Cheap SEO is any optimisation service sold at a price that does not cover the hours needed to produce a result. It is not a market segment, it is a subtraction that does not add up: take the tools, coordination and margin out of the monthly fee, and what is left is the time someone will actually spend on your site.
Most articles on the subject stop at a verdict: below a certain figure, it is a rip-off. Nobody shows the maths. Below you will find the figures from the two largest international surveys of SEO pricing, a calculation of how many hours each budget band buys, and the Search Console data of a real site that had bought that kind of service.
What an hour of SEO work costs, according to those who measured it
The two surveys with the widest samples both price in US dollars and both include UK respondents.
Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO service providers (published December 2023, last updated August 2024). The average hourly rate is $111, 24% of respondents charge between $75 and $100 an hour, and only 10% charge more than $150. The average monthly retainer is $2,917, which splits into $3,209 for agencies and $1,348 for freelancers. The most crowded band is $501 to $1,000 a month, with 20.4% of the sample.
SE Ranking surveyed 260 agencies in 2024, partly together with Duda, across the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, continental Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Of the 119 European agencies, 53 were based in the UK. 64% of agencies charge less than $1,000 a month and 45% bill between $50 and $100 an hour.
These are selling prices. Underneath them sits the cost of labour. In the UK, the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings puts median gross hourly pay (excluding overtime) for full-time employees at £19.67 in April 2025. For the EU, the hourly labour cost including employer contributions calculated by Eurostat for 2025 is €34.9 across the European Union and €38.2 in the euro area, ranging from €12.0 in Bulgaria to €56.8 in Luxembourg.
Between the roughly £20 gross that ends up in a payslip and the £40 to £75 an hour a client pays sit employer contributions, tools, training, non-billable time and margin. That is why the selling price of an hour cannot be compared with a salary, and why the real issue is not the price but the number of hours.
How many hours your monthly budget buys
Take the fee you have been quoted and divide it by the hourly rate. It is the only calculation you need. The table uses three rates inside the $50 to $100 band that SE Ranking found to be the most common, converted into pounds for ease of reading.
| Monthly fee | Hours at £40/h | Hours at £55/h | Hours at £75/h |
|---|---|---|---|
| £150 | 3.8 | 2.7 | 2.0 |
| £300 | 7.5 | 5.5 | 4.0 |
| £500 | 12.5 | 9.1 | 6.7 |
| £800 | 20.0 | 14.5 | 10.7 |
| £1,500 | 37.5 | 27.3 | 20.0 |
| £3,000 | 75.0 | 54.5 | 40.0 |
Even this is optimistic, because the fee also pays for software. The Ahrefs Lite plan costs $129 a month and Standard $249: if an agency spreads it across twenty clients it comes to a few pounds each, if it spreads it across five it becomes roughly £20 to £40 of your fee. Add account management time, emails and the monthly meeting.
So with £300 a month you buy between four and seven and a half gross hours, which become roughly three to five hours of actual work on the site. In four hours you can write and optimise one article, or fix the title tags of about twenty pages, or do half of a serious keyword research project. One of the three, not all three.
The problem is not that four hours is too little in absolute terms. The problem is when those four hours are sold as "full SEO management" together with content, links and reports. At that point the work exists only on paper, and the quickest way to find out is to ask how many hours a month the contract includes.
The $1,000 threshold is American and does not transfer to the UK
A clear-cut threshold circulates in English-language content. Sarah Berry, lead SEO consultant at WebFX, writes on seo.com that anything under $1,000 to $2,000 a month is cheap SEO and does damage, and that below $500 no agency is using safe methods. The line is quoted often, and that is where the misunderstanding starts.
SE Ranking's data on the same sample shows that only 9% of European agencies, almost half of them British, charge more than $2,000 a month, against 22% in North America, and that only 6% of European agencies bill more than $125 an hour, against 40% in the US and Canada. Applying the American threshold to the UK and Europe means declaring nine European agencies out of ten unfit for the market.
