You have a quote in front of you and no idea whether it is a fair price or a stitch-up. That is the normal position to be in. SEO is one of the few things a business buys where the seller sets the price, defines the deliverable, and grades their own homework.
Here is the short version. Most small businesses buying SEO from an agency end up somewhere between $500 and $5,000 a month, and the spread inside that range has almost nothing to do with quality. It has to do with how many pages you have, how many locations you run, and how hard the people you are competing against are working.
What the pricing surveys actually say
Almost every “SEO pricing” page you will read quotes a range and names no source. Two surveys are worth more than all of them, and they disagree in an interesting way.
Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO providers (published 2023, updated August 2024) and asked what they charge. The average monthly retainer came back at $2,917. For local SEO specifically it was $1,557. Agencies averaged $3,209 against $1,348 for freelancers — roughly 138% more for the same job title.
Backlinko surveyed 1,200 business owners (2019) and asked what they pay. The average came back at $497.16 a month.
That is not a contradiction. It is the whole market in two numbers. What agencies quote and what small businesses actually spend are different figures, because most small businesses buy at the very bottom of what agencies offer. If your quote is $2,900 a month, you are being priced like the survey average for a provider — not like the survey average for a business your size.
The Backlinko survey carries the more uncomfortable finding: in that sample only 30% of business owners would recommend their SEO provider, the industry net promoter score was 0, and among those who had switched, 82% left over results and 81% over cost. Buying SEO badly is the normal outcome, not the unlucky one.
The ranges you should expect
These are commonly published ranges — figures that recur across the Ahrefs survey above and the pricing pages of agencies who publish theirs. Treat them as a sanity check, not a price list. The surveys disagree with each other, sample different markets, and are mostly US-weighted.
| What you are | Low | Typical | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| One location, one town | $500/mo | $750 – $1,500/mo | $2,500/mo |
| 2–20 locations, or a multi-city service area | $1,000/mo | $1,500 – $3,500/mo | $6,000/mo |
| Online store, roughly 100–5,000 products | $1,500/mo | $2,500 – $5,000/mo | $10,000/mo |
| Selling nationally, or B2B | $2,500/mo | $4,000 – $8,000/mo | $15,000/mo |
If you are a single-location plumber and the quote says $4,000 a month, that is not automatically wrong — but it has to be earned by something specific in the document, like named senior people or case studies in your exact category. If it is earned by nothing, you are paying national prices for local work.
A one-off technical audit, if you are buying just that, commonly runs $500 to $1,200 for a small local site and $2,000 to $5,000 for an online store. What you are paying for is the prioritisation and the fix instructions. An audit that is a tool export with a logo on the cover is worth close to nothing at any price.
The three ways you will be charged
| Model | What the data says | Best for | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | The dominant model — 78.2% of providers in the Ahrefs survey use it | Ongoing work with a fixed scope | You pay the same whether or not anything happened that month |
| Hourly | Ahrefs puts the average at $111/hr, most commonly $75–100. Credo’s agency pricing survey found 85.49% of agencies charge $50–200/hr | Advice, one-off fixes, a second opinion | Meetings and reporting are billable too — ask which activities count |
| Fixed project | Ahrefs’ most common project band was $2,501–$5,000 | An audit, a migration, a site build | It ends when the deliverable ships, which is a feature, not a limitation |
Credo also found that just over 60% of agencies will not take a retainer below $1,000 a month. That is useful in reverse: a real agency offering you $400 a month has priced you below the point at which they can staff you properly, and something in the delivery has to give.
Retainer is not automatically the right model. If you have a specific problem — a site that migrated badly, a Google Business Profile that is not showing — a fixed project is a cleaner purchase than a twelve-month subscription.
Divide the price by the hours — the check nobody shows you
Every pricing page in this market sells you tiers. None of them do the arithmetic that tells you whether a particular quote is thin. So here it is.
Take the monthly fee and divide it by a blended rate of $100 an hour — near the Ahrefs average of $111 and comfortably inside Credo’s $50–200 band. That gives you the hours the retainer can physically contain, before the agency’s margin, tools and account management come out of it. In practice, assume about a third of those hours go to reporting, calls and admin.
| Retainer | Hours it can contain | Realistic delivery hours | What that is |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500/mo | ~5 | ~3–4 | Maintenance |
| $1,000/mo | ~10 | ~7 | Maintenance plus one real project a month |
| $2,000/mo | ~20 | ~13–14 | A campaign |
| $4,000/mo | ~40 | ~27 | A campaign with senior time on it |
Now put the proposal’s deliverable list next to that number. Four 1,200-word articles is 8 to 12 hours if a person writes and edits them. A technical fix list worked through, rather than merely delivered, is 4 to 8. Genuine link outreach is 2 to 4 hours per placement. Reporting is 1 to 2.
If a $900 proposal promises 8 articles, 20 links and “ongoing technical optimization”, it has promised roughly 60 hours of work inside 9 hours of money. The proposal is not ambitious. It is arithmetic that does not close, and something on that list will be produced by a tool instead of a person. That check takes five minutes, and no agency pricing page will do it for you.
What $500 a month actually buys
At $500 a month you are buying three to five hours of somebody’s attention. That is enough for:
- Google Business Profile maintenance — posts, photos, review responses, Q&A
- One decent article a month, or two shorter ones
- Checking that nothing broke, and fixing small things when it does
- A short monthly report
That is a real service and it is worth the money for a single-location business that already has a working site. What it is not is a campaign. It will not out-rank an established competitor in a contested market, and any proposal at that price promising it is lying about the arithmetic.
The genuinely dangerous version of the cheap retainer is the one that spends its budget on things that look like volume: 500 directory submissions, bulk “high DA” links, twenty AI-generated articles. That is RF-17 directory-submission padding, RF-03 bulk link packages, and RF-16 AI content sold as bespoke — three of the named red flags we check in every audit. Those are not a cheaper version of SEO. They are a different activity that can cost you rankings you already have.
What $2,000 a month buys
At $2,000 you are buying 12 to 20 hours. That is a campaign:
- A technical fix list that gets worked through, not just delivered
- Three to five articles a month with a named writer and an edit step
- Real outreach for a handful of links per quarter — named targets, not a package
- Location pages, category pages or service pages actually being built
- Monthly reporting on leads and calls, not just impressions
The jump from $500 to $2,000 is not “better SEO”. It is a different quantity of work, and the proposal should show you exactly what that quantity is. If the $2,000 proposal has the same deliverable list as the $500 one with bigger adjectives, that is RF-02 vague deliverables, and it is the flag that costs clients the most money over a year. “Ongoing optimization” and “up to 15 backlinks” are quantities of zero. You can never prove they did not do