Ask five SEO companies what SEO costs and you will get five numbers that do not look like they belong to the same service. One is less than your phone bill. One is more than a salesperson’s salary. Most owners I talk to have been quoted both, sometimes in the same week, and nobody explained why the gap exists.
I sell SEO, so I will show you our prices, because they sit on our plans page for anyone to read. But the more useful thing I can give you is a way to read any quote, ours included: what the money is actually buying, why prices spread so far apart, and which pricing models leave you holding the risk. Whether SEO is worth paying for at all is a separate question with its own math, and I covered it in is SEO worth it for a small business. This post is about the price tag.
How much does SEO cost for a small business?
The honest answer to “how much” is a question back: how much of what? SEO is not a product with a shelf price. It is a bundle of skilled labor. Someone researches what your buyers search, writes and publishes pages that answer it, fixes what is broken on your site, earns links from other websites, keeps your Google Business Profile and listings accurate, and tracks whether any of it is working. Two companies quoting the same monthly number can be delivering wildly different amounts of that labor.
So here is ours, as an anchor you can check. Starter is $997 a month for four blog posts, 50 keywords and 60 AI questions tracked, weekly Google Business Profile posts, listings cleanup, technical fixes, and a monthly report with a strategy call. Growth is $1,997 and doubles the content to eight posts, then adds two authority links and two new pages a month, plus 25 citations a year. Authority at $2,997 and Dominate at $4,997 scale the links and pages further and add press releases. Every plan starts with a seven day free trial, the setup fee is printed and waived, and the full list is on the plans page.
I am not telling you that is the right price for your business. I am telling you it is a price with a list attached, and that list is the standard you should hold every quote to.
Why do SEO quotes for the same business vary so much?
Three things create the spread.
The first is volume. A real blog post that answers a buyer’s question better than the pages already ranking takes research, writing, editing, and publishing with the right links and markup. Four of those a month is a different job from sixteen, and both are different from zero.
The second is who does the work. Experienced people cost more than a bulk operation that turns out pages nobody reads. You can usually tell which you are dealing with by asking to see three things they published for a client last month.
The third is what is quietly left out. The story I hear most from owners who have been burned is not that they paid too much. It is that they could never tell what they paid for. The quote said “optimization” and “strategy”, the report showed a list of keyword positions, and nothing in either one pointed at a page, a link or a fix on their own site.
What are you actually paying for each month?
Here is what sits inside each bucket, so you can recognize it on a quote.
Content means posts published on your site, under your name, answering the questions your buyers ask. New pages means service pages, or pages for each state or industry you serve, each written for that audience rather than copied from a template. Links means other real websites linking to yours, which is still one of the strongest signals Google reads and one of the slowest things to earn honestly.
Technical fixes cover site speed, structured data, crawl errors and the files that tell search engines and AI crawlers what they may read. Your Google Business Profile and listings decide whether you appear on Maps and whether your name, address and phone match everywhere. Tracking now has two halves: where you rank on Google, and whether AI tools name your business when a buyer asks who to call.
The month by month version of this list, with what a good provider should show you for each line, is in my post on what done for you SEO should include.
What does cheap SEO usually leave out?
Cheap is not automatically bad. A business in a quiet market with little competition may need very little ongoing work once the basics are fixed. The trap is paying every month for something that stopped producing after the first few weeks.
The worse trap is cheap content and cheap links. Pages produced in bulk to fill a count, with nothing on them a reader could not find elsewhere, are exactly what Google’s spam policies describe when they talk about generating many pages without adding value. Links bought from networks of sites that exist only to sell links carry the same risk. Neither saves you money. Both are a debt that comes due when the site loses the rankings it had.
If your budget only stretches to a quote that includes neither, you are usually better off doing the free basics yourself for a few months and saving toward a level of work that includes both.
Monthly retainer, one time project or pay per result: which pricing model protects you?
A monthly retainer fits SEO because the work is ongoing. Content keeps publishing, links keep coming in, and the site keeps getting maintained. The version that protects you is month to month, so the provider has to earn the next month with this month’s work. A twelve month lock in removes that pressure, and my post on SEO contracts, what to sign and what to strike goes through the terms clause by clause.
A one time project is right for a defined job: an audit, a site repair, a relaunch. It is the wrong model for growth, because growth is the part that happens after the project ends.
Hourly consulting works when you have someone in house to carry out the advice. If you do not, you are paying for a plan nobody executes.
Pay per result sounds like the safest deal of all. In practice the provider picks the keywords, and the easiest keywords to rank for are the ones nobody searches. You pay for positions that never ring the phone. No one can guarantee a ranking or an AI mention, because no one controls Google or the AI tools. What a company can guarantee is the work, and that is the only promise worth paying for.
