Contents
Most pricing guides explain what makes SEO expensive and leave you to guess where you land. This one starts with the numbers and then tells you what each of them actually buys.
My consultancy prices
| Engagement | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly consultancy | £60 per hour | A single session to review a specific problem, pressure-test a plan or give your in-house team a second opinion. |
| Full-day consultancy | £400 per day | Sustained work on one thing: an audit, a migration plan, or a workshop with your team. |
| Monthly retainer | from £1,800 per month | Ongoing consultancy with agreed monthly hours, regular reporting and continuous prioritisation as the site and the market change. |
I am not VAT registered, so these figures are what you pay. Full-day consultancy is available on selected weekends and pre-arranged annual-leave dates. Hourly, project and retainer work is scheduled around agreed delivery dates, with calls booked in advance.
This page covers independent consultancy. Agency retainers that bundle content production, development or link acquisition are priced on a different basis and are not comparable like for like.
What each engagement actually buys
The useful question is not what an hour costs. It is which problems an hour can solve, and which ones it cannot.
An hour: a decision or a second opinion
Best value when you already know roughly what the question is. Reviewing a migration plan someone else wrote, deciding whether a technical recommendation is worth the development time, working out whether a traffic drop is your fault or the market's, or giving an in-house team a sanity check before they commit a quarter to something.
It does not work for open-ended problems. An hour spent describing the situation is an hour not spent solving it, and you will leave with a list of things to look at rather than an answer.
A full day: sustained work on one thing
A day buys focus that hours cannot, because the expensive part of consultancy is context. Somebody has to load your site, your market and your constraints into their head before the useful thinking starts, and doing that four times across four separate hours wastes most of it.
Days suit a technical audit, a migration plan, or a working session with your team where the output is a decision everyone has agreed to rather than a document somebody has to read.
A defined project: a deliverable with an end
Priced on the deliverable, not the hours, because the value of a migration plan does not depend on how long it took me. This suits work with a clear finish line: an audit, a content and keyword strategy, a backlink review, an international structure.
The thing to insist on is a written scope. A fixed price against a vague deliverable protects the supplier, not you.
A monthly retainer: continuous prioritisation
Right when the problem has no end date and priorities move. What you are buying is not a fixed number of tasks but someone who holds the context between months, so each decision does not start from nothing.
A retainer only represents value if you have enough ongoing work to use it. If you do not, you are paying a lower hourly rate for time you are not consuming, which is worse value than the hourly rate you avoided.
Choose by the problem, not the pricing model
| Your situation | What usually fits |
|---|---|
| One specific question, or a decision to pressure-test | An hour |
| A defined piece of work with an end point | A project, fixed price |
| A team that can execute but needs direction | A small retainer |
| Continuous work, shifting priorities, no senior owner internally | A larger retainer, or fractional SEO leadership |
| You are not yet sure what is wrong | A paid diagnosis first, then decide |
That last row matters more than the others. Committing to twelve months before anyone has established what is actually wrong is how budgets get spent on the wrong problem, and it is the most common way SEO money is wasted.
What you may still need to fund
A consultancy fee buys diagnosis, strategy, prioritisation and specification: someone deciding what should be done and why. Doing it usually costs more, and that cost lands elsewhere in your business.
- Development time to ship technical changes. Often the real constraint, and rarely budgeted for.
- Content production. Writers, editors, and someone to approve what they produce.
- Digital PR or link acquisition, where authority is genuinely the gap.
- Tooling, though far less than most people assume.
The practical implication: if your entire SEO budget goes on consultancy, nothing gets implemented and you have bought a document. Budget for delivery alongside the advice, or hire someone whose engagement explicitly includes doing the work.
How to compare two quotes properly
Quotes that differ by a factor of four are almost never quotes for the same work. Before comparing the numbers, settle these:
- Whether the price includes VAT.
- Whether meetings and reporting are included, or billed on top.
- Whether implementation is included, or only the specification of it.
- Whether developer, writer or digital PR costs sit outside the fee.
- The minimum engagement length, and how to exit.
- What access to your systems is required, and when.
