SEO Packages & Pricing

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Every number on this page is real and published. What SEO costs in 2026, what each price band actually buys in hours and deliverables, how to read a quote you have been sent, the pricing models and the conflict of interest inside each one, and the arithmetic for working out what SEO is worth to your specific business before you spend anything. Our own packages are at the bottom. You are welcome to use everything above them to negotiate with someone else.

The short answer

Below roughly $1,000 a month you are buying maintenance. Between $1,000 and $2,500 you are buying focused work on a small number of things. Above $2,500 you are buying a program. Above $10,000 you are buying a team. The rest of this page is the detail behind those four sentences.

Why SEO pricing is so opaque

Three structural reasons, none of them conspiratorial, all of them working against you.

1. The work is genuinely variable. A ten-page site in Sussex County and a 4,000-page ecommerce catalog competing nationally are the same service name and completely different jobs. A single published price would be wrong for almost everybody.
2. Outcomes are not controllable. Nobody controls Google’s ranking systems, so nobody can sell a guaranteed outcome honestly. Pricing therefore attaches to effort, which is harder for a buyer to evaluate than a result.
3. Opacity is commercially useful. An agency that quotes after learning your budget can quote to your budget. This is why the first question in many sales calls is ‘what were you looking to invest?’ rather than ‘what are you trying to achieve?’

The six pricing models, and the conflict inside each

Retainers: what you should get for the fee

• A rolling 90-day roadmap with expected outcomes stated before the work is done
• A monthly list of every change actually shipped, with dates
• Reporting that leads with qualified leads and cost per acquisition
• A named person who does the work and answers your email
• The right to reduce or pause without a penalty when the work runs out

Projects: what belongs in the contract

• A written definition of done
• A fixed revision count
• Named deliverables, itemized
• A redirect map before any development starts, if URLs will change
• Payment milestones tied to deliverables, not to dates

Percentage of ad spend, and why it is not SEO pricing

It appears in SEO conversations because agencies bundle paid and organic. It is a paid-media model. If an agency proposes charging a percentage of ad spend for SEO work, ask what the connection is. There usually is not one.

What each monthly band actually buys

What SEO costs by service line

How to read a quote you have been sent

Most SEO proposals are written to look substantial rather than to be evaluated. Six questions convert any proposal into something you can judge.

1. How many hours a month, and at what seniority? Divide the fee by the hours. If they will not answer, that is the answer.
2. Which specific URLs will change in the first 60 days? A competent agency has already looked and can name them.
3. What is the one number we judge this by at twelve months? If the answer is rankings, renegotiate.
4. What is explicitly out of scope? The absence of this section is where change orders come from.
5. Who does the work, and how many other accounts do they carry?
6. What happens at exit? Ownership of accounts, content, links and data, with a written offboarding timeline.

Working out what SEO is worth to you before you spend

Do this arithmetic before any agency quotes you. It takes ten minutes and it converts the entire conversation from a price negotiation into a return calculation.

1. Average value of a customer. Not a job — a customer, including repeat work and referrals.
2. Your close rate on inbound web leads. Look it up; do not estimate it.
3. Revenue per lead = customer value × close rate.
4. Maximum affordable cost per lead = revenue per lead × your target marketing cost percentage (commonly 10–25% for service businesses).
5. Leads needed to justify a retainer = monthly fee ÷ maximum affordable cost per lead.
6. Ask whether that number is plausible given your search demand. If your county produces 40 relevant searches a month and you need 30 leads to break even, the maths does not work at that price.

A worked example

A New Jersey roofing company. Average customer value $11,400. Close rate on inbound web leads 31%. Revenue per lead is therefore $3,534. At a 15% marketing cost target, the maximum affordable cost per lead is $530. A $4,000 monthly retainer needs to produce 7.5 leads a month to hit that target — a plausible number in most New Jersey counties within nine months, and an implausible one in month two.

The same example with different numbers

A New Jersey salon. Average customer value $840. Close rate 62%. Revenue per lead $521. At a 15% target, the maximum affordable cost per lead is $78. A $4,000 retainer needs 51 leads a month. That is a very different proposition, and the honest recommendation is a much smaller local program plus retention marketing, not a $4,000 SEO retainer.

