How Much Should You Spend on SEO? A Practical Budget Guide

“How much does SEO cost?” and “how much should I spend on SEO?” sound like the same question, but they lead to different answers. The first is about market rates — what agencies typically charge, which we cover in our guide on how much SEO should cost. The second is about your business specifically: given your revenue, your margins and your market, what’s a sensible amount to commit before you’ve even started talking to agencies?

Setting a budget before you start collecting proposals changes the whole process. Without one, it’s easy to anchor on whatever the first agency quotes, and judge every subsequent conversation against that number rather than against what actually makes sense for your business. With one, you walk into every conversation already knowing roughly what you’re prepared to commit, and can evaluate proposals against that instead.

It’s worth being honest that neither approach in this guide will produce a scientifically precise number — nobody can tell you with certainty that your business needs exactly £1,847 a month in SEO investment. What they can do is get you to a defensible starting range, grounded in your own numbers rather than a figure you half-remember from a conversation with another business owner, or the first quote that happened to land in your inbox.

Start With a Percentage of Revenue

A common, if rough, benchmark is to allocate somewhere between 5% and 12% of revenue to marketing overall, with SEO taking a meaningful but not exclusive share of that alongside other channels. Early-stage or smaller businesses often need to spend toward the higher end of that range relative to revenue simply because there’s less existing brand awareness or organic visibility to build from.

Business stage	Typical marketing spend (% revenue)	SEO’s rough share of that
Early-stage / growth-focused	10–12%	Often a primary channel — higher relative share
Established, steady growth	6–9%	One of several channels, balanced with paid and other activity
Mature, defending market share	4–6%	Ongoing maintenance-focused share

These are starting points, not rules — a business with very thin margins may not be able to commit 10% of revenue to marketing at all, regardless of stage, and that’s a real constraint worth respecting rather than working around.

Adjust for Your Competitive Landscape

Revenue percentage only gets you so far, because the same percentage buys very different amounts of visibility depending on how competitive your search terms are. A local trades business competing against a handful of similar companies needs meaningfully less budget to rank well than a national ecommerce brand competing against dozens of well-resourced competitors for the same keywords.

Before finalising a number, it’s worth a rough look at who currently ranks for your priority search terms. If the top results are dominated by large, established competitors with clear SEO investment behind them, budget toward the higher end of what your revenue can support. If the current results are thin, outdated or poorly optimised, a more modest budget can go further than it would in a crowded market.

A quick way to sense-check your competitive position: search your top three or four priority terms yourself, and look honestly at who’s ranking. Are they larger businesses with obvious marketing resource behind them, or smaller local competitors with fairly basic websites? You don’t need any specialist tools for this — just an honest look at what’s already there, and a realistic sense of what it would take to compete with it.

A Simple Way to Set Your First Budget

If percentage-of-revenue feels too abstract, working backward from the value of a conversion is often more concrete, particularly for businesses with a clear sales process.

1. Work out the average value of a new customer or enquiry to your business.
2. Estimate how many additional customers or enquiries would make a meaningful difference over the next 12 months.
3. Multiply the two to get a rough value of the outcome you’re aiming for.
4. A marketing budget that represents a small fraction of that value — commonly somewhere in the region of 10–20% — is usually a defensible starting point, with SEO taking its share alongside other channels.

Worked example: a business with an average customer value of £2,000 aiming for 20 additional customers a year is targeting roughly £40,000 in additional annual revenue. A combined marketing budget of £4,000–£8,000 (10–20%) to pursue that is a reasonable starting range, with SEO taking a meaningful slice of that if organic search is a realistic channel for reaching those customers.

The businesses that get the most out of SEO tend to set a budget based on what a new customer is actually worth to them, not based on what feels like a round number. £1,000 a month sounds reasonable in the abstract, but whether it’s the right figure depends entirely on whether it’s proportionate to what you’d gain from the results. If you want a ballpark for your market before you start, our SEO cost calculator gives you a typical monthly range in under a minute.

Andy McLoughlin, Founder of Before You Invest

How to Get SEO Budget Approved

Knowing the right number is only half the job if someone else signs off the spend. Finance teams and business owners rarely object to SEO itself; they object to an open-ended cost with no clear point at which anyone will know whether it worked. A request that answers that concern up front is far easier to approve.

• Tie it to a commercial outcome. Use the customer-value calculation above, so the request reads as “X to pursue Y in revenue” rather than “X a month for SEO”.
• Propose a fixed review point. Six months is a common, fair checkpoint for SEO. Agree in advance what you will look at then, so the decision to continue is based on evidence, not momentum.
• Show what the money buys. A costed proposal with itemised deliverables is far more persuasive than a single monthly figure, and it gives approvers something concrete to question.
• Explain how success will be measured. Name the metric (enquiries, sales, revenue from organic search) and how it will be reported. Our guide to measuring ROI from SEO covers how to set that up.

If you are asking for budget against a specific agency proposal, an independent view of that proposal can do a lot of the persuading for you. Approvers tend to trust a second opinion from someone with nothing to sell, which is exactly what our SEO Proposal Review provides.

When to Increase or Decrease Your Budget

A budget set before you’ve started shouldn’t be treated as fixed forever. Review it against actual results at the 6 and 12-month marks, using the reporting your agency provides — see our guide on what a retainer should include for what that reporting should cover.

• Consider increasing if early results are outperforming projections, or if a competitive gap analysis shows a clear opportunity that current budget can’t fully capture.
• Consider holding steady if progress is roughly on track — SEO compounds over time, and switching budget levels frequently makes it harder to judge what’s actually driving results.
• Consider reviewing the strategy before cutting budget if results are behind expectations — a lower budget rarely fixes a strategy problem, and may just slow down the point at which you find out whether the approach itself needs to change.

A budget figure is only ever a starting estimate. What matters more than getting it precisely right on day one is having a clear enough rationale behind it that you can sensibly revisit it once real data starts coming in.

One last practical point: whatever number you land on, share your actual budget range with the agencies you’re talking to, rather than keeping it back to see what they quote. Some business owners worry this leaves them open to being quoted right up to their ceiling. In practice, it usually produces a more useful proposal — an agency working within a known budget can tell you honestly what’s achievable for that figure, rather than you having to guess whether a generic proposal actually fits what you were prepared to spend.

A budget only helps once you know what you’re comparing it against. Our guide to how SEO pricing models are structured explains what that number is actually paying for, and our guide to how to choose an SEO agency covers the rest of the decision.