Straight answer: most freelancers should be charging £250 to £600 for a small business keyword research project, £800 to £2,000 for an ecommerce or SaaS site, and £50 to £90 an hour if you’re billing by time, with US rates running roughly 20 to 30 percent higher. Below that and you’re subsidising the client with your own unpaid strategy thinking, above it and you need to be able to defend the number with a plan, not just a spreadsheet of search volumes.
What keyword research costs right now
I get asked this a lot, usually by someone who’s just finished a course, built a nice looking template, and has no idea what number to type into a proposal. So here’s the range as it sits in 2026, based on what I see clients pay and what I charge myself.
- Solo freelancer, small local business (a plumber, a dentist, a single-location shop): £150 to £400, or $200 to $500 in the US market.
- Solo freelancer, growing service business or small SaaS: £500 to £1,200, or $650 to $1,500.
- Ecommerce site with 50 or more product categories: £800 to £2,500, depending on how many product lines and how competitive the space is.
- Agency-level, full site audit plus keyword mapping as part of an SEO onboarding package: £1,500 to £5,000, often bundled so the client never sees keyword research as a line item on its own.
- Hourly rate, if the client wants ongoing keyword work rather than a one-off report: £35 to £90 in the UK, $50 to $150 in the US.
Those numbers aren’t guesses. I’ve quoted at the bottom and top of every one of those ranges depending on the client, the industry, and honestly, how much I wanted the work that month. Pricing is never as clean as the blog posts make it sound, and anyone telling you there’s one correct number is selling you a template.
The three ways to price this, and which one protects you
There are really only three models, and each one suits a different type of client.
Hourly
Good for ongoing relationships where the scope keeps shifting, bad for one-off projects because the client will always ask “how long will it take” and then judge your worth by the answer rather than the outcome. If you’re new and unsure how long a full keyword audit takes, track your hours on your first three projects with a stopwatch app, then price the fourth one as a flat fee based on what you learned.
Flat fee
This is what I recommend for most keyword research work, because it forces you to scope the project before you start, and it means the client is paying for the deliverable, not your speed. A flat fee also means if AI tools let you do the same job in half the time next year, you keep the margin instead of the client keeping it.
Retainer
Keyword research isn’t really a one-off job for anyone who’s serious about growth, because search behaviour shifts, new competitors show up, and Google keeps changing what it rewards. A £300 to £800 a month retainer that includes ongoing keyword tracking, gap analysis, and quarterly re-prioritisation is usually more valuable to the client than a single big report, and it’s far better for your income than chasing a new client every month.
A client I priced badly, and what it taught me
Years ago, back when I was still building out my own consulting work, I quoted a UK based ecommerce client £250 for what turned out to be a proper full keyword mapping project across 400 products in three categories. I’d scoped it in ten minutes based on gut feel, not based on how many hours the categorisation, search intent grouping, and competitor gap analysis would take. It took me eleven hours. Do the maths on that hourly rate and you’ll wince, because I did.
What I learned wasn’t “charge more,” which is the lazy lesson everyone repeats. What I learned was that I hadn’t asked a single scoping question before quoting. I didn’t ask how many product categories, whether they wanted competitor comparison, whether they needed the keywords mapped to existing pages or new ones, or whether they wanted search intent tagged. Every one of those adds real hours, and every one of those should change the price. Now I never quote a number before I’ve had a fifteen minute call and asked at least six scoping questions. That single habit has probably added more to my income over the years than any pricing formula ever has.
What should be baked into your price
A number without a breakdown is just a guess dressed up as confidence. Here’s what goes into a proper keyword research quote:
- Tool costs. Ahrefs runs around £99 to £199 a month depending on the plan, Semrush is similar at $139 upward. If you’re doing this monthly for multiple clients, that cost needs to be spread across your pricing, not eaten out of your own pocket. If a client is price sensitive, I sometimes point them toward doing an initial pass themselves using free methods, and I’ve written a full guide on how to do keyword research for free without expensive tools for exactly that situation.
- Research and gathering time. Pulling seed keywords, running competitor gap reports, checking search volume and difficulty. For a small site this is two to four hours, for a mid-size ecommerce site it’s often eight to fifteen.
- Analysis and grouping time. This is the part most junior freelancers skip and it’s the part clients pay for. Sorting keywords by search intent (informational, transactional, navigational), grouping them into topic clusters, and flagging which ones map to existing pages versus needing new content. Budget at least as much time here as you did gathering the data.
- Strategy and recommendations. A spreadsheet of 200 keywords with volume and difficulty columns is not a service, it’s a data dump. The service is the two or three paragraphs telling the client which ten keywords to go after first and why, based on their actual capacity to produce content or optimise pages.
- Delivery and a call. Always include a 30 minute walkthrough call in your price. A report nobody understands doesn’t get acted on, and a client who doesn’t act on your work won’t hire you again.
Pricing by client type
The type of business changes the price more than almost anything else.
