What should you actually be paying for SEO?
There is no list price for SEO, which is exactly why it is so easy to overcharge for it. Here are the ranges we see, what each one should buy you, and how to work out whether your own retainer is fair.
Ask three agencies what SEO costs and you will get three answers an order of magnitude apart. That is not because two of them are lying. It is because "SEO" covers everything from writing four blog posts a month to rebuilding a 40,000 page site's information architecture.
The problem is that the vagueness cuts one way. When nobody publishes a price, nobody can tell they are overpaying. So here is what the ranges actually look like, and more usefully, what each one should be buying you.
The actual ranges
These are the bands we see most often for US businesses. They are not a survey, they are what turns up repeatedly in the accounts and contracts we audit.
| Who you hire | Typical monthly | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | $500 – $2,000 | One location, narrow service list, an owner who can make site changes quickly |
| Small agency | $1,500 – $5,000 | Most local and regional businesses. The commonest band by a distance. |
| Mid-size agency | $5,000 – $15,000 | Multi-location, competitive categories, ecommerce with real catalogue depth |
| Enterprise or specialist | $15,000+ | National competition, large sites, in-house teams needing outside strategy |
Hourly consulting generally runs $100 to $250 an hour, with genuinely senior specialists above that. One-off projects like a technical audit or a migration plan tend to land between $2,000 and $10,000 depending on site size.
A $2,000 retainer that produces nothing is more expensive than a $6,000 retainer that produces customers. Judge the fee against what it returns, not against what someone else charges.
Three pricing models, and when each makes sense
Monthly retainer
The default. You pay a fixed amount for an agreed scope of ongoing work. It suits SEO well because the work genuinely is continuous. The risk is that "ongoing" quietly becomes "the same report every month", which is the single most common failure we see.
Hourly
Good for a defined problem: diagnose a traffic drop, plan a migration, review someone else's strategy. Less good as a permanent arrangement, because you end up paying for the meeting where the work is discussed as well as the work.
Project or fixed fee
Sensible for one-off pieces with a clear deliverable. A technical audit, a site restructure, a batch of location pages. If you are nervous about committing to a retainer, a paid project is a much better way to test an agency than a discounted trial month.
Paying per ranking sounds like it aligns incentives. In practice it pushes the agency toward easy keywords nobody searches for, because those are cheap to win and still count. Pay for leads or revenue if you want performance pricing. Never pay for rankings.
What each tier should actually buy you
This is the part nobody puts on a pricing page. If you are paying inside one of these bands, this is roughly the volume of work the money supports once the agency has covered its own costs.
| Monthly fee | Realistic scope |
|---|---|
| Under $750 | A few hours. Realistically that is reporting and light housekeeping. Not enough to move a competitive market, and often the tier where automated link building appears. |
| $1,500 – $3,000 | Ongoing technical fixes, two to four solid content pieces, Google Business Profile management, monthly reporting with real conversion data, and a named person who knows your account. |
| $3,000 – $6,000 | All of the above plus genuine digital PR or outreach, conversion work on key pages, structured internal linking, and proactive strategy rather than a maintenance loop. |
| $6,000+ | A team rather than a person. Specialists for technical, content and links, dedicated analytics work, and someone senior enough to argue with you about strategy. |
Why quotes vary so much for the same business
- Competition in your category. Ranking a plumber in a mid-size city and ranking a personal injury firm in Houston are not the same job, and are not the same price.
- The state of your site. A fast, well-structured site needs less remedial work. A slow one on an awkward platform burns budget before any progress starts.
- Who does the work. A senior specialist costs more per hour and usually needs fewer of them. See white label SEO for what happens when the person you met is not the person doing the work.
- How much content you need. Content is the biggest single cost driver in most retainers.
- Whether links are included. Real outreach is expensive and slow. If links are included at a low price, ask exactly where they come from.
Keep the fee separate from the ad spend
This is not strictly an SEO issue, but it causes more confusion than anything else on this page, so it belongs here.
If your agency also runs paid ads, your invoice may combine their management fee with the money that goes to Google. Those are completely different things. One is what you pay the agency. The other is your media budget, and none of it stays with them.
You should be able to say, without checking, what your management fee is and what your ad spend is. If you cannot, ask for them split out. Any agency that resists that request is telling you something.
Why cheap SEO usually costs more
The maths is simple. At $299 a month, after overheads, an agency can afford perhaps two hours on your account. Two hours cannot produce research, writing, technical fixes and reporting. So the work becomes whatever can be automated:
- Templated blog posts written for a keyword tool rather than a customer.
- Bulk directory submissions and link packages, which range from useless to genuinely risky.
- Automated reports showing rankings for terms nobody searches.
- Auto-applied platform recommendations, presented as management.
The real cost is not the $299. It is the twelve months you spend believing the problem is being handled.
Working out whether yours is worth it
You do not need a spreadsheet. You need four numbers, and if you cannot get them, that is the finding.
- What you pay per month, fee only, excluding ad spend.
- Leads per month from organic search, specifically non-branded. People who found you without typing your company name.
- Your close rate on those leads.
- Your average customer value.
Multiply the last three together and compare to the first. If organic brings 20 non-branded leads, you close a quarter of them, and a customer is worth $2,000, that is $10,000 of business against whatever you are paying. That retainer is working.
The common failure is not that the number is bad. It is that nobody can produce number two, because conversion tracking was never set up properly or branded and non-branded traffic were never separated. When that happens, the honest answer is that neither of you knows whether it is working.
Questions worth asking your agency
- What is my management fee, separate from any ad spend?
- How many hours a month does that buy, and who spends them?
- Is any part of this outsourced, and to whom?
- How many non-branded leads did organic search produce last month?
- What did you actually ship in the last 90 days? Pages, fixes, content, links.
- What happens to my accounts and content if I leave?
Every one of those has a short factual answer. Watch for the ones that produce a meeting invitation instead.
Common questions
How much should SEO cost per month?
Most US small and mid-sized businesses land between $1,500 and $5,000. Local businesses with one location sit lower, competitive categories sit higher. Below roughly $750 there is not enough time in the budget to do the work properly.
Is cheap SEO worth it?
Rarely, and it can be worse than doing nothing. The tactics that fit a very small budget are the automated ones, and bought links in particular carry real risk to your site.
How long before I should expect results?
Three months before anything meaningful moves, six to twelve before you can fairly judge it. But you should see evidence of work within weeks. If nothing has shipped by month three, the timeline is not what is wrong.
Should I pay hourly or monthly?
Retainer for ongoing work, hourly or fixed-fee for defined projects. What matters more than the model is whether the scope is written in quantities you can verify.
Is it normal to sign a twelve month contract?
It is common, and there is a fair argument for it, since SEO takes time to show returns. What is not fair is a twelve month term that auto-renews with a narrow cancellation window you have to catch. Read the termination clause before you sign, not when you want to leave.
Not sure your retainer is buying anything?
Send us your site and we will tell you what is actually being done for the money, in writing, for free. If the answer is "quite a lot", we will say so.
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