The difference is not about seriousness, it is about labour costs: US levels on one side, a European average of €34.9 an hour on the other, and within Europe itself a factor of four between Bulgaria and Luxembourg. A threshold only makes sense if it is built on the market you work in. We go through pricing in more detail in how much SEO costs, and compare in-house teams with external suppliers in in-house SEO or agency.
Four signs of a package with no work in it
Price on its own tells you nothing. These four things do, and you can read all of them in the proposal before you sign.
The hours are not written down. A proposal that lists activities without quantifying them ("on-page optimisation, link building, monthly monitoring") is selling you a list, not a commitment. Ask for the number of hours and watch the reaction.
The content is sold by volume and off topic. Four articles a month at £40 each means barely an hour per article. The predictable result is generic pieces on subjects that bring visits with no connection to what you sell. The next section measures the damage on a real site.
The links come in bundles. "Twenty backlinks a month" is a price per unit, and links bought by weight come from networks of sites built to sell them. Link building done properly needs relationships or content worth citing, and neither has a stable unit price.
They guarantee a position or a date. Anyone promising the top spot in thirty days is describing something they do not control. We have written about realistic timescales in how long SEO takes to deliver results, and the full list of questions to ask before signing is in questions to ask an SEO agency.
What a site that bought cheap content looks like in Search Console
We opened the Search Console property of an Italian management consultancy for dental practices, a client of ours on another service. The site has a blog built up over the years with content bought by volume. The data below covers the quarter from 1 May to 31 July 2026, filtered on traffic from Italy.
| Metric | Value (1 May - 31 Jul 2026, Italy) |
|---|---|
| Impressions | 5,984 |
| Clicks | 71 |
| CTR | 1.19% |
| Average position | 25.8 |
| Impressions from off-topic queries | 541 (9.0% of total), 1 click |
Seventy-one clicks in ninety-two days is less than one click a day. An average position of 25.8 means the third page of Google: the site exists in the index and does not exist for users.
The most telling row is the last one. Five hundred and forty-one impressions out of 5,984, 9%, come from searches such as "cosa significa https" (what does https mean), "differenza tra http e https" (difference between http and https) and "hashtag cosa sono" (what are hashtags). These are articles written to fill an editorial calendar, on subjects that have nothing to do with consultancy for dental practices. They produced one click in three months, and none of those visitors had a problem the company can solve.
Meanwhile, on the searches that actually describe the service being sold, the site appears on the second or third page: "servizio progettazione studi dentistici" (dental practice design service) gets 225 impressions at an average position of 33.7, "gestionale studio dentistico" (dental practice management software) 109 impressions at position 50.9, "controllo di gestione studio dentistico" (dental practice management control) 48 impressions at position 20.2. All three with zero clicks. The hours that went into the articles on http would have been enough to get at least one of them onto the first page.
This is the real cost of a cheap package, and it does not appear on the invoice: it is not the money spent, it is the ranking someone else took in the meantime.
What to buy first if your budget really is small
A small budget is not a problem in itself. It becomes one when it is spread across every activity instead of concentrated on one. With £300 or £500 a month, the approach that works is to buy finished pieces of work, one at a time, rather than a retainer that covers a bit of everything.
First, a one-off audit. It tells you whether the site has problems that make any other spending pointless: pages not indexed, duplicate content, a structure that hides the commercial pages. You buy it once and it holds for months. We explain how to read one in SEO audit.
Second, research into the right keywords for your business. Not the most searched ones: the ones that describe what you sell. The difference between the two becomes clear when you look at the search intent behind each query.
Third, commercial pages before the blog. The pages that describe your services or products are the ones that convert. Rewriting five of them well is worth more than twenty articles.
Fourth, the Search Console queries report filtered on positions 8 to 20. These are pages Google already considers relevant and that sit just outside the first page. It is the work that pays back soonest, and Search Console is free. The DIY SEO guide has the step-by-step procedure.
