Ask an agency what SEO costs and most will not answer until you are on a call. We audited twelve agencies ranking for AI SEO terms while researching a separate article. Not one published a price.
There is a reason for it, and it is not always cynical. Scope genuinely varies. But the effect is that a business trying to budget has nothing to work from, so here are real numbers, including ours.
How much do SEO services cost?
Monthly retainers for small businesses commonly run from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on scope and market. Productised plans for local service businesses sit at the lower end. Custom programmes for competitive national markets sit considerably higher, because the work and the competition are both larger.
Two numbers matter more than any average: what is included, and what condition your site starts in. A quote without both is a guess.
What makes one quote three times another?
| Factor | Why it moves the price |
|---|---|
| Competition in your market | Four local competitors is a different job from four hundred national ones |
| Starting condition | A site with clean technical health and consistent listings needs far less remediation |
| Whether content is included | Writing is the largest single cost in most programmes |
| Whether link building is included | Genuine editorial links are slow and expensive. Cheap ones are neither |
| Number of locations or services | Each one is another page, another set of signals, another thing to maintain |
| Reporting and measurement | Doing it properly takes hours every month and is frequently omitted |
Two quotes differing by a factor of three usually differ on the last three rows. Ask which of them are included before comparing anything.
The three ways SEO is priced
| Model | How it works | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | Ongoing work, reported monthly | Most businesses. SEO is continuous rather than a project |
| One-off project | Audit, fixes or a build, delivered once | A specific problem, or a team that implements in-house |
| Hourly | Billed by time | Consulting and advice rather than delivery |
Retainers dominate because the work compounds. An audit alone rarely changes rankings, since the value is in implementing it, which is where most one-off engagements stop.
Why cheap SEO usually costs more
This is worth being specific about, because we have cleaned up the result of it.
A client site we took over had 165 referring domains. 161 of them carried paid-link signals, with anchor text reading “Buy Backlinks Online Cheap” pointing at the homepage. Every one had zero authority. The previous provider had been inexpensive.
The cost of that was not the fee. It was that every keyword the site targeted was suppressed, the links had to be identified and disavowed, and the recovery takes months before any new work begins to count. The cheap option bought negative progress and a cleanup bill.
- Below roughly $300 a month, most of the budget goes on reporting rather than work
- Link packages priced per link are almost always from networks, which is the problem above
- Content at volume pricing is written to a word count rather than to a question anybody asked
- Agencies with no measurement are cheaper because measurement is the expensive part
Note - Ask what the agency does in month one. An honest answer describes an audit, a baseline measurement and a prioritised fix list. A vague answer means the engagement has not been planned, and you are buying hours rather than outcomes.
What we charge
Our plans for local service businesses are published rather than quoted, because the scope for that kind of business is predictable enough to productise.
| Plan | Monthly | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| Starter Growth | $257 | Getting found, trusted and chosen on Google |
| Growth Pro | $425 | Outranking local competition and converting visitors into calls |
| Growth Elite | $675 | Aggressive, market-leading local growth |
All three are monthly rolling with no lock-in, and annual billing saves roughly 20 percent. Full details are on our pricing page.
Those plans are built for roofers, HVAC companies, plumbers, remodelers and other home service businesses competing on local search. The scope is predictable because the job is similar from one to the next.
When the price is different
Two situations fall outside those plans, and both are quoted after scoping rather than priced from a list.
- A business that needs the SEO foundation built from scratch. AI visibility sits on top of ordinary SEO rather than replacing it, so a site with technical problems, thin content and inconsistent business information has to have those fixed first. That is more work than a maintenance plan covers
- A business competing nationally rather than locally. The local market is a different problem. Competing across the United States means more competitors, harder keywords and a longer timeline, and pricing that reflects it
We scope both before quoting, because quoting either from a list would be a guess. AI SEO explains why the foundation has to exist before the AI visibility work counts for anything.
What should be included at any price?
Regardless of budget, these are not extras.
- A written baseline, so progress can be measured rather than claimed
- A named set of keywords being tracked, agreed with you
- A monthly report showing what moved, what did not, and what was done
- Access to your own accounts, including Search Console and Google Business Profile
- A clear statement of what is not included
An agency unwilling to provide the first three is selling activity. The fourth matters more than it sounds: a business that does not own its own Search Console property cannot verify anything it is told.
How should you judge a quote?
Five questions. The answers separate a considered proposal from a template.
- What will you do in the first 30 days, specifically?
- Which keywords will you track, and what is my position on them today?
- Is content writing included, and how much?
- How do you build links, and can you show me examples from the last six months?
- What is not included in this price?
The fourth is the one that matters most. An agency that cannot show recent, genuine links either is not building them or is building the kind that need disavowing later.
Is SEO worth the money?
It depends on whether customers search for what you sell, and whether you can wait. SEO compounds, which means it is poor value in month two and good value in month twelve. A business needing enquiries next week should spend on advertising instead, and we will say so.
Where customers do search and the timeline allows, the cost per enquiry falls over time in a way paid channels do not, because the work keeps producing after the spending stops. The benefits of local SEO covers when that trade is worth making and when it is not.
