SEO Pricing: What to Expect

Most small and mid-sized businesses that hire outside SEO help pay a monthly retainer somewhere between $1,500 and $10,000. Where you land depends on three things: how hard your searches are to win, how much is broken on your site today, and how much new content and outreach the plan needs.

A one-time audit or a fixed-scope project is the other common way to buy. It suits a business that has someone in-house to carry out the fixes.

• Monthly retainer. Ongoing work against a plan: technical fixes, content, local listings, outreach and reporting. Best when search is a channel you want to grow, not a one-off repair.
• Fixed-fee project. A defined deliverable with a start and an end, such as a technical audit, a site migration or a rebuild of your service pages.
• Hourly consulting. Strategy sessions, training, or a second opinion on work your team or another vendor is doing.
• Pay for performance. You pay per ranking or per lead. It sounds safe, but it rewards the vendor for ranking easy phrases nobody searches and for counting leads you would have had anyway. I do not sell it.

• Competition. A dentist in one suburb and a personal injury firm in a major metro are different problems. The second needs far more content and authority to move.
• Site condition. Indexing problems, slow templates, duplicate pages or a messy migration history add up-front technical work before anything else pays off.
• Locations. Each location needs its own Google Business Profile, listings, reviews and a page that says something specific about that place.
• Content volume. How many pages need to be written or rewritten, and whether a subject-matter expert on your side can review them.
• Measurement. If call tracking, form tracking and GA4 conversions are not set up, that comes first. Without it nobody can tell you what the money returned.

Whatever the fee, you should be able to point to work, not just a report. Each month you should see:

• A written plan that names the pages and searches being worked on, and why.
• Technical fixes shipped to the live site, not only listed in a spreadsheet.
• New or improved pages published under a real, named author.
• Local work for each location: profile updates, listing corrections, review responses.
• Reporting on calls, forms and revenue from Search Console and GA4, alongside rankings rather than instead of them.

• Guaranteed rankings. Google itself says no one can guarantee a top position.
• A price far below the range above, which usually means automated work or nothing at all.
• A long contract before any work has been seen.
• Link packages sold by the count ("50 backlinks a month").
• Reports that show rankings for phrases you have never heard a customer use.
• A vendor who owns your Google Business Profile, analytics or domain instead of you.

Work backwards from what a customer is worth. Here is an example with made-up numbers: if a new customer brings $2,000 in gross profit and you close one in four qualified leads, each lead is worth $500. A $3,000 monthly fee then needs six extra qualified leads a month to break even, and everything past that is return.

Plug your own numbers into the SEO ROI calculator. Expect technical and local fixes to show up within weeks, and competitive organic rankings to take three to six months or longer.

Every engagement starts with a free audit, and the proposal comes from what the audit finds. Work is month-to-month. I scope it myself, so the person quoting you is the person accountable for the result. Published results are on the case studies page.