If your market is a town, city or county, local SEO is where a small budget goes furthest, because competition on a narrow geographical scale is a fraction of the national one.
When a modest investment still produces results
There are situations where a few well-spent hours are enough, and they almost always have to do with the average value of what you sell.
Macropix, a Milan-based manufacturer of custom LED screens, moved from position 88 to position 2 for the Italian search "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising display). Position 88 is the ninth page, which means zero traffic. The jump did not come from a technical fix but from a well-written page on a subject the company had something to say about. With industrial orders, a handful of enquiries a year pays for the whole project: the full case is in SEO for manufacturing and our other work in projects.
Market context matters too. In many niche B2B and local sectors the first page is not fought over by aggressive competitors: it is held by whoever got there first with a decent website. That is where a small, focused budget has the best chance.
The comparison nobody makes: what the same lead costs when you buy it
People weighing up a £300 SEO retainer rarely compare it with the most direct alternative, which is buying the same leads on Google Ads.
On the Macropix account, between July 2025 and June 2026, Google Ads produced 374 conversions from €16,805 of spend: €44.93 per conversion, just under €1,400 a month. That number is the yardstick you need. If a qualified lead costs you about €45 when you buy it, a monthly fee of around €300 is worth six or seven leads: SEO has to produce at least as many to break even, and it takes months to get going.
Which leads to an unpopular conclusion: if you have £300 a month and need leads now, that money goes further in Google Ads than in a diluted SEO retainer. SEO makes sense when you can afford to spend for six months without a return, or when you already have rankings to defend. We have written about measuring the return in SEO ROI and about the metrics to watch in SEO KPIs.
Something the industry rarely says
People selling £150-a-month packages are almost never scamming anyone. They are working at a loss, or close to it, hoping to make up for it with client volume. While it holds, the service is thin but it exists. When it stops holding, the client does not get a notice: they get more automated reports, slower replies and articles written ever more quickly. The relationship does not break, it wears thin.
So the useful question at proposal stage is not how much it costs, but how many hours a month and who does them. A supplier working sustainably answers in ten seconds. If you want to see how we set the scope of work before starting, it is described on our SEO services page, and the criteria for comparing suppliers are in how to choose an SEO agency.
Cheap SEO FAQs
There is no threshold that works for everyone, because it depends on how many hours your site needs. The calculation is to divide the fee by the hourly rate: at rates between £40 and £75 an hour, £300 a month buys between four and seven and a half gross hours, enough for one targeted piece of work a month but not for full management. If that is your budget, it is better to buy finished pieces of work one at a time rather than a retainer that covers a bit of everything.
That threshold comes from the US market, where labour costs are higher. According to SE Ranking's 2024 survey of 260 agencies, only 9% of European agencies charge more than $2,000 a month against 22% in North America, and only 6% bill over $125 an hour against 40% in the US. A low fee does no damage in itself: it does when it is sold as full management and filled with generic content or links bought in bundles.
Look at four things. The monthly hours must be written into the contract. The planned content must be about what you sell, not generic subjects. Links must not be sold in fixed quantities. There must be no guarantees of a position or a date. A proposal that meets these four points can be honest even at a modest price, because it states a scope instead of promising everything.
It depends on when you need the leads. On one account we manage, Google Ads produced 374 conversions from €16,805 over twelve months, or €44.93 per conversion. Ads brings leads from day one and stops when you switch off the budget, while SEO takes months and what it builds stays. With a very small budget and an immediate need for enquiries, Ads pays back sooner.
Open Google Search Console and filter the queries report on positions 8 to 20: these are searches for which Google already considers you relevant and that sit just outside the first page. Improving those pages is the work with the fastest return and costs nothing but your time. The second free check is to make sure your service pages are indexed and that their titles describe what you sell.
