Expect BestAsk three agencies what SEO cost looks like for the same brief and you can get ninety pounds a month, eight hundred, and four thousand. That spread is the single most confusing thing about buying search marketing, and it is why so many businesses end up buying badly.
The reason the range is that wide is simple: the term covers wildly different amounts of human work, and almost nobody says which of those they are selling.
What each SEO cost band actually buys
Under two hundred a month. At this level nobody is doing meaningful work on your site. The economics do not allow it. What you typically get is an automated audit, a monthly PDF full of charts, and some directory submissions. Occasionally a few hundred words of thin content. This is the band where most of the sector's bad reputation was earned.
Three hundred to eight hundred a month. A real person spends real hours on your site. Usually that means technical fixes, page-level optimisation, a piece of content a month and some local work. Appropriate for a single-location business competing locally, and where most small firms should be looking.
Eight hundred to two thousand a month. Enough for a proper content programme, active link acquisition, and someone genuinely thinking about your market rather than working through a checklist. This is where competitive terms and multi-location businesses live.
Two thousand and up. Multiple specialists, national or competitive commercial terms, digital PR, often ecommerce at scale. Justified when the search results you want are contested by companies spending similarly.
Why the range exists at all
Search work is almost entirely labour. There is no expensive software licence to blame and no media spend, unlike advertising. So the price is a fairly direct proxy for hours, and hours are a fairly direct proxy for results.
That makes the arithmetic unusually easy to sanity-check. If a quote works out at four hours of work a month, ask what four hours can realistically achieve against a competitor buying forty.
What should be in the quote
A quote worth taking seriously tells you what happens, not just what you get. Look for the number of hours or the specific deliverables, who does the work, what happens in month one versus month six, how it is reported, and what you keep if you leave.
Be wary of guaranteed positions, which nobody can promise, of any contract longer than twelve months, and of an agency that will not tell you what it will actually do this month.
The thing that changes the maths
Search work is cumulative in a way advertising is not. Stop paying for ads and the traffic stops that afternoon. Stop paying for search work and the rankings usually hold for a while, then erode as competitors keep going.
That cuts both ways. It means the real SEO cost is best judged over a year rather than a month, and it means the cheap option is rarely cheap. Twelve months at a hundred and fifty pounds is eighteen hundred spent on reports, and a site in the same position as when you started.
How to work out your own number
Take the lifetime value of a customer and how many extra ones a month would make the spend worthwhile. For a business where a client is worth two thousand pounds, one extra customer a month justifies a serious budget. For a fifteen pound transaction, the maths is completely different and the honest answer might be that paid advertising or something else entirely fits better.
That calculation, rather than a price list, is what should decide the budget.
If you want the local picture, we have written separately on what it costs for Bournemouth businesses, and our SEO service pages set out what we do at each level. If local search is the only part you are buying, our sister agency GEO SEO has a UK-wide guide to local SEO pricing.