Why this calculation matters more than the price

Two businesses can receive an identical $4,000 quote where it is excellent value for one and indefensible for the other. Price alone tells you nothing. Any agency that quotes without asking for your customer value and close rate is not in a position to know whether their own proposal makes sense.

Cheap SEO: what you actually get for $300 a month

The offers exist, they are not illegal, and it is worth understanding the economics rather than simply being told to avoid them. At $300, after overhead and margin, roughly two to four hours of junior or offshore labor are available. That buys one of the following, not all of them:

• Four to eight generic blog posts written to a template
• An automated directory submission run
• A monthly report generated by a tool with no human interpretation
• Minor on-page tweaks applied by a checklist

None of those are worthless in isolation. The problem is that at volume, templated content is now a documented quality risk rather than a neutral activity, and automated link building carries downside that lands on your domain rather than the vendor’s. If your budget is genuinely $300, spend it on tooling and do the free high-leverage work yourself — the profile, the reviews, the internal links, the titles.

Red flags in SEO pricing specifically

1. A price quoted before any questions about your business.
2. Guaranteed rankings at any price. Nobody controls the ranking systems.
3. Very low price attached to very high deliverable counts. 40 blog posts for $900 is unedited machine output or offshore volume work, and it is a liability.
4. Setup fees with no itemized explanation.
5. Prices that rise when you mention a competitor’s quote. Or fall.
6. A contract longer than twelve months with no exit clause.
7. Refusal to state hours.
8. Link packages priced per link. Priced links are paid links.
9. ‘Unlimited’ anything. Nothing is unlimited; the limit is simply undisclosed.
10. Auto-renewal with a narrow cancellation window.

What is genuinely worth paying more for

• Senior attention on strategy. Thirteen senior hours beat 140 junior ones for anything requiring judgment.
• Genuine subject knowledge in your vertical. Someone who has run campaigns in your category will not spend three months learning it on your budget.
• Original research and data. Expensive to produce, and the only content type that reliably earns links without outreach.
• Real technical capability. Most ‘SEO agencies’ cannot ship a code change. If your problems are technical, this is the whole engagement.
• Analytics and CRM integration. The difference between reporting leads and reporting revenue.
• Honest disagreement. An agency that tells you not to spend money is worth more than one that agrees with everything.

What is not worth paying more for

• A bigger agency name on the invoice, if juniors do the delivery
• Volume of deliverables rather than quality of them
• Proprietary dashboards that repackage Search Console data
• ‘Proprietary algorithms’ and ‘secret sauce’
• Citation counts in the hundreds
• Monthly reports that grow longer as they grow emptier

In-house versus agency versus freelance, priced

How pricing changes by New Jersey county

Competition, not cost of living, drives this. The same program costs the same to run and produces materially different results depending on where you are competing.

Contract terms that cost more than the price

An actual SEO price list

Almost nobody publishes one, which is why you are reading a page about it. Here is a real line-item list. Individual pieces of SEO work, bought on their own, at the mid-point of what competent US providers quote.

Why so few providers publish search engine optimization rates

Because the honest answer varies by site, and because a published number becomes an anchor in every later negotiation. Both are true. Neither justifies the total silence that is standard in this market, and the silence is a large part of why the whole category is distrusted.

What the line items actually contain

Buying piecemeal costs more, and is sometimes right anyway

The premium for buying line by line is roughly twenty to forty per cent, because the provider carries sales cost on every small job rather than amortizing it across a year. What you get for that premium is the absence of an ongoing obligation. For a business that needs three specific things fixed and nothing else, that is a straightforwardly good trade.

SEO charges that should never appear on an invoice

• A monthly fee for citations after the initial clean-up is complete
• A per-report fee on top of a retainer that already includes reporting
• A set-up fee that duplicates work described inside month one
• Licensing charges for tools the agency uses to do its own job
• A fee to release your own Analytics, Search Console or Ads access
• ‘Link maintenance’ on links you did not commission
• Charges for meetings, on any retainer above about a thousand dollars

What a fair proposal looks like on paper

One page of diagnosis with named URLs, one page of what will be done in the first sixty days, a price, a term, a notice period, and a single number that will be used to judge the work. Everything beyond that is presentation. A twenty-page proposal with no named URL in it is a document about the agency, not about your website.

