What SEO costs, by level
The honest way to read this table is by the third column. The prices are not really buying different SEO — they are buying different amounts of it, and different amounts of people who are not doing it.
| Level | Monthly | What it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer / small studio | £250 – £1,000 | A few hours a month of actual work by the person doing it. Right for local businesses and small e-commerce. |
| Mid-size agency | £1,000 – £3,000 | A team, a process, reporting, and an account manager between you and the work. |
| Large agency | £3,000 – £10,000+ | Specialists per discipline, a strategist, and the overhead structure that comes with both. |
| One-off audit | £500 – £3,000 | A document. Useful once, worthless if nobody implements it — which is the usual outcome. |
| Cybrial growth block | from £250 | A block of hours spent on whatever moves the business that month: SEO, AI optimisation, ads, conversion or artwork. No management fee. |
Source: Cybrial pricing correct 4 September 2026. Ranges from UK proposals seen and quoted against.
Two prices to be actively suspicious of. Under about £200 a month is arithmetically impossible for competent work: at any real hourly rate that buys under two hours, which is not enough to do anything and change anything. And any price attached to a guarantee of position one, at any level, is selling something other than SEO.
What the money actually buys
SEO is four different jobs sold under one word, and a proposal that does not say which ones it covers is not a proposal.
- Technical. Crawlability, site structure, speed, structured data, redirects, index coverage. Usually the first work on any site, usually the fastest to show a result, and almost always where the largest untouched gains are on an older site.
- Content. Working out what people actually search for and building pages that deserve to answer it. Slower, compounding, and the part most likely to be quietly skipped because it is the most work.
- Local. Google Business Profile, consistent business details, location pages that earn their place. For a business serving a place, this frequently outranks everything else in value — and a great deal of it needs no code at all.
- E-commerce. Catalogue structure, product data, shopping feeds. A different discipline again, and the one where scale changes the nature of the work rather than just the volume.
When you receive an SEO proposal, ask which of those four the hours go on and in what proportion. A proposal that cannot answer is describing a report, not a plan.
How long before it works
Longer than anyone selling it wants to say, and less long than the industry's "six to twelve months" hedge implies for technical work.
| Window | What you should see |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1–4 | Technical fixes shipped, tracking made honest, a true baseline established. No traffic change yet. |
| Months 2–3 | Impressions rise before clicks do. The site starts appearing for more queries at poor positions. This is the first real signal and it is easy to dismiss. |
| Months 3–6 | Positions improve on the terms that were nearly there. Clicks begin to follow. On Beds.ie the curve was visible from month two and the result landed by month five. |
| Months 6–12 | Competitive and head terms move, if they are going to. Content published in month two starts earning. |
Beds.ie is the worked example: between April and August 2026 — five full calendar months — organic clicks went from 672 to 7,781 a month, impressions from 38,608 to 282,069, average position from 17.4 to 12.2, and the number of distinct queries the site appears for from 5,189 to 24,054. All Search Console figures, full months only.
Two caveats on that, because a case study without them is a sales sheet. It started from a low base, so the percentage is flattering. And it is a 17,000-product catalogue, where structural work applies itself across thousands of pages at once — a five-page local business will not see a eleven-fold change, because there are not eleven-fold more pages for the work to land on. What transfers is the shape of the curve, not the multiple.
Local SEO costs less and often pays more
If you serve a place rather than the whole country, read this section before spending anything.
The local pack — the map with three businesses on it — sits above the ordinary results on most local commercial searches. On 4 September 2026 it was present on the live UK results for "web design manchester", "seo agency manchester", "google ads agency manchester" and "web design bolton", among others. The businesses in it held between 23 and 69 reviews at ratings of 4.9 to 5.0.
Getting into that pack is mostly not a website job. It is a claimed and complete Google Business Profile, the right primary category, business details identical everywhere they appear, and genuine reviews from real customers. That work costs very little and no code at all, and for a plumber, a practice or a paving company it will out-earn several months of content.
The related search family is enormous and almost entirely won this way: "web designer near me" and its siblings carry many thousands of searches a month in the UK, several times the city-name phrases. No page ranks for "near me". A profile does.
How to read an SEO proposal
- How many hours a month, and who does them? "A dedicated team" usually means a junior with a checklist and a senior who signs the report.
- Which of the four disciplines, in what proportion, in the first three months?
- What will be shipped, not what will be reviewed? Audits are cheap to produce and expensive to leave unimplemented.
- What is the reporting, and is it from Search Console or from a tool? A rank-tracking tool showing personalised, non-local positions is not evidence.
- What happens if it does not work — what is the review point, and can you stop?
- Is there a minimum term? There is no technical reason for one. There is a commercial reason, and it is theirs.
- Are they guaranteeing rankings? If so, stop reading. Nobody controls Google's results, and the guarantee is always attached to terms nobody searches for.
What you can do yourself, for nothing
Genuinely useful, genuinely free, and in this order:
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Correct category, real photographs, accurate hours, and ask your last ten happy customers for a review.
- Verify your site in Google Search Console and read the coverage report. It will tell you which of your pages Google has not indexed, which is information nobody else can give you.
- Give every page a title that names what it is and where you do it, and make sure no two pages share one.
- Test your site on a phone on mobile data, not office wi-fi. Time it. If it takes more than three seconds to be usable, that is your first job.
- Make sure every service and area you sell has a page of its own rather than a paragraph on a combined page. Pro Pave needed 27 for exactly this reason.
That list will take a weekend and will out-perform the first month of a cheap retainer. If you do it and then still want help, you will also be a much better-informed buyer.
