How much does SEO cost for a small business?

Guide · Updated 18 August 2026 · Written by James

Almost every article on this question refuses to give you a number. This one gives you the ranges, taken from what UK agencies and freelancers actually publish, explains what each budget band buys, and says plainly when SEO is not worth paying for at all.

The short answer

For a UK local business, ongoing SEO usually runs between £300 and £800 a month. Widen the brief to a small business competing beyond one town and it is more like £500 to £1,500. Genuinely competitive trades and multi-location work start around £1,500 and climb from there.

A one-off project, meaning an audit and a fixed list of work rather than a retainer, is typically £300 to £1,500 for a small site, and £1,500 upwards for a large or technically messy one. Freelance hourly rates sit around £50 to £150, and named consultants charge more.

Those figures come from published pricing across UK agencies and freelancers in 2026 rather than from us. Worth knowing that the firms who publish prices at all tend to be the ones comfortable with theirs, so if anything these ranges read slightly high.

Why nobody will tell you a price

Search for this question and almost every result says the same thing: it depends on your goals, your industry, your competition. All of which is true, and none of which helps you work out whether you can afford it.

The real reason prices stay hidden is that a quote given on a call can be shaped around what the agency thinks you will pay. Publishing a number removes that. We publish ours for the same reason we publish everything else, which is that guessing games waste your time and ours, so it seems only fair to give you the wider market numbers too.

The four ways SEO gets sold

Monthly retainer. The most common, and usually the right shape, because SEO is continuous work rather than a task you finish. You pay a fixed amount and a set of work happens each month. Ask what that work is before you sign anything.

One-off project. An audit, a fixed scope, a delivery date. Good if your site has clear problems you want fixed, or if you have someone in-house who can carry it on afterwards. Less good as a standalone, because competitors keep working after you stop.

Hourly. Fine for advice, awkward for delivery. You end up watching the clock instead of the outcome, and small jobs get padded.

Payment on results. This sounds like the safest option and is usually the worst. Two problems: the target gets set somewhere easy to hit, often a phrase nobody searches for, and the incentive is to chase quick wins rather than build anything durable. If someone offers to work for free until you rank, ask what happens to your site if they walk away halfway through.

What each budget actually buys

Worth reading these as descriptions of work, not of outcomes. What any of it produces depends on your market, your competitors and your starting point.

Under £300 a month. Below the market floor, and usually an hour or two of someone's attention or an automated report. That can still cover keeping a Google Business Profile current, which for a very small local business is better than nothing. It will not cover new pages, technical work or content.

£300 to £800 a month. The local band, and where most single-location businesses land. Enough for a properly maintained Google listing, a handful of service and area pages, technical fixes, review generation and a monthly report.

£800 to £1,500 a month. A wider brief: more services, more than one town, content written for you rather than by you, and time spent on what competitors are doing. Sensible once you are chasing customers beyond your immediate area.

£1,500 to £3,000 a month. Competitive trades where everyone is already doing this properly, or several locations at once. Law, cosmetic work and trades in big cities sit here.

Over £3,000 a month. National ambitions or e-commerce with a real catalogue. If you are a single-location local business and you are quoted this, ask exactly what the extra buys before agreeing to it.

Five things that move the price

• How competitive your trade is. A Norwich massage therapist and a Norwich personal injury solicitor face completely different amounts of work for the same result.
• What state your site is in. A slow or badly built site has to be fixed before anything else pays off, and that fix is sometimes cheaper as a rebuild than as a repair.
• How many services and locations you have. Each one needs its own page, and each page needs writing.
• Whether content is included. The single biggest hidden variable. Ask whether the fee covers writing, or whether you are expected to supply it.
• Whether reporting is real. A dashboard nobody explains is not reporting. You want to know what came in and where from.

If you are weighing this against advertising, the trade-off is speed against durability. Google Ads can put you in front of people within a week but stops the moment you stop paying; SEO takes months and keeps working. Most businesses eventually want both, in that order.

When it is not worth paying for

Three cases where we would tell you to keep your money.

Nobody is searching for what you sell. If your product is new, impulse-led, or something people do not know exists, there is no search demand to capture and no amount of spend creates it. Advertising on social is the better fit.

Your site cannot convert the visitors it already has. Sending more people to a page that does not ask them to do anything is an expensive way to prove the page does not work. Our guide on why a website gets no enquiries covers how to tell which problem you have.

You need customers this month. Local SEO typically takes three to six months to move properly. If cash flow is tight now, ads are the honest answer and SEO is what you start once there is room to wait.

Where we sit, for transparency

Brava Digital is a Norwich studio, so we are selling something here and it is fair to say so. Ongoing SEO sits inside a growth plan from £250 a month, which also covers hosting, your Google listing, review requests, ads and reporting.

You will have noticed that is below the range above, which is worth explaining rather than leaving you to wonder. We are a small studio with low overheads and we are still building a client list, so the price reflects that rather than the amount of work. It will not stay there indefinitely, and anyone who joins now keeps what they signed up at. SEO on its own is quoted per project. Every price is on the site rather than behind a call.

We start with a free audit rather than a proposal, because you should know what is actually wrong before anyone asks you for a monthly fee. What we will not do is promise you a position on Google or a number of leads, because nobody can honestly predict either before the work has run. If the audit says you do not need us yet, that is what it will say.

If you want to see the shape of the work rather than read about it, the Soma Wellbeing Centre rebuild is a Norwich business whose practitioners went from a list of names in a paragraph to a page each, which is the structural half of the job described above. There are more answers on pricing and contracts in our FAQ.