SEO cost per keyword, and why it is the wrong unit

Pricing per keyword sounds precise and is the least reliable unit in the entire discipline. Two keywords with identical monthly search volume can require ten times different effort.

Where per-keyword pricing comes from

It comes from the era when ranking meant on-page work plus links pointed at one URL, and that was genuinely most of the job. It survives because it is easy to sell and easy to invoice. It has almost no relationship to how ranking works now, where an entire site’s topical depth and technical health affect what any single page can do.

What actually determines the effort on one term

1. Who currently ranks, and how strong those specific pages are
2. Whether your site already has a page that could reasonably rank, or needs a new one
3. Whether that page can be crawled, indexed and rendered correctly today
4. How much internal linking authority you can route to it without harming something else
5. Whether the term needs external authority you do not currently have
6. Whether the search intent is one your business can actually satisfy

Only the first item on that list is visible from the keyword itself. A price quoted from the keyword alone is a guess dressed as a quote.

When per-keyword pricing is defensible

On a small, technically healthy site, for a short list of low-difficulty local terms, where the work genuinely is ‘write and optimize one page’. That is a real situation and per-keyword pricing there is fine. It stops being fine the moment the constraint is anything other than the page.

SEO keyword price in practice

Where it is offered, expect roughly $60 to $300 per keyword per month for local terms and $300 to $1,500 for national ones. Read those numbers as what the provider believes the average term will cost them, plus margin, plus a buffer for the ones that turn out to be hard. You are paying the buffer on every easy term.

A better unit

Price the constraint, not the keyword. If indexing is the constraint, buy an indexing fix. If the constraint is that you have no page for a whole category of demand, buy those pages. The word ‘keyword’ is a unit of measurement, not a unit of work.

SEO consulting fees versus agency fees

These are two different products sold under adjacent names, and the price comparison between them is routinely made incorrectly.

What an SEO consultant sells

Diagnosis, priority and direction. A consultant tells you what is wrong, what to do about it and in what order, and then somebody else does it — usually your team or your existing developer. SEO consulting fees typically run $150 to $400 an hour, or $2,000 to $8,000 for a defined engagement.

What an agency sells

Execution, with diagnosis included. The hourly rate looks lower because it is blended across seniorities, and much of what you buy is production. Both are legitimate; the mistake is comparing a consultant’s hourly rate against an agency’s blended rate as though they buy the same thing.

SEO consultant pricing by engagement shape

When the consultant is cheaper than it looks

If you already employ people who can write, build and ship, a consultant may be several times cheaper than an agency for the same outcome, because you are only buying the part you cannot supply. This is the single most under-used arrangement in the market and it exists because agencies do not sell it.

When the consultant is the wrong purchase

If nothing will get built without somebody outside your business building it, a consulting engagement produces a document and no change. Under those conditions the cheapest option is the one where execution is contractually somebody’s job.

A note on titles

‘Consultant’, ‘strategist’, ‘specialist’ and ‘expert’ are unregulated and describe intent rather than capability. Judge the engagement shape and the deliverables, not the noun on the proposal.

Local SEO costs, specifically

Local SEO is priced far more predictably than organic SEO because the surface area is smaller and more of the work is bounded. This is good news if you are buying it and bad news if you are being charged growth-program money for it.

What drives local SEO services pricing

• Number of locations, which multiplies almost everything
• Category competitiveness, which decides how much content is needed at all
• Whether the business has a storefront or is a service-area business
• How badly the existing citations and profile data are broken
• Whether review generation needs building from nothing or already runs
• Whether the site has usable location pages or none

A realistic first-year local budget

The detail on what each of those phases contains is on our local SEO services page, including the parts you can do yourself for nothing.

Where local SEO money is most often wasted

Ongoing citation fees after the clean-up is done, directory packages sold by volume, and templated town pages built at scale. All three are easy to sell because they produce a visible deliverable. None of them is where local ranking is won.

What local SEO should cost if you do it yourself

Nothing, plus a few hours a month. Profile completeness, review requests, photos and accurate hours are the highest-leverage local factors and every one of them is free. Pay somebody when the market is genuinely competitive or when the hours stop happening.

Multi-location pricing is not linear

Location two costs nearly as much as location one. Location twenty costs a fraction of location two, because the strategy, templates and processes already exist. Any per-location price that stays flat as the count rises is either overpriced at the top or unsustainable at the bottom.