Small local businesses
Simple intent, low competition, small keyword universe. £150 to £400 is fair. Don’t over-engineer this with a 40 page report, a one to two page priority list with 20 to 30 keywords is more useful and takes you three to five hours.
B2B and SaaS
Longer sales cycles, more nuanced intent, often need to map keywords against buyer stages (awareness, comparison, decision). This is where the analysis time goes up, and £600 to £1,500 reflects that.
Ecommerce
Volume is the challenge here, not complexity. Hundreds or thousands of product pages need keyword mapping, and this is where I’d sometimes bring in a data extraction tool to speed up scraping product titles and competitor listings rather than doing it by hand. I’ve covered a few of these in my roundup of data extraction tools that make product research a breeze, and using one of those can cut research time by a third, which should either widen your margin or let you drop the price and stay competitive.
Amazon sellers
A slightly different beast, because you’re researching for Amazon’s own search algorithm, not Google’s. Amazon keyword research for a seller launching a new product line often runs £200 to £600 as a standalone project, and if you’re advising anyone building out a store, it’s worth understanding the wider context of what they’re trying to do, which I go into in my guide on how to sell on Amazon and make real money.
The bit most pricing guides skip
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: on its own, a keyword research report is one of the weakest standalone services you can sell right now, because AI tools have made the raw research part close to free. Anyone can paste a topic into an AI tool and get 100 keyword suggestions with rough intent categories in under a minute. If your entire offer is “I’ll find you keywords,” you’re competing with a free feature that ships inside half the tools your clients already pay for.
What still has value, and what you should be pricing, is judgement: knowing which of those keywords a specific business with a specific budget and a specific content capacity should chase first, which ones are a waste of time even though the volume looks tempting, and which ones signal a gap their competitors haven’t spotted yet. That’s the part AI can’t replicate well, because it doesn’t know the client’s business the way you do after a proper conversation. Price the judgement, not the list. Clients who understand this pay double without blinking, and the ones who won’t were never going to be good clients anyway.
How to raise your price without losing the client
If you’ve been undercharging, don’t apologise for the increase, explain what it now includes. Move from “here’s a spreadsheet” to “here’s a spreadsheet, a prioritised action plan, and a 30 minute call to walk through it.” That single addition justifies a 30 to 50 percent increase because it changes what you’re selling. I did exactly this in 2023, added a strategy call and a one-page priority summary to every keyword project, and raised my flat fee by 40 percent. Not one client pushed back, because the perceived value had shifted, not just the number on the invoice.
If you subcontract keyword research out to a virtual assistant or a junior freelancer to keep your own time free for client calls and strategy, make sure what you’re paying them and what you’re charging the client reflects the same split I described above. My full breakdown of what a virtual assistant should charge and what most people get wrong is worth reading before you set that internal rate, because underpaying the person doing the gathering work while overcharging the client for your “strategy” layer is a fast way to lose good VAs.
If you’re looking for this kind of work yourself
If you’re a freelancer trying to build a client base around keyword research specifically, it’s worth knowing this rarely stands alone as a full time income unless you bundle it into broader SEO or content strategy work. Plenty of people start by picking up smaller hourly gigs on remote job boards to build a portfolio before pitching flat fee packages directly. I’ve listed some of the better ones in my roundup of the best websites for finding hourly paid remote jobs, and starting there while you build case studies is a sensible way in, rather than pricing yourself at agency rates before you’ve delivered ten projects.
A simple way to scope any keyword research quote this week
- Ask the client how many pages, products, or service categories are involved. This alone tells you 60 percent of the time estimate.
- Ask whether they want competitor gap analysis included, or just their own site. Competitor work roughly doubles the research time.
- Ask what they’ll do with the output. If they have no content team and no plan to act on it, sell them a shorter, more focused list rather than an exhaustive one nobody will use.
- Estimate hours honestly using the breakdown above, gathering, grouping, strategy, delivery, then multiply by your target hourly rate.
- Add 20 percent as a buffer for scope creep, because there is always scope creep.
Frequently asked questions
What’s a fair hourly rate for keyword research?
In the UK, £35 to £90 an hour depending on experience and the complexity of the site, in the US, $50 to $150 an hour. Beginners should sit at the lower end while building a portfolio, and move up once they can point to results, not just deliverables.
Should I charge a flat fee or hourly for keyword research?
Flat fee is usually better for one-off projects because it rewards you for getting faster with experience and tools, rather than punishing your speed with a lower bill. Hourly makes more sense for ongoing, open-ended keyword monitoring work.
Is keyword research alone still worth selling as a standalone service in 2026?
It’s harder than it used to be, because AI tools have made basic keyword generation close to free. The part still worth charging for is the strategic prioritisation and judgement about what a specific business should act on, not the raw list of keywords itself.
How much should I charge for keyword research on an ecommerce site?
Expect £800 to £2,500 for a site with 50 or more product categories, scaling with how many product lines exist and whether competitor gap analysis is included. Larger, more competitive catalogues sit toward the top of that range.
