SEO Pricing: Starter Is £495 a Month
Here is our SEO pricing without the phone call first: Starter SEO costs from £495 a month, rolling monthly, with no lock-in. Growth and Market Leader exist too, but neither has a published figure, because the honest number depends on your market and the state of your site. Send us the address and we will work it out.
SEO pricing at Digital Movement: £495 a month to start
One published figure, and a straight answer about the two tiers that do not have one.
Starter SEO costs from £495 a month. It runs on a rolling monthly agreement, so there is no minimum term and nothing to buy your way out of later. Most agencies treat SEO pricing as something you have to earn on a phone call. We would rather you saw it now, because a price you cannot see is a price you cannot compare.
Starter suits a business with one location and a website that broadly works. It covers the groundwork that decides whether Google can read your pages, and whether the right ones show up for the searches your customers type. If your site is large, badly broken, or fighting a crowded market, Starter will not be enough. We will tell you that instead of taking the money and hoping.
The two tiers we do not put a price on
Growth and Market Leader exist, and neither has a published figure. We are not going to invent one. The real reason is that the number depends on things nobody can judge from a distance. Your market, the size of the site, how many places you serve, how much is already broken.
So we scope those two after we have looked. That costs nothing, it takes a few days, and you get a written number with the reasoning attached. If you want the wider picture first, our guide to how much SEO costs in the UK covers the whole market, whoever you end up hiring. This page is the commercial one. It is about what we charge.
What SEO pricing looks like across the UK market
Real advertised tiers from UK agencies, so you can see where any quote sits.
Published UK agency prices run from about £199 a month at the low end to £2,149 a month at the top. Those are real advertised tiers from agencies that put their numbers on the page instead of behind a form. One-off setup packages sit near £699. Against that spread, £495 sits in the lower middle, which is where we want to be. SEO pricing in this country is not one number, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
Two traps hiding in the cheap end
The first is VAT. Some advertised prices leave it out, so a tier shown at £399 costs a fifth more once VAT reaches your invoice. That gap is often enough to flip which quote was really the cheapest. Read the small print under every price table, ours included.
The second trap is time. A retainer buys hours, and hours are the only thing an agency genuinely sells. At £199 a month you are buying roughly half a day of somebody's attention. Half a day can keep a small, healthy site ticking along. It cannot rebuild one, and it will not out-work a competitor spending four times as much.
So we do not compete at the bottom of the range. £495 buys enough time to do real work on a small site every month, rather than a monthly report about work nobody did. It also means we sometimes tell a business that paid ads would serve them better for now, because search takes months and the rent does not wait.
What actually changes your SEO pricing
Four things decide the number, and none of them is how much you look like you can afford.
Competition comes first. Ranking a solicitor in central London is a different job from ranking a plumber in a market town. Harder markets need more content, more technical work and more patience, so the monthly figure goes up. Price follows the effort involved.
Size is second. A twelve-page brochure site and a four-thousand-page shop are not the same animal. Every page is a page somebody has to check, fix, rewrite or delete. Condition is third. If the site is slow, duplicated or invisible to Google, the first months go on repair before anything grows, and repair costs money.
How SEO pricing changes when you serve several places
Locations are the fourth factor and the one people underestimate. Each town you want to be found in needs its own page, its own reason to exist, and usually its own Google Business Profile. Three branches is roughly three times the work of one. That is why our local SEO work is scoped per location rather than sold as one flat fee.
None of this is unusual. Every honest agency prices on those same four things. The difference is whether they tell you which one is pushing your SEO pricing up, or whether a number simply appears at the end of a call with no working shown. Ask which factor is doing the damage. A good agency will name it in a sentence.
How we arrive at your number
Three steps, a few days, and nothing to pay while we do it.
We do not quote from a phone call. A price given before anyone has opened the site is a guess in a suit, and guesses are how businesses end up on retainers that never fitted them. So our SEO pricing is decided after the look, not before it.
Step one is the site itself. We crawl it, read the pages that matter, and list what is holding it back. Some of that work is dull, like redirects and page speed, and it is the part most often skipped. Our public teardown of Bupa's website shows the sort of thing we find, on a site far larger than yours.
Step two is the market. We look at who sits above you today and what keeps them there. Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable. They have spent five years building something you will not catch in six months. When that is true we say so, and we usually suggest a narrower target you can actually win.
Then we write the number down with the work attached. If Starter fits, it is £495 a month and you can start next week. If it is Growth or Market Leader, the figure is specific to your site and you will see how we got there. Either way it goes in writing before you commit to anything. Our SEO services page sets out the full range of work those numbers can cover.
We look at the site
We crawl it, read it and list what is broken. Nobody can price a job they have not seen.
We look at who beats you
We check who ranks above you for the searches that matter, and what they have that you do not.
We write the number down
You get a figure, the work behind it, and the reason it is that figure and not a different one.
What a cheap monthly retainer usually leaves out
Low prices are not a con. They are simply smaller, and the gaps are predictable.
A £199 or £250 retainer is not a scam. Cheap SEO pricing buys a smaller amount of work, and the things that drop out of it are fairly consistent. Knowing which ones they are is the whole point of comparing quotes properly.