Small business SEO cost, without the euphemisms

The most searched version of this question, and the one with the least honest answers in circulation.

What SEO costs a small business, in one line

Between $800 and $2,500 a month for a real program, $2,500 to $8,000 one-off for a project, and zero for the free work that most small businesses have not done yet. Below $800 a month you are buying somebody’s spare hours.

The free work, which genuinely comes first

1. Claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile, every field
2. Fix your title tags so each one names the service and the place
3. Check in Search Console that your important pages are actually indexed
4. Ask every satisfied customer for a review, by text, the same day
5. Link your pages to each other with text that describes the destination
6. Put your real phone number, in text, on every page
7. Delete or merge pages that compete with each other for the same term

This list has produced more measurable improvement for small businesses we have audited than any sub-$1,000 retainer we have seen. It costs a weekend.

Average cost of SEO for small business, and why the average misleads

Survey averages cluster around $500 a month, which is real but describes mostly freelance maintenance. The average of a market containing both $300 packages and $15,000 retainers describes neither. Read the band, not the mean.

When a small business should not buy SEO at all

• When nobody searches for what you sell — check volume before anything else
• When the phone is not answered reliably during business hours
• When the website cannot take an inquiry without friction
• When the business needs revenue inside sixty days
• When the owner has no capacity to review or approve anything
• When the same money would demonstrably return more in paid search

What a $1,000 month should contain

Roughly eight senior-equivalent hours. Spent well, that is one substantial page, profile and review management, and a small technical fix. Spent badly, it is four blog posts nobody searched for. Ask which of those two you are buying before you sign, and ask for the month’s change log afterwards.

Enterprise SEO pricing

A different market with different arithmetic, included here because the term is searched and because the reasoning is instructive even at smaller scale.

What drives enterprise SEO cost

Scale and coordination, far more than sophistication. A site with hundreds of thousands of URLs has crawl budget, faceted navigation, internationalization and templating problems that a forty-page site cannot have. And every change must pass through people who do not report to the SEO team.

Typical enterprise engagement shapes

How much does enterprise SEO cost per URL

A question that gets asked and should not be answered, because effort concentrates in templates rather than pages. Fixing one template can affect two hundred thousand URLs. Per-URL pricing at enterprise scale is a category error.

Why enterprise programs take longer to judge

Eighteen months is a fair window, not because the SEO is slower but because the release cycle is. If recommendations wait a quarter for engineering capacity, the program’s real clock is the roadmap, not the algorithm.

What smaller businesses can borrow from it

The discipline of fixing templates rather than pages, and the habit of agreeing a single judging metric in advance. Both scale down perfectly and both are rare below enterprise level.

What website optimization costs, beyond SEO

‘How much does it cost to optimize a website’ is asked far more often than ‘how much does SEO cost’, and it is a broader question. Optimization covers at least six distinct pieces of work, priced very differently.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

On a typical small marketing site, $1,500 to $4,500 one-off. The work is usually image handling, render-blocking scripts, third-party tags and theme bloat. It is measurable before and after, which makes it one of the few line items you can verify yourself.

Accessibility

$3,000 to $8,000 for WCAG 2.2 AA on a small site. Worth stating plainly: this is a legal exposure question as much as an optimization one, and overlay widgets sold as instant compliance do not achieve it.

Conversion rate optimization

$3,000 to $6,000 for a three-month cycle at small scale. Frequently the highest-return line on this entire page, because it multiplies the value of traffic you already have rather than buying more.

Analytics and tracking

$1,200 to $3,000 to rebuild properly. Undramatic and load-bearing: every other number on this page is unverifiable if the tracking is wrong, and in our audits it is wrong more often than it is right.

When ‘optimization’ is really a rebuild

If the recommendation touches the theme, the templates, the information architecture and the content at once, that is a redesign with a gentler name and a different price. Ask directly. A rebuild can be the correct answer; it should just be sold as one.

Building an SEO budget you can defend

Not ‘how much does SEO cost’ but ‘how much should we spend’, which is a different and more useful question because it has an answer specific to you.

Start from lead value, not from a benchmark

Average customer value, multiplied by close rate, gives revenue per qualified lead. Apply the marketing cost percentage your business can sustain, and you have a ceiling per lead. Multiply by the leads you want and you have an annual budget with arithmetic behind it.

