SEO pricing, and why
nobody publishes it.

What the published guides actually say

If you read the guides that rank for this question, the figures cluster tightly. These are what each one publishes.

Figures as published by each source at the time of writing, October 2026.

WebFX also publishes $75 to $200 an hour for consulting and $500 to $5,000 for one off projects, which is the widest honest statement of the market anyone makes.

So the market answer is roughly $1,000 to $5,000 a month. That is true and almost useless, because the thing you want to know is what you will pay, and nobody on that list will tell you without a call first.

The three ways SEO gets sold

Monthly retainer. The commonest. You pay a fixed amount and a set of work happens each month. This suits SEO because the work compounds and nothing meaningful happens in four weeks.

Hourly. Usually consulting rather than delivery. Useful if you have people who can execute and need somebody to decide what they execute. The risk is that you pay for hours rather than outcomes, and hours are easy to fill.

Project or one off. An audit, a technical fix, a site migration. Fixed scope with an end date. Good for a specific problem, poor as a growth strategy, because the thing that makes SEO work is doing it continuously.

Most of the confusion in pricing comes from comparing across these three without noticing. A $3,000 project and $3,000 a month are not the same purchase.

Why nobody publishes a number

This is the part worth understanding, because it tells you more about the industry than the prices do.

A quoted price is set after the quoter has looked at you. They have seen your website, your industry, often your office. By the time a number arrives it has been adjusted for what you appear able to pay. The same work genuinely does cost two businesses different amounts, and the first conversation becomes a negotiation rather than a diagnosis.

That is not a conspiracy. It is a rational response to the fact that pricing is the highest leverage variable an agency controls. Publishing removes it.

It also explains why the guides exist. A pricing guide that gives a range ranks for the question, captures someone at the moment they are deciding to buy, and hands them to a sales call where the actual number is set privately. The guide is the top of a funnel, which is why the range is always wide enough to include you.

What mine costs

$1,500 a month if SEO is the single channel you are buying. That covers audit, technical work, pages, local search, measurement and a monthly read out in plain language.

$1,999 a month inside full marketing management, where SEO runs alongside the website, content, paid media and tracking rather than being bought separately. Most businesses that buy SEO alone discover the website is the constraint, which is why the second option exists.

There is also a $3,000 fixed scope strategy engagement if what you need is the plan rather than the hands, and a free twenty minute consultation if you are not sure which of those you are.

Every other price I charge is published too, on the pricing page, and the figures are the same whether your business is two years old or twenty.

What actually changes the price

Four things, and none of them is how much you look like you can spend.

How many channels are in scope. SEO alone is cheaper than SEO plus the website plus paid media, because it is less work. That is the whole of it.

What state you are starting from. A site with a sound technical base and thin content is a different job from one that needs rebuilding before anything can rank. An audit tells you which you are, and it should happen before anyone quotes.

How competitive the term is. Ranking for a service in one city is a different scale of task from ranking nationally against companies with content teams. Anyone who prices those identically has not looked.

Whether you need the plan or the hands. Fixed scope strategy work has an end date. Ongoing management does not. They are different purchases and should not be compared on monthly cost.

What $199 a month buys

Search this question and you will be advertised cheap packages. One of the ads on this very query offers SEO from $199 a month. It is worth being specific about what that number can contain, because the honest answer is arithmetic rather than opinion.

At $199 a month, after the cost of tools and any overhead, you are buying somewhere between one and three hours of someone's attention. SEO that moves anything requires a technical audit, fixes that usually need a developer, pages written for terms real customers search, and measurement that records enquiries rather than rankings. None of that fits in two hours a month.

So what is usually delivered instead is activity that can be produced at volume: directory submissions, a handful of low quality links, a monthly report of rankings that nobody checks against enquiries, and a blog post written to a word count. All of it is real work. None of it is the work.

This is not an argument that expensive is better. A $5,000 retainer can buy exactly the same thing with a nicer dashboard. It is an argument for asking what specifically happens each month and who does it, which is the second question in the list below.

Local SEO usually costs less, and it should

If you serve one city and compete with a handful of other local businesses, the job is genuinely smaller than ranking nationally against companies with content teams and link budgets. The published guides reflect this. Boulder SEO Marketing puts local service businesses at $2,000 to $4,000 a month. Others put narrow local scope lower still.

The work is also different rather than just lighter. Local search leans on your Google Business Profile, the directories your industry actually gets cited in, consistent business information across all of them, and reviews. A national SEO retainer spent on a local business often funds content nobody in your city is searching for.

Which is why asking what proportion of the fee goes to local work, and what proportion to general content, is worth doing before you sign. What local SEO consists of is set out separately.

What to ask before you pay anyone

Four questions, and the quality of the answers tells you more than any proposal.

1. What is the price, before the proposal? If it cannot be given, the number is being set by what you look like you can pay.
2. Who specifically does the work, and what else are they working on? Agency pricing often funds account management rather than execution. Divide the monthly fee by a realistic senior rate and ask how many of those hours are senior.
3. Which metric are you accountable for, and how is it recorded? If the answer is rankings or impressions, you are buying a report. Enquiries are the only number that spends.
4. What happens to my accounts and data if we stop? Everything should be in your name. If it is not, you are renting your own marketing.

A good answer to the last one is often the clearest signal in the whole conversation.

When SEO is the wrong thing to buy

SEO is slow. It compounds, which is the argument for it, but it means the first few months produce work rather than enquiries. If you need customers this quarter, paid media does that and SEO does not.

It is also the wrong purchase if your website does not convert the traffic it already has. Doubling the visitors to a page that turns nobody into an enquiry doubles nothing. That problem is worth ruling out first, and it is cheaper to fix.

And if nobody is searching for what you sell, no amount of optimisation creates demand. I have told people that and lost the work. It is still the right answer.