How Much Does SEO Cost? SEO Pricing in Europe
SEO pricing from 50 European agencies' public price pages: a €450/month median for entry packages, prices by country, pricing models and red flags.
How much does SEO cost? In Europe, the typical published starting price for a monthly SEO package is €450 a month excl. VAT, and the next package up costs about €800. Those are the medians from our check of SEO pricing on the public price pages of 50 agencies and freelancers in 13 European countries, seen on 23 October 2026. Of the 39 that publish a monthly SEO package, the cheapest started at €137 a month and the most expensive entry package at €2,500.
These are “from” prices for each agency’s smallest packages, so a quote for a competitive market or a large site will often be higher. For a small European business they are still a closer guide than the $1,500 to $5,000 a month quoted by US-focused pricing guides and by Google’s AI summary for this search.
In short
- Entry-level monthly SEO packages in our European sample have a median published price of €450 excl. VAT (39 agencies, range €137 to €2,500).
- The second package on the same price pages has a median of about €800 a month (30 agencies).
- Ireland’s median entry price is also €450 (9 agencies), but six of the nine Irish pages don’t say whether VAT is included.
- Most providers sell SEO as a monthly retainer. Hourly rates in our sample ran from about €57 to €175.
- Our own SEO plan costs €690/mo excl. VAT, between the two medians, and includes four SEO articles a month.
How much should SEO cost a month?
For an entry-level package from a European agency, budget around €450 a month excl. VAT. That is the median published starting price across the 39 agencies in our sample that sell monthly SEO: half started below it and half above. Nearly two thirds of them (25 of 39) started between €300 and €700 a month.
| Package level | Agencies | Lowest | Median | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry (cheapest monthly SEO package) | 39 | €137 | €450 | €2,500 |
| Second package on the same page | 30 | €229 | €798 | €4,200 |
Published starting prices, excl. VAT where the page says so (9 of the 39 pages don’t say), rounded to the nearest euro. Non-euro prices converted at the ECB reference rate of 22 October 2026.
Setup fees and contract terms change what you pay in the first year. Five agencies in the sample add a one-off setup or onboarding fee to their SEO packages, from about €120 to €1,490, while four say on their price page that there is none. Minimum terms ran from cancel-any-month to 12 months. VAT wording varies too: 30 of the 39 pages say explicitly that prices exclude VAT, and the median for those 30 alone is €430.
How much should SEO cost for a small business?
Agencies that publish prices tend to sell fixed packages to small businesses, while larger agencies usually quote on request. That makes the €450 median a fair starting point for a single-location business with a modest website.
If you mainly need customers from one town, start with what local SEO costs on its own. It isn’t automatically cheaper: the 11 local SEO packages in our sample had a median of €490 a month, and several general entry packages already include Google Business Profile work.
The price rises with reach and site size. Where a price page splits its packages this way, national and e-commerce SEO costs more than local. One Irish agency lists local packages from €800 and national or e-commerce work from €3,000 a month, and a London agency’s list runs from £495 for local to £995 for international SEO.
SEO is rarely the only marketing line in a small business budget. If you’re planning ads, email and social media as well, see a full digital marketing budget for small businesses and email marketing costs for small businesses.
SEO pricing models
SEO is sold in four main ways, and many providers use more than one. In Ahrefs’ poll of 439 SEO providers, 78.2% charged a monthly retainer, 48.9% charged per project and 34.8% charged by the hour. A common one-off project is an audit, and we cover what a one-off SEO audit costs in a separate guide.
| Model | How it’s billed | What we found in Europe | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | Fixed fee for an agreed amount of monthly work | Entry median €450, second package €798 | Ongoing SEO |
| Hourly | You pay for the time used | €57–€175 an hour, median about €93 (6 agencies) | Advice, training, a second opinion |
| Project | One price for a defined job | One-off audits from €290 to €1,800 (7 agencies) | Audits, site migrations, one-time clean-ups |
| Performance-based | You pay per ranking or lead | None of the 50 agencies published a price | Read the contract closely |
Retainers are the norm because SEO is ongoing work. Performance deals can look low-risk, but Google’s own guidance says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, so check what counts as a “result” and who chose the keywords.
How much does SEO cost in Ireland?
In Ireland, the median published starting price for monthly SEO was €450 a month, the same as the European median. The nine Irish agencies in our sample started between €350 and €1,500 a month. The four that list a second package priced it between €500 and €800, with a median of €748.
Six of the nine Irish pages don’t say whether VAT is included. Where a price is excl. VAT and your business can’t reclaim it, add the Irish standard VAT rate of 23%, which turns €450 into €553.50.
Some Irish agencies’ own pricing guides quote higher figures; one puts a local small business at €800 to €2,000 a month. That describes what agencies say their clients typically spend. Our figures are the published prices of the smallest packages, which you can compare before asking for a quote.
SEO prices across Europe by country
| Country | Agencies | Median entry price | Entry range | Median second package |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland | 9 | €450 | €350–€1,500 | €748 (4 agencies) |
| United Kingdom | 4 | €534 | €358–€657 | €892 (4) |
| Germany | 4 | €740 | €300–€1,490 | €1,245 (4) |
| Netherlands | 5 | €570 | €360–€999 | €950 (3) |
| Denmark | 3 | €468 | €455–€602 | €870 (3) |
| Norway | 4 | €324 | €286–€476 | €524 (4) |
| Finland | 3 | €299 | €199–€349 | too few to say |
| All 13 countries | 39 | €450 | €137–€2,500 | €798 (30) |
Monthly, excl. VAT where the page says so, rounded to the nearest euro. Sweden, Spain, Austria, Cyprus and Poland had fewer than three agencies each and are included only in the total.