How much to spend on SEO as a share of marketing

For most service businesses, organic search deserves somewhere between a fifth and a half of the marketing budget, weighted by how much of the category’s demand actually happens in search. A category where nobody searches deserves nothing, regardless of what the benchmark says.

Front-load the first year

Foundations first, content second, links last. The chart above is deliberately top-heavy in the first quarter because publishing onto a site that cannot be crawled correctly is the most common way to spend a first-year budget with nothing to show at the end of it.

Budget for the things nobody quotes

• Your own time in reviews, approvals and subject-matter interviews
• Developer hours for anything the agency cannot deploy itself
• Photography, because stock imagery is visible and costs trust
• Tooling you keep after the engagement ends
• A contingency for the migration or replatform nobody has mentioned yet

An SEO budget plan on one page

Review the budget quarterly, judge it annually

Quarterly review keeps spend pointed at the current constraint. Annual judgment stops you canceling a program in month seven that was working. Those two sentences are in tension and both are correct.

Average SEO costs, and what the averages hide

Every published average is real and every one of them is close to useless without its distribution.

The most cited numbers

Why the mean is the wrong statistic here

The distribution is bimodal: a long tail of very small retainers and a shorter tail of very large ones, with comparatively little in between. A mean drawn across those two populations describes a kind of engagement that mostly does not exist.

How to use a benchmark properly

As a sanity check on a quote you have already received, never as a target. If a quote sits far outside the band, ask why. There are good answers — unusual scale, unusual competitiveness — and the absence of one is itself informative.

What average price for SEO services does not tell you

Who is doing the work, at what seniority, how many hours, and whether the diagnosis was done before the price was set. Those four things vary more than the price does, which is precisely why price alone predicts outcome so poorly.

Does Google itself charge anything for SEO?

A reasonable question given how much of this page is about money, and the answer is a clean zero at every step.

There is no paid path to an organic position

Google has stated this repeatedly and it remains true. Ad spend does not influence organic ranking, and no agency has a relationship that changes it. See Google Search Essentials and the SEO starter guide.

The free tools that answer most questions

Search Console tells you what you rank for, what is indexed and what is broken. Google Business Profile is the single largest local ranking surface. Both are free and both are underused.

Where SEO money actually goes

People’s time. That is the entire invoice — yours, an employee’s or an agency’s. Every other line item on a proposal is a description of what those hours are spent on. Reading a quote as a purchase of hours rather than deliverables makes most pricing questions answerable.

The one genuine platform cost

Tooling. Rank tracking, crawling and keyword data cost real money — typically $100 to $500 a month for a small business, more at scale. An agency should absorb this in its rate rather than billing it separately, and should not charge you for licenses it needs to do its own job.

If you are the one setting the price

A large share of the traffic to pricing pages is providers checking their own numbers. This section is for them, and it is useful to buyers too — knowing how the other side prices makes you a better negotiator.

Price the outcome you control

You control diagnosis, execution quality, speed and communication. You do not control the algorithm, the client’s sales process or their willingness to approve anything. Price and guarantee only the first list.

How much to charge for SEO optimization work

1. Establish your fully loaded cost per hour, including sales and admin time
2. Decide your target margin honestly — below thirty per cent you cannot invest in quality
3. Estimate hours by constraint, not by deliverable count
4. Add a contingency for the discovery you have not done yet
5. Sanity-check the result against the market band, then hold your number

Why cheap pricing destroys the work first

At a low rate the only way to stay solvent is to reduce hours, and the first hours cut are always diagnosis and quality control — the two that decide whether anything works. The client experiences this as ‘SEO does not work’ rather than ‘we bought too few hours’.

What to put in the agreement

• A clear scope with a named judging metric
• Thirty days’ notice, both ways, and no automatic renewal
• Client ownership of every account, asset and piece of work product
• A change log delivered monthly, whether or not anyone reads it
• An explicit statement that rankings are not guaranteed, and why

The proposal that wins most often

The one containing a real finding. Naming a specific broken thing on the prospect’s site — with the URL — before any money changes hands outperforms every credential, case study and package table we have ever tested.

Watch before you buy

Four short talks from Google’s own Search Central team. None of them is about pricing, and that is the point: what an SEO invoice pays for is the work described in these videos. Watching them makes it considerably harder to be sold something imaginary.