- What happens when the scope changes, because it will.
Two of those decide most disputes. Implementation, because it is the difference between a plan and a result. And scope change, because every engagement has one.
If you are still choosing between people rather than pricing a decision you have already made, how to choose an SEO consultant covers the questions to ask.
How I scope and quote
I would rather quote a narrow thing accurately than a broad thing optimistically. So the first conversation is mostly me asking what has happened, what has already been tried, who can implement changes, and what the site runs on.
Five things then move the number, in roughly descending order of impact:
| Factor | Why it changes the price |
|---|---|
| Scope definition | A bounded deliverable prices time. An open brief prices uncertainty as well. |
| Site complexity | Page count is rarely the driver. Faceted navigation, product turnover, several CMSs behind one front end and release cycles I do not control matter far more. |
| Risk of the change | Migration work sits in its own bracket. The window is fixed and a mistake affects every commercial landing page at once, not one of them. |
| Market competition | A niche with three competitors and a category dominated by national brands need different amounts of sustained work. |
| How involved you need me | Advice you implement is cheapest. Advice plus delivery costs more. Owning the channel costs more again. |
Whether AI search is in scope increasingly matters too. It belongs inside the wider work rather than sold as a separate product, and the genuinely new cost is measurement, because conventional rank tracking does not capture how a brand appears in AI-driven results. Nobody can guarantee inclusion in an AI answer, and anyone pricing that as its own line item with its own guarantee is selling you something else.
When I would tell you to spend less
Three situations, and I would rather say so at the quoting stage than six months in.
- You cannot implement what you would be buying. No developer time, no content resource, no route to approving changes. Buy a smaller diagnosis, fix the constraint, come back.
- The gap between budget and market is genuinely large. Spending anyway, thinly, is the worst of the options. Narrowing to one thing done properly beats a broad programme delivered at half strength.
- The problem is not SEO. Organic traffic will not fix a conversion problem that starts at the offer, and some products have no meaningful search demand. Worth establishing before you invest, not after.
What should not happen is a supplier quietly reducing quality to hit a number, which is hard to detect until the results fail to arrive. That usually shows in the proposal before it shows in the reporting: no link between activity and revenue, guaranteed positions, no distinction between consultancy and implementation, deliverables described as "SEO" with no written scope, or a price arrived at without any discussion of your competition or complexity.
Frequently asked questions
Do SEO consultants charge VAT?
UK consultants must register for VAT once their rolling 12-month taxable turnover exceeds £90,000, the threshold having risen from £85,000 in April 2024, and may register voluntarily below it. So some quotes include VAT and some do not, which can make a 20% difference to what you actually pay. Always ask whether a quoted figure is inclusive or exclusive. If your own business is VAT registered you will usually be able to reclaim it, so the fair comparison between suppliers is on the figure excluding VAT.
I am not currently VAT registered, so my quoted prices are what you pay.
Is implementation included in an SEO consultant's fee?
Usually not by default, and this is the most common source of disappointment. Consultancy typically covers diagnosis, strategy and specification. Changes to your codebase, templates or CMS are normally carried out by your own developers. Agree explicitly who implements what before the engagement starts.
Are SEO retainers cheaper than hourly consultancy?
Per hour, usually yes, because committed time is easier to plan around. In total spend, not necessarily. A retainer only represents better value if you have enough ongoing work to use the hours. If you do not, you are paying a lower rate for time you are not consuming.
Why do SEO consultant rates vary so much?
Because the label covers very different work. The same title is used by someone running keyword research for a local business and by someone leading SEO for a multi-brand retail group. Rates track the seniority of the judgement being bought, the complexity of the site, and how competitive the market is.
Does a higher rate mean better results?
No. Rate tells you what someone charges, not what they deliver. What it does buy, at the upper end, is experience of problems like yours, which usually shows up as fewer wasted months rather than as a bigger list of recommendations. Judge the evidence, not the price.
Working out what you need
If you know the scope, tell me and I will price it. If you do not, describe the problem and I will tell you which of the four engagements fits, or whether you need something other than a consultant.