How much does SEO cost for a UK B2B company?
For a UK B2B company, managed SEO usually runs from around 1,800 a month at the entry level to 8,500 or more for multi-service, multi-location programmes. The price reflects senior hours and scope, not a magic number. What matters is what those hours buy, who does the work, and whether the reporting is honest enough to tell you if it is working.
If you have asked three agencies what SEO costs and had three very different answers, you are not imagining it. The range is real, and most of it comes down to two things: how many senior hours sit behind the work each month, and how much of the site and market you are asking us to move. Everything else is packaging.
What you are actually paying for
SEO is not a product you buy off a shelf. It is a monthly cycle of work: a technical crawl and the fixes it surfaces, titles and meta descriptions written to spec, structured data added, content briefed and published, internal links maintained, and rankings monitored in Search Console. Somebody senior has to direct that, decide what matters, and tell you the truth about what moved. The retainer is really a way of buying a known number of those hours.
We cost every engagement against a reference rate of 119 an hour, then wrap it in a tier so you buy an outcome rather than a timesheet. Our entry tier sits at around fifteen hours a month. A broad programme across several services and locations is closer to seventy. The price gap between agencies is usually an hours gap, whether or not they say so.
Why some quotes look suspiciously cheap
A retainer that looks like a bargain is often a retainer that has quietly run out of hours by the second week. The work that gets cut first is the invisible work: the technical fixes, the internal linking, the honest monthly read of the numbers. What survives is a blog post or two, because a blog post is something to show. That is how a company ends up paying for SEO for a year and seeing nothing move.
A fair price is not the highest price. It is the one where the hours behind the tier are enough to do the job properly and are actually spent on the job. Ask any agency to show you where the time goes. If they cannot, that is your answer.
What changes the number
- Scope. One site and one core service costs less than five locations and three service lines.
- Starting condition. A site that cannot be crawled or rendered needs foundation work before content earns anything.
- Content volume. More published content each month means more hours, which is why tiers step up in blog output.
- Seniority. Junior time is cheaper per hour and slower to results. We do not run a bench of juniors learning on your account.
The honest part about timing
Technical fixes show up in weeks. The compounding organic growth is a two to three quarter story, and we say so on the first call rather than after you have signed. If you need pipeline next week, paid is the faster lever, and we will tell you that too.
The reason our senior hours stretch further than a manual agency at the same rate is automation. Our own platform runs the crawls, drafts the meta and schema and assembles the reports, so paid time goes to judgement rather than busywork. That is a genuine cost advantage, and it is worth understanding where automation actually saves a marketing team time.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Two retainers at the same price can buy very different work, so compare the inputs, not just the number. Ask each agency how many senior hours sit behind the fee, who spends them, and what happens in a month when nothing obvious needs writing. A good answer describes the invisible work: the crawl, the technical fixes, the internal linking, the honest read of the numbers. A weak answer lists deliverables you can photograph, usually a set number of blog posts, because that is all that survives when the hours are too thin.
It is worth asking what is not included, too. Content beyond the tier, one-off audits, migrations and automation builds are usually scoped separately and costed at the same reference rate. Knowing that upfront stops a low headline price turning into a stack of change requests later, and it tells you whether the quote in front of you is the real cost or just the opening one.
If you want the full picture, our SEO service page sets out the monthly cycle in detail, and our pricing is public so you can see the tiers and the hours behind them before you ever speak to us.
Common questions
Is there a minimum spend for SEO?
Our entry tier starts at around 1,800 a month, which buys roughly fifteen senior hours and a full monthly cycle on a single focus. Below that, honest managed SEO is hard to deliver without cutting the work that matters.
Do you charge a setup or onboarding fee?
No. The onboarding strategy phase, including keyword research and a page by page plan, is absorbed into month one rather than billed separately.
Can you guarantee first-page rankings?
No, and nobody can honestly. We fix a set of numbers at the start and report them every month whether they moved or not.