With three to nine agencies per country, the table shows where published prices sit in our sample and says little about which country is cheaper overall. Germany’s median is pulled up by two agencies that only sell larger retainers. For one Norwegian agency we used its 6-month contract price; it charges less for 12- or 24-month terms.
What each price level gets you
The packages that list their contents fall into rough price bands.
| Monthly price | What the packages include | Examples from the sample |
|---|---|---|
| About €300–€500 | A few hours of work: on-page fixes on a handful of pages, Google Business Profile upkeep, rank tracking and a monthly report | Packages that state hours list between about 2 and 6 hours a month. New content ranges from none to four pieces a month. |
| About €650–€1,000 | More hours, more keywords and pages, usually some regular content | A German package at €899 includes 15 hours a month. A UK package at £550 (about €657) includes 8 hours. |
| €1,500 and up | National, multi-location or e-commerce SEO, more content and link building | The same UK agency sells 24 hours for £1,500 (about €1,791). An Irish agency starts national and e-commerce SEO at €3,000. |
When you compare quotes, look at the hours and the number of new pages per month. The package name tells you little.
Why US SEO prices look higher
Many of the English-language SEO pricing guides that rank for this search are written for the US market. Several things explain most of the gap.
- The currency and market are different. At the ECB rate of 22 October 2026, $1,500 to $5,000 a month is about €1,339 to €4,462.
- Surveys often report averages. Ahrefs’ poll found an average of $2,917 a month, but the most common retainer band was $501–$1,000 (20.4% of respondents), and 42.8% charged between $501 and $2,000. A few large retainers pull the average up.
- Surveys ask what providers charge across all clients. Our data records the published starting price of the smallest package.
- Large agencies rarely publish prices, so a price-page sample leans towards small-business packages.
- The survey data is older. The Ahrefs page was last updated in August 2024, and our prices were seen in October 2026.
Is paying someone to do SEO worth it?
We can’t give you a reliable return-on-investment figure, because we haven’t found an independent study with a published method that measures one. The SEO ROI percentages we found on agency blogs don’t show how they were calculated. The closest data point is about traffic, not return: in BrightEdge’s 2019 channel report, organic search made up 53.3% of trackable website traffic across thousands of domains, against 15% for paid search. That is vendor data, and it is seven years old.
Your own numbers are a better test. Track clicks in Google Search Console and the enquiries or sales they bring, then compare that with the cost of the same clicks in Google Ads. If €450 to €800 a month in SEO brings in traffic that would cost more to buy as ads, that’s a reasonable sign it’s paying its way.
Give it time before you judge. Google says it could take several months for its systems to confirm that a site as a whole has improved, and an Ahrefs study found that only 1.74% of newly published pages reached the top 10 within a year. We look at how long SEO takes to show results in more detail.
Paying someone makes most sense when you lack the time or skills to do the work every month, or when competitors already invest in SEO. In a small local niche, doing it yourself can be enough.
What does DIY SEO cost?
The cash cost is low. Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and Google Business Profile are free. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs for free, and a licence costs €245 a year.
Paid SEO suites are optional. At list prices, Ahrefs starts at $29 a month (Starter) and $129 for its Lite plan, Semrush’s SEO plan is $139 a month and Moz’s entry plan is $49 a month, all in USD and plus VAT where applicable. Most of what DIY SEO costs is your time and the learning curve.
Red flags in an SEO proposal
Google’s guide Do you need an SEO? lists several warning signs, and the price pages we read add a few more:
- Guaranteed rankings. Google’s guide is blunt: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
- Claims of a “special relationship” with Google or a “priority submit” service. Google tells you to be wary of both.
- Vague deliverables. If the proposal doesn’t say how many hours, pages or articles you get each month, you can’t compare it with other quotes.
- Talk of link schemes, or offers to submit your site to thousands of search engines.
- Cold emails offering to fix your rankings.
- A request for write access to Search Console during an audit. Google advises giving read access only at that stage.
- Terms you only find in the contract. Check the minimum term, any setup fee and whether the price includes VAT. In our sample, minimum terms ran from none to 12 months, and setup fees from nothing to €1,490.
Where our SEO plan sits
Caladona’s SEO plan costs €690/mo excl. VAT. That is above the €450 median entry price in our European sample and below the €798 median for the second package. The plan includes a technical SEO audit and fixes, keyword research and topic clusters, 4 SEO articles per month, local SEO and Google Business Profile work, and a monthly ranking and traffic report. For comparison, the entry packages in our sample that state their content ranged from no new content to four pieces a month.
If you only need part of that, the SEO audit (€990 one-time) and Local SEO (€290/mo) add-ons can be bought on their own. All our prices are public, and all are excl. VAT.
How we collected these prices
We searched in ten languages for agencies and freelancers that publish SEO prices on their own websites and opened each price page on 23 October 2026. For each agency we recorded the cheapest and second-cheapest monthly SEO package, converted GBP, DKK, SEK, NOK and PLN to euros at the ECB reference rate of 22 October 2026, and kept prices excl. VAT where the page said so. We used medians, because a few expensive agencies would skew an average. Agencies are not named, and Caladona is not in the sample.