Three ways this page could be wrong for you

Published pricing is a generalization, and generalizations fail in specific ways. Here are the three situations where the numbers above should be ignored.

Your category has almost no search demand

If nobody searches for what you sell, every figure on this page is irrelevant and the correct SEO budget is close to zero. Check demand with Keyword Planner before you check prices. We have told prospective clients this and lost the work, which is the only reason the sentence is worth anything.

You are in an unusually expensive vertical

Legal, medical, insurance and finance carry costs the bands above do not reflect — compliance review, credentialed authorship, and competitors spending at a level that changes the arithmetic. Expect the top of every band, and treat the bottom as a warning sign rather than a bargain.

Your constraint is not visibility at all

If inquiries arrive and are not converted, buying more inquiries makes the loss larger. The cheapest and least popular recommendation we make is to spend the first month’s budget on the inquiry process instead. It is unpopular because it is not what anyone came to buy.

A worked example, end to end

Abstract pricing advice is easy to agree with and hard to use. Here is the whole method applied to one realistic business, with every number shown.

The business

A six-person commercial cleaning company in Bergen County. Average contract value $18,000 a year. Roughly one in four qualified inquiries becomes a client. They currently get eleven inquiries a month, nine of them from referral and two from a Google Business Profile nobody has touched in two years.

Step one: what a lead is worth

Contract value $18,000, multiplied by a 25 per cent close rate, gives $4,500 of revenue per qualified inquiry. At a sustainable marketing cost of 12 per cent, the ceiling is $540 per qualified inquiry. That single number governs everything that follows.

Step two: what the goal costs

The owner wants six additional qualified inquiries a month. Six multiplied by $540 gives a defensible ceiling of $3,240 a month — considerably more than the $1,450 they were nervous about spending. The arithmetic, not the benchmark, gave permission.

Step three: what the money should buy first

Not content. Their profile has the wrong primary category, four reviews, and no services listed, and three of their service pages are not indexed. Those are free or cheap to fix and are worth more than any first-year content plan. Foundations first, and the first month is unusually productive because it recovers visibility they should already have had.

Step four: the judging number

Qualified inquiries attributable to organic search and the profile, counted monthly, judged at twelve months. Not rankings, not traffic, not impressions. One number, agreed before any work started, written into the agreement.

What actually happened to the budget

They started at $1,450 rather than $3,240, because the first three months were mostly free fixes and there was no honest way to spend more. That is the version of this conversation nobody markets: sometimes the correct recommendation is to spend less than the business can afford, and to revisit it in a quarter.

Search engine optimization cost, price and costs: the same question, three phrasings

Answer first: there is no single search engine optimization cost, because the price is set by how many hours of specialist work the engagement contains rather than by a rate card for the service itself. People searching search engine optimization costs, search engine optimization price and search engine optimization cost are asking the same thing, and the useful answer is the list of cost drivers below rather than a number.

The largest driver is writing. After that, in rough order: the technical condition of the site, how many locations or services need their own pages, whether local profile and review work is included, how much link acquisition is attempted, and how bespoke the reporting is. Two quotes that differ by a factor of three almost always differ on those six lines rather than on margin.

Why a fixed price per month tells you almost nothing

A retainer is a budget, not a deliverable. The same monthly figure can buy ten thoroughly researched pages or forty thin ones, and the second costs more in the long run because thin pages produced at scale are the pattern search engines discount. Ask what ships, not what it costs per month.

Where to check these numbers yourself

Nothing on this page should be taken on trust, including the parts that are inconvenient for us. These are the primary sources worth reading before you agree any SEO price.

• Google Search Essentials — what Google actually asks of a site, which bounds what any agency can legitimately promise.
• Google: how to hire an SEO — Google’s own guidance on evaluating an SEO provider, including the questions to ask.
• FTC online advertising guidance — the rules governing claims made to you and by you.
• SBA marketing guidance — budget framing for small businesses, free and independent of any vendor.
• Keyword Planner — check whether demand exists at all before you price anything against it.
• Search Console — verify indexing, impressions and clicks yourself, at no cost.
• web.dev on Core Web Vitals — the definitions behind any speed line item you are quoted for.
• Schema.org Service — what structured data actually is, so you can judge a schema deliverable.

