–£6,000 / €1,100–€7,000
Audits, migrations, schema implementation, internal linking work. Defined start, defined end, defined deliverable.
This is the lowest-risk way to test a supplier. You find out how they think and communicate for a bounded amount of money, without a twelve-month commitment.
How to compare two quotes
Package names are marketing. These four questions make the difference visible:
- How many hours, and at what seniority? Get it in writing.
- Who works on the account after signature? If the pitch team vanishes at handover, price the delivery team instead.
- What are the deliverables this month? Named artefacts with dates, not “ongoing optimisation”.
- What do we keep if we leave? Content, accounts, links. If the links disappear, they were rented.
What to expect for the money
Six to twelve months to meaningful results on most sites. Longer in competitive markets, faster if you already have domain authority and the problem is structural rather than competitive.
Anyone quoting a shorter timeline without having seen your site is guessing, and anyone guaranteeing rankings is describing something Google explicitly says cannot be guaranteed.
For a model-by-model breakdown including where we sit ourselves, see the pricing comparison. If you suspect you are already overpaying, these twelve signs are worth checking first.
