TL;DR: In the UK, as of 2025, in order to see results, and given the costs involved in producing content, gaining backlinks, a solid strategy and technical insights, you’re looking at a minimum of £1,000 per month for a small or new business and £2,000 upwards for an established, larger website. Now onto the longer answer:

Investing in any business has to provide a return on investment and SEO has huge potential to bring relevant traffic to your website with no direct cost in the long term. Time and resource of course have to be invested in order to achieve this, so how much should you spend in order for it to be worthwhile?

Assess Your Objectives and Situation

When considering how much you should spend on SEO per month you should first review what stage of the growth cycle your business is at and what you are trying to achieve.

If you need customers coming to your website immediately, SEO may not be the best channel for you as it generally takes months to see an impact. In this instance consider setting up a PPC campaign where you can set an exact budget and set defined CPA (cost-per-acquisition) and ROAS (return on ad spend) targets. You could also consider trying to growing a community through social channels such as Facebook or Instagram.

If you’re in a comfortable enough position financially to allow for a few months before you start to see an impact, it’s then a question of how complex your project is. From a standing start i.e. if your website is new or has no organic visibility, you should be able to get away with using a freelancer a couple of days a month (£200-500) guiding a strategy that will be based largely around content production and backlink acquisition (£500).

If things are more complex, i.e. you run an ecommerce website with 1000s of products then you should be looking to up your budget to have enough impact and harness the potential of your business. At this stage there are a couple of options for you to consider.

Consider Your Options

SMEs and larger websites attracting tens of thousands of visitors a month or generating thousands in revenue have a choice in who they invest their SEO budget with and this greatly influences budget. There are pros and cons to each. Your options are:

Freelancer

You can find good freelancers on LinkedIn that have years of experience in agencies and inhouse with a day rate of around £250. You’d probably need around 4 days worth of support (£1000). The downfall here is that freelancers generally specialise in a certain area of SEO and you’ll also need content and backlink support which will cost at least an additional (£1000). Often they can provide all three services but generally SEO freelancers will specialise in a certain area, so the level of service you receive will be somewhat diluted.

Multiple Freelancers

Working with multiple freelancers that specialise in different areas of the SEO trinity (technical, content, backlinks) works for a lot a SMEs and medium sized websites. You could have an an SEO Specialist, a Digital PR Consultant and a Content Strategist. Each would probably want around £1000 per month each and you’d likely receive an excellent level of service that drives results. The cons however are that their combined approach may be siloed and disjointed and it may be cheaper to use a smaller agency that houses all of these specialisations. Freelancers and consultants are less likely to insist on contracts though which may give you more flexibility than a smaller agency.

Small to Medium Agency

As mentioned agencies have experts they can call on and provide you with a more comprehensive service. To work with one of these you should look to spend around £2000-£3000 depending on your objectives. There will be agencies out there that allow you to spend as little as £1500 but the impact of this work is going to be limited and/or take a long time. Lower budgets at agencies also generally get less attention so unless you’re spending £2k+ I would stick with consultants and freelancers generally.

If you are looking to really make waves in the industry and get ahead of your competitors it could be around £3000-5000. As mentioned this will be influenced heavily by your targets. Ask for a couple of proposals to compare and contrast, let them know your targets rather than your budget and see what prices and deliverables come back.

Large Agency

Generally it would be wise not to spend any money with a large agency for SEO services. Even when spending 10s of 1000s of pounds most of this budget disappears and the deliverables you receive make up only a fraction of what you pay. They serve a purpose for very large enterprises in the sense that they give decision makers security when putting the contracts out to tender but for most businesses they would be best avoided. You can probably expect to pay around £8,000-10,000 with them.

Watch Out for Cowboys

The SEO industry is rife with people happy to part you from your money and take a burn and churn approach to clients. It’s a relatively new and fairly unregulated industry meaning it is harder to assess the direct impact of the work of the person you hire vs other channels such as paid media. It’s also harder to give accurate projections but you should always insist and request realistic targets. Get references where you can and as mentioned before, work out what your targets are and ask for people to quote how much it will cost to get there and the itemised deliverables involved on a monthly basis in a roadmap format.

Assessing The Impact

Of course, how much you spend on SEO should eventually become irrelevant as long as the value and impact of the work supersedes what you spend on it. After 3 months you should expect to see green shoots and signs of progress. After 6 months there should be some form of uptick in performance. After 12 months there should be a notable YoY increase in traffic to your website, baring any unavoidable external factors in your industry. This is the best time to assess if you are spending the right amount.

Use Google Search Console and focus specifically on non-branded traffic. You can do this by filtering out variations of your brand name. This will exclude any offline activity that influences branded organic search for your brand that could skew the data of the increases that become apparent initially.

Review keyword tracking to see increases in rankings for queries that were identified in the initial proposals you received.

Use Google Analytics to review performance at a page level to see YoY differences in traffic. Are there any correlations between specific areas of focus or new pages created and improvements that you see in terms of traffic or revenue.

If the overall value of the traffic increase is inline with or greater than what you’re spending on a monthly basis, then it may be time to increase your budget and push for more.

Conclusion

How much you should spend on SEO per month will be greatly influenced by your size, industry and how quickly you need to see an ROI. Generally, smaller websites and businesses may be able to get away with £1000 per month although this is really the minimum entry point and progress will be slow. £2000 is a healthy budget for most websites to see healthy growth. £3000-5000 is probably the best budget for a medium to large website if you can afford it. Beyond that, be very careful who you spend it with. Good luck.