If you run an agency and want the other side of this math, what it costs to deliver per client, that lives on killerseox.com.
What makes SEO cost more for one business than another?
Place yourself honestly on each one.
Competition first. Search for what you sell the way a customer would and look at who ranks. If the top results belong to businesses with years of content and plenty of links, the foundation alone will not move you past them. You need new pages and earned links on top, which is why Growth adds both and why we recommend most businesses start there. If the results are thin, the foundation may be enough for the first stretch.
Reach second. One location serving one town needs a handful of strong service pages. A business serving several states needs a page for each one, written for that state, and that is real work every month.
Your site third. If it loads slowly on a phone, has no clear service pages, or hides the phone number, the first months go into fixing the thing that catches the leads. That is part of the work, but it is work you should expect to see listed.
AI search is now part of the price everywhere. Tracking what the AI tools say about you, and writing pages they can quote, is its own line of work. What that looks like when it is done properly is on our AI SEO services page.
How do you compare two SEO quotes line by line?
This takes twenty minutes and it is the most useful thing you can do before you sign anything.
Make one row for each of these: blog posts a month, new pages a month, links a month, keywords tracked, AI questions tracked, Google Business Profile posts, listings work, technical fixes, reporting, setup fee, contract term and how you cancel. Fill in each company’s number. Where a quote says “ongoing optimization” or “content strategy” without a count, write a question mark, then ask them to replace it with a number in writing.
Then ask three questions of each. Who writes the content, and is it published on my site under my name? What kind of sites do the links come from, and which of my pages do they point at? Does the monthly report list the work delivered, or only the rankings?
A quote that answers all of that clearly is a quote you can hold someone to. The wider set of questions for choosing between companies, and the red flags to walk away from, is on our page about hiring an SEO company for small business, and the interview version is in how to choose an SEO company.
How much should a small business spend on SEO?
The break even calculation is short: divide the monthly fee by what one new customer is worth to you in margin, across repeat work and referrals. If the answer is one customer a month or fewer, the spend is easy to justify. The full walk through is in the worth it post linked at the top, and I would run it before you collect a single quote.
Then choose the level your competition requires, not the lowest price on the table. Buying too little work in a crowded market is the most expensive option there is, because you pay every month and never get far enough up the page for it to matter.
The short version before you collect quotes
SEO has no fixed price because it is labor, and the amount of labor is what the quote should tell you. Count the posts, pages, links and fixes. Prefer month to month over a lock in. Walk away from anyone who guarantees a ranking or will not put the work list in writing. Choose the level of work your market demands, then check it against what one customer is worth to you.
If you want to see where you stand before you ask anyone for a number, our free audit shows what Google and the AI tools currently see when someone searches for what you do. If you would rather see how the work runs week to week, how it works lays it out. And every plan on the plans page starts with a seven day free trial, so the first week of work costs you nothing while you hold it against everything in this post.
Questions We Get Asked
Why do some SEO companies not publish their prices?
Sometimes the work really is custom. More often a published price invites comparison, and a company that would rather size the quote to what you seem able to pay keeps it off the page. Our prices are on the plans page so you can run the math before you talk to anyone. Whoever you speak to, ask for a written quote that lists the deliverables by monthly count before any conversation about price.
Is there a setup fee for SEO?
Many companies charge one to cover onboarding: tracking setup, technical cleanup, profile and listing fixes and the first content plan. Ours are printed on each plan, from $1,500 on Starter to $3,500 on Dominate, and every one is waived right now. If a company charges a setup fee, ask what it produces that the monthly fee does not.
Can I pay for SEO only when I rank?
Some companies offer that, but read who picks the keywords. The provider usually chooses terms that are easy to rank for and rarely searched, so you pay for positions that bring no calls. Nobody can guarantee a ranking or an AI mention, because nobody controls Google or the AI tools. We guarantee the work, never the result.
Is cheap SEO better than no SEO at all?
Not when the low price comes from bought links or mass produced pages, because both can hurt a site that was doing fine. If the budget is tight, the free basics usually beat a small monthly fee that buys reports: claim and complete your Google Business Profile, ask every happy customer for a review, and fix the phone number and forms on your site.
Does AI search make SEO cost more?
It adds work. Someone has to track what ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overview say when buyers ask about your service, and write pages those tools can quote. On our plans that tracking is included at every level, from 60 AI questions on Starter to 250 on Dominate. A quote that only tracks Google rankings is pricing half the job.
