How much does SEO cost? What you should get at each price
How SEO is priced: hourly, by project, monthly or by results. What moves the price, what each model should include, and the red flags to walk away from.
Ask five SEO agencies for a price and you will get five answers, and probably five different ways of charging. That isn’t because SEO is mysterious. It’s because “SEO” covers very different amounts of work.
This guide explains how SEO is priced, what should come with each price, and how to spot a quote that isn’t worth signing.
The four ways SEO is priced
Hourly
You pay for time: a consultant’s afternoon to review a site, or a few hours of advice a month. It suits a business with its own team, who need direction more than hands.
You should get: a clear record of what was done in those hours, and advice specific enough to act on.
By project
A fixed price for a defined job: a technical audit, a site migration, a set of new pages. It suits problems with an end, such as a site Google can’t read properly or a redesign that lost traffic.
You should get: a written scope before you pay, and the job finished, not a list of what someone else should do. An audit that ends in a 90-page PDF leaves the hard part to you.
Monthly retainer
A monthly fee for ongoing work: new pages, technical care, local SEO, links and reporting. It suits a business that wants to keep climbing, because competitors don’t stand still and neither do Google’s results.
You should get: a named amount of work each month, such as a number of pages, and a report that shows what shipped and what moved.
Pay for results
You pay only when a page reaches a position. It sounds safe, and sometimes is. But it rewards ranking for easy searches that bring no customers, and nobody controls Google’s results, so the fine print tends to protect the agency.
You should get: searches chosen by you, from what your customers actually type, and a definition of “ranking” that you can check yourself.
What makes SEO cost more
- The size of the site. A ten-page site and a ten-thousand-product shop are different jobs.
- How hard your searches are. Ranking for a plumber in one town is easier than ranking for a national insurance product.
- How many markets and languages. Each country, city or language is its own set of searches to win.
- How much new content you need. Pages written from real research take time; pages that don’t, don’t rank.
- Digital PR and links. Earning mentions on sites people trust is slow, skilled work.
Red flags in an SEO quote
- A guaranteed first position. Nobody honest can promise one. Google decides.
- Bought links. They break Google’s spam policies and can cost you the rankings they were meant to win.
- Work you can’t see. If you don’t get access to what was changed and published, you can’t tell what you paid for.
- Long lock-ins. SEO needs a few months to show, but a year’s contract with no exit protects the agency, not you.
- Reports full of numbers you didn’t ask about. Impressions and “visibility scores” matter less than the searches that bring customers.
What we charge
We keep it to three prices, written on our pricing page:
- Technical SEO: a flat $1,000. A full audit with every fix made, in three weeks, with no retainer.
- Monthly SEO: from $399 a month. Technical care, two new pages a month, local SEO and AI answer tracking, with a report every Monday.
- Paid ads: from $499 a month. Google, Microsoft and Meta ads managed for up to $5,000 of spend, which you pay the platforms directly.
There are no setup fees, and the monthly plans run month to month after the first three months. If you want to know which you need, the call is free, and you leave with the three fixes we would make first, whether you hire us or not.
