What SEO actually costs, by delivery model
Below is what each way of buying SEO costs, what you genuinely get for it, and when it is the wrong choice — including the cases where hiring us is not the right answer.
The seven ways to buy SEO
Ranges below are typical Western European market rates as of 2026. Currency and market shift them — expect US rates roughly 20–40% higher, and Central and Eastern European delivery meaningfully lower for equivalent seniority.
| Model | Typical range | What you actually get | Worth it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheap monthly packages | under £500 / €600 per month | Automated tool reports, templated content, directory links. Almost no human hours on your account. | Rarely. The maths does not allow for experienced time at this price. |
| Freelance specialist | £400–£900 / €450–€1,000 per day | One experienced person, deep in a specific discipline, with limited capacity and no bench. | Excellent for a defined problem. Risky as your only resource — holidays and illness stop everything. |
| Fractional consultant | £1,200–£3,500 / €1,400–€4,000 per month | One to three senior days a month setting direction. Your team executes. | Best value if you already have people who can ship. |
| Small agency retainer | £2,000–£6,000 / €2,300–€7,000 per month | A small team executing strategy, content and links. Usually one strategist across several accounts. | The standard answer for SMBs with no in-house SEO capability. |
| Large agency retainer | £8,000–£30,000+ / €9,000–€35,000+ per month | Dedicated pods, enterprise tooling, procurement-friendly process and reporting. | Justified at enterprise scale and stakeholder complexity. Overkill below it. |
| In-house hire | £55,000–£95,000 salary, ~30–40% more fully loaded | Full-time ownership, plus 3–6 months of ramp-up before meaningful output. | Right once SEO is a primary channel. Expensive as an experiment. |
| Fixed-scope projects | £950–£6,000 / €1,100–€7,000 per project | Audits, migrations, schema, internal linking. Defined start, defined end, defined deliverable. | The lowest-risk way to test a supplier before committing to anything monthly. |
How to compare two quotes properly
Package names are marketing. Ask every supplier the same four questions and the differences become obvious immediately:
- How many hours, and whose? A £3,000 retainer might be forty junior hours or eight senior ones. Those are different products at the same price.
- Who works on my account after signature? If the person pitching disappears at handover, price the account team instead.
- What is the deliverable this month? Not "SEO" — specific artefacts with dates.
- What happens if I leave? Do you keep the content, the accounts, the links? If the links vanish when you stop paying, they were rented.
Where we sit, plainly
We publish prices on every service page rather than gating them behind a call. We are a nearshore European team, which means our cost base is lower than a London or Munich agency at the same seniority. For most buyers we come out between the freelance and small-agency rows above.
We are not the cheapest and we will not compete with the sub-£500 tier — nobody delivers real work at that price, including us. If that is your budget, spend it on one fixed-scope project instead of twelve months of nothing.
Questions we get asked
Why do SEO prices vary so much for the same words? +
Because "SEO" describes everything from a checklist run through a tool to a team of specialists rebuilding a site architecture. The label is identical; the labour behind it differs by an order of magnitude. Always compare hours and seniority, not package names.
Is cheap SEO always bad? +
Not always, but the arithmetic is unforgiving. Below roughly £500/€600 a month nobody can afford to put experienced time on your account, so you are buying tool output with a human forwarding it. That is fine if it is what you expect and you know it.
Should I pay per project or per month? +
Per project for anything with a defined end — audits, migrations, schema, a linking fix. Per month for content and link acquisition, which only compound with continuity. Paying monthly for work that has an end date is how retainers quietly become subscriptions.
How long before it pays back? +
Six to twelve months on most sites, longer in competitive markets, faster if you already have authority and the problem is structural. Anyone quoting a shorter number without seeing your site is guessing.
Read before you hire
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