If a proposal contradicts any of those sources, the source is right. That sounds obvious and is regularly the fastest way to disqualify a quote.

The five questions that price an SEO engagement correctly

If you ask nothing else, ask these. Each one is answerable by a competent provider in a sentence, and each one is uncomfortable for a bad one.

Which specific URLs on my site will change in the first sixty days?

A provider who has done the diagnosis can name them before you sign. One who cannot has not looked, and is pricing from a template rather than from your website.

How many senior-equivalent hours does this fee represent?

The most useful question on the list, because it converts every quote into the same unit. A refusal to answer is itself the answer.

What is the single number we will judge this by in twelve months?

One number, agreed in advance, and ideally qualified leads or revenue rather than rankings. Programs without an agreed judging metric get canceled on feeling rather than on evidence.

What happens to my accounts and content if I leave?

Everything should be yours already — Analytics, Search Console, Ads, the pages, the schema, the reports. If any of that is held by the agency, the price you were quoted is not the price of leaving.

What would you tell me not to spend money on?

The single most revealing question we know. A provider with a real point of view has a list. One selling a package will struggle, because everything in the package must be worth paying for.

Our packages

Published, so you can compare them against everything above. Every tier includes owner-level access to all your own accounts, a named strategist, a monthly change log with dates, and reporting that leads with qualified leads and cost per acquisition including our fee. No auto-renewal, 30 days’ notice.

Certified SEO: do qualifications mean anything?

Answer first: not much, and less than in most professions. There is no licensing body for search engine optimization, so a certified SEO is somebody who completed a course, usually one run by a tool vendor or a platform. Those courses teach real things and completing one proves attendance rather than judgment.

The certifications with the most substance are the platform ones, because they at least confirm familiarity with the tools the work is done in. Google’s own analytics and ads certifications fall into that category. None of them predict whether somebody can decide what to write, which is where the actual difficulty in this work sits.

What to look at instead of certifications

• Three pages they wrote, read as a stranger would read them.
• A description of a project where the result was disappointing and what they concluded.
• How they would decide what to build first for your specific business.
• Whether they report on inquiries or only on positions.
• What they would refuse to do, and why.

Those five tell you more in twenty minutes than any certificate does, and none of them can be prepared for in advance by somebody without the underlying experience.

Pricing questions we get asked in every call

Why does one agency quote $900 and another quote $4,500 for the same thing?

Because it is not the same thing. Divide each fee by the hours it represents and the difference usually resolves itself. $900 buys six to eight junior hours; $4,500 buys roughly thirty senior-equivalent hours. Both are honest prices for what they are. The question is which one matches the job you need done. See affordable SEO services.

Should I pay a setup fee?

Sometimes. Month one carries genuine front-loaded work — a full audit, access, baselines, keyword mapping, tracking implementation. A setup fee covering that is legitimate. A setup fee with no itemized explanation is a deposit dressed up as a deliverable. Ask for the line items.

Is a 12-month contract normal?

Common, and defensible only with an exit clause. SEO genuinely compounds, so a commitment is not unreasonable — but a 12-month term with no termination provision protects only the agency. Negotiate three months then monthly, or twelve months with 30 to 90 days’ notice.

Can I pay only for results?

You can find agencies that offer it, and the model is harder than it looks. The failure mode is definitional: is a 12-second hangup a lead? A competitor filling in your form? An existing customer? Agencies paid per lead optimize for lead count, and lead count is trivially inflatable. If you use this model, define a qualified lead in writing and audit a random sample monthly.

How much should content cost?

$350 to $1,500 per substantial page, and the price should track research depth rather than word count. A page that required interviewing your operations manager, pulling permit data and photographing a job costs more than one assembled from what already ranks — and it is the only kind worth publishing.

Is link building worth paying for?

Earning links is worth paying for. Buying links is not — the risk lands on your domain, not the vendor’s. If the deliverable is ‘ten DA40+ links a month at a fixed price’, those are purchased placements regardless of the language used. Ask for the exact URL of every link acquired.

What is a fair hourly rate?

$85 to $140 for a competent US freelancer, $110 to $185 at a small US agency, $150 to $250 at a mid-sized one, and $225 to $450 at a national brand agency. Offshore production runs $18 to $35 and is genuinely good value for mechanical work and genuinely poor value for anything requiring judgment.