Technical work usually goes first. Fixing a slow site, sorting out duplicate pages, or stopping a shop's filters from generating thousands of junk addresses takes hours nobody has budgeted at that price. Our technical SEO audit exists because this is the item a cheap retainer quietly drops.
Content, links and the monthly report
Content is the second casualty. Two blog posts a month sounds generous until you read them and realise nobody in the business was ever asked anything. Posts written from a template rank for nothing. One good page built from what your sales team gets asked every week will beat a year of them.
Links are third. Earning a mention from a real publication takes research, writing and outreach, and it is slow. At the bottom of the market that work gets swapped for directory submissions, which are cheap because they are close to worthless now.
Last comes the report. Plenty of retainers report on rankings, because rankings can be chosen to look good. Ask for enquiries instead. Calls, forms, bookings. If an agency cannot connect its work to those, the report is decoration.
What we will not do, at any price
Three refusals, and the reason behind each one.
We will not guarantee a ranking. Nobody can, and Google says so in its own guidance on hiring an SEO, which warns you off anyone promising the top spot. An agency that promises position one is either targeting a phrase nobody searches for, or hoping you will not check.
We will not tie you into a twelve-month contract. Long contracts mostly protect the agency during the months when little is happening. Rolling monthly puts that risk back on us, which is where it belongs, and it is why the commercial terms sit on this page rather than in an appendix.
We will not publish SEO pricing we cannot stand behind. That is why Growth and Market Leader carry no figure here. Putting a tempting starting price under them would probably win us more enquiries this month, and it would be fiction. You would find that out at the quote, which is the worst possible moment to discover it.
Nor will we sell you search when it is the wrong tool. If you need enquiries next week, this is not the channel, and we will say so on the first call rather than the third invoice.
No guarantees, no lock-in, no invented prices
Rankings cannot be promised. Contracts should not trap you. A price we have not worked out is not a price. All three cost us enquiries, and we think they are worth it.
Questions to ask any agency before you sign
The answers tell you more than any price table does.
Ask what the notice period is, and get it in writing. Find out how many hours a month you are buying, because hours are the real unit behind every quote. It is worth knowing who does the work too, and whether it stays in the UK or goes to a subcontractor you never meet.
Then ask the harder ones. What happens in month one, specifically? What will you report on besides rankings? Which of my competitors have you looked at, and what did you find? An agency that has done its homework answers that last one in detail. One that has not will change the subject. Ask, too, how their SEO pricing moves if your site doubles in size next year.
What rolling monthly actually means
Rolling monthly means you pay for a month at a time and stop when you want to. There is no minimum term, no exit fee, and no clause that renews itself while you are looking the other way. In practice it changes the relationship. We have to be worth keeping every month, not only on the day you sign.
That said, it is not permission to judge the work in four weeks. Search is slow, and Google's own guidance puts the wait at four months to a year before the effect shows. Rolling monthly is protection against being stuck with bad work, not a way to test good work in a fortnight.
When you are ready, the quickest route is a free SEO audit, or you can just send us the address of your site. Either way you get a number and the reasoning behind it.
Related: Guide: how much does SEO cost in the UK · SEO for small businesses · What our SEO work covers
SEO pricing questions we get asked most
The things people ask right before they decide, answered plainly.
How much does SEO cost in the UK?
Published UK agency prices run from roughly £199 a month to £2,149 a month, with one-off setup packages around £699. Most small businesses land somewhere in the middle. Our own SEO pricing starts at £495 a month for Starter, and check whether the price you are comparing includes VAT, because plenty do not.
What do I get for £495 a month?
Starter covers the core monthly work on one website. Fixing the technical problems that stop Google reading your pages, improving the pages that already earn you enquiries, and reporting on enquiries rather than rankings. We do not publish a fixed checklist of items, because what matters in month one depends on what we find when we look.
Do I have to sign a contract?
No. Everything runs rolling monthly, with no minimum term. You pay for a month, and you can stop at the end of it. That is the whole arrangement, and it is written down before you pay anything.
More questions about SEO pricing
How are Growth and Market Leader priced?
They are scoped after we have looked at your site, and there is no published figure for either. We will not invent one, because the honest number depends on your market, the size of the site, how many locations you serve and how much is already broken. The scope and the figure come to you in writing before you commit.
How long before I see results?
Google's own guidance says four months to a year before the effect of the work shows. In a quiet market it can be quicker. In a crowded one it takes longer. Anyone giving you a firm date has not looked at your competitors properly.
Is a monthly retainer better than one-off project work?
It depends who is doing the work afterwards. A one-off audit and fix suits a business with someone in-house to carry it on. A monthly retainer suits one where nobody has the time. SEO pricing for one-off work is quoted per job, and we will tell you which of the two your site actually needs.
Get a number for your site, in writing
Send us the web address. We will look at the site, look at who beats you, and come back with SEO pricing you can act on. Starter is £495 a month, rolling. Everything above it gets scoped, and it costs you nothing to find out where you sit.
Raoul (Alex) Müller
Email: office@digitalmovement.uk
Phone: +44 7865 064463