How much does SEO cost? What drives the price of a quote

SEO is priced three ways: a monthly retainer, a fixed project fee, or an hourly rate. What you pay depends far more on the amount of work your site and market need than on the provider's rate card. Two plumbing companies in the same city can get honest quotes that differ several times over, because one needs a dozen service pages and a rebuilt site and the other needs two fixes.

This guide gives you the one set of price figures we could trace to a survey with a stated method, then the things that move a quote, then what each pricing model should include so you can compare offers line by line. We publish no price list ourselves. We quote after a free site check, for reasons explained at the end.

How much does SEO cost per month?

The most useful public figures come from a survey, not from a provider's sales page. Ahrefs, an SEO software company, polled 439 SEO service providers and checked each respondent's website by hand to confirm they sold SEO. It reports:

• Monthly retainer: the most common bracket was $501 to $1,000 a month, charged by 20.4% of respondents. The average across all respondents was $2,917 a month.
• Local SEO: $1,557 a month on average.
• Project: the most common fee bracket was $2,501 to $5,000, charged by 21.2% of respondents.
• Hourly: the most common bracket was $75 to $100 an hour, charged by 24% of respondents.
• Models in use: 78.2% of respondents offered a monthly retainer, 48.9% charged per project and 34.8% charged hourly.

Read those as what providers say they charge, across every country and every size of client. They do not tell you what work was inside the fee, and that is the part that decides whether a quote is cheap or expensive. A low retainer that buys a monthly report and two blog posts costs more per booked job than a higher one that builds the pages your customers search for.

What drives the price of an SEO quote?

Six things, and you can estimate most of them yourself before anyone sends a proposal.

1. How many services need their own page. A plumber with drain cleaning, water heaters, sewer lines and repiping needs a page for each. So does a dentist with implants, Invisalign and emergency visits, and a law firm with five practice areas. Each page is research, writing, photos and review. A one-service business needs far less.
2. The condition of the site. Pages Google cannot index, a slow theme, broken forms, or a redesign that dropped old addresses all have to be fixed before new pages can work. See pages not indexed and, if a rebuild is coming, SEO migration.
3. Who you are up against. A personal injury firm in a large metro competes with firms that have been publishing for years. A cleaning company in a small town may compete with three websites that have barely been touched. More competition means more pages and more time.
4. Locations and service area. Each real office or branch adds work. Be careful with anyone who prices by the city page: Google treats pages targeted at specific cities that funnel visitors to one page as doorway abuse, which is spam.
5. Who writes and who builds. If your office supplies job photos, prices and answers to customer questions, and your web person can publish changes, the provider's hours drop. If the provider does all of it, they rise. Law firms and dental practices should also allow time for the attorney or dentist to review every page.
6. Measurement. Tracking which calls and forms came from search is a setup job, sometimes with a monthly fee for a call tracking number. Without it nobody can tell you what the work returned.

Retainer, project or hourly: what should each include?

Choose the model by the shape of the work, then check the quote against the right-hand columns.

Whichever model you choose, three things should be yours from day one: the website and its content, the Google Business Profile, and the Search Console and analytics accounts. A provider is a user on your accounts. If you would lose any of those by canceling, the price is higher than the invoice says.

What should you not pay for?

Start with anything Google itself warns against, because you carry the risk and the provider does not.

• Guaranteed rankings. Google's guidance on hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and that if a provider guarantees first place you should find someone else.
• Link packages. Google lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam. A monthly line for "50 backlinks" is a liability you are paying for.
• Tool scores. Google says it does not endorse third-party SEO tools and that they have no access to its ranking data. Raising a score from 70 to 92 is not a deliverable. A booked job is.
• Reports about traffic alone. Visits that do not call are a cost. Our guide on website traffic but no leads shows what to ask for instead.

Google also advises giving a prospective provider read-only access to Search Console for an audit, and nothing more until you have hired them.

Can I do SEO on my own?

Partly, and Google says so. Its guidance states that if you run a small local business you can probably do much of the work yourself, and it points owners to its SEO starter guide. Keeping your Business Profile accurate, asking every customer for a review, and writing a plain page for each service with real photos and prices are all within reach of an owner or office manager.

The parts that usually need paid help are the ones where a mistake is expensive: indexing and site-speed problems, a redesign or change of platform, and working out which searches are worth a page in the first place. Paying hourly for direction while your own staff do the writing is a legitimate way to keep the cost down. Our comparison of an agency, a freelancer and an in-house hire covers who suits which situation.

How do you know if a quote is too high?

Compare it with what the work has to earn, not with other quotes. Take the monthly fee and divide it by the profit on one booked job. The answer is the number of extra jobs a month the work must bring in to pay for itself. The SEO break-even calculator does this with your job value, margin and close rate, and is SEO worth it for a small business walks through the decision. Contractors setting a whole marketing budget should read how much contractors should spend on marketing. Buyers in the Philippines, where rates and scopes differ, have a separate guide to SEO pricing in the Philippines.

Why we quote after a site check

The six cost drivers above cannot be read from a contact form. A price given before anyone has looked at the site is a package, and a package is priced for the average client, not for you. So we look first. Ask for a free site check and we send one useful finding within two business days, with no call required. If there is work worth doing, the quote names it page by page and fix by fix, and you can hold it against the table above.