Do I pay more for a competitive industry?

Yes, and the reason is workload rather than opportunism. Competing in personal injury law in Essex County requires more content, more technical precision and more authority work than competing in appliance repair in Salem County. The service is the same; the amount of it is not.

Should the price include the website?

Usually not, and bundling them obscures both. Websites are fixed-scope projects; SEO is ongoing. Price them separately so you can evaluate each. See how much a website costs.

What if I want to pause?

You should be able to, with 30 days’ notice, without a penalty. Understand what pausing costs: rankings decay slowly, but review velocity stalls within weeks and any in-flight content work stops. A three-month pause typically costs two months of recovery.

Is it cheaper to hire someone in-house?

Only above a certain scale. A loaded in-house SEO hire costs $85,000 to $150,000 a year and covers one or two disciplines well. An agency at $3,400 a month costs $41,000 and covers more disciplines shallowly. Most New Jersey businesses between $3M and $25M end up with an internal coordinator plus an agency. See what is a fractional CMO.

How do I compare two proposals fairly?

Normalize them. Convert each to hours per month, list the deliverables side by side, note what each one excludes, and check the ownership and exit terms. Then ask each agency the same question: which of our pages are indexed but not ranking, and why? The quality of that answer separates them faster than price does.

Why do you publish your prices when most agencies do not?

Because the most common way a business gets a bad deal is having no reference point. Publishing costs us some negotiating room and saves both sides several wasted conversations. If our numbers are wrong for you, you find out in ninety seconds instead of after two meetings.

What is the minimum you will work with?

$1,450 a month, and below that we will tell you honestly what to do yourself instead. There is a genuine list of high-return free work — profile, reviews, internal links, titles, indexing checks — that produces more than a very small retainer would. See marketing ideas for small business.

Does the price go up over time?

Ours does not automatically. Where prices do rise, insist the increase is capped or index-linked rather than at the agency’s discretion, and that it requires notice.

What is included in reporting?

Qualified leads and cost per acquisition including our fee, first. What changed and why. What we did, with dates. What we will do next and what we expect it to produce. What we tried that did not work. Rankings and traffic last, as context.

Can I buy just an audit?

Yes, from $1,900, and you can take the findings anywhere. A real audit names specific URLs and specific problems with a prioritized backlog. If you want a shorter free version first, we run one at no cost. See SEO audit service.

Do you work outside New Jersey?

Yes. Geography matters for local demand capture and very little for anything else. We work across the New York metropolitan area including New York City, and nationally for ecommerce and B2B where physical location is irrelevant.

Every guide we publish, grouped by what you are trying to do. Pricing is only useful alongside an understanding of what you are buying.

Consultant fees and how SEO marketing prices are actually set

An SEO consultant fee is structured differently from an agency retainer and the comparison confuses people. Consultants generally price hourly, per day or per bounded project, and the figure reflects experience rather than delivery capacity — you are buying judgment, not hours of execution. Agency SEO marketing prices bundle strategy, implementation, content and reporting into a monthly fee, so the headline number is larger and covers a different scope. Neither is inherently better value; they answer different questions. The trap is comparing a consultant’s day rate against an agency’s monthly retainer as though they were the same purchase, and concluding the consultant is expensive — a day of senior diagnosis and a month of junior execution can cost the same and produce entirely different outcomes depending on whether your constraint is knowing what to do or having someone to do it.

What the charges for SEO actually cover, and where fixed price breaks down

People asking how much are SEO services usually want one number, and the reason nobody gives one is not evasion. The charges for SEO cover work whose quantity is not knowable until someone has looked: a site with clean architecture and thin content needs the opposite of a site with good content and broken architecture, and the two cost different amounts to fix.

Fixed price SEO exists and is honest in one situation — a bounded, well-specified piece of work such as a technical audit, a migration, or a defined set of pages. It becomes dishonest when applied to open-ended work, because the only way to hold a fixed price against unbounded scope is to reduce what gets done, quietly, after the invoice is agreed.

An SEO campaign cost is best understood as three separate numbers rather than one: diagnosis, implementation, and the ongoing work that compounds. Ask for them separately. A firm that will not break them out is usually protecting a margin rather than simplifying your life.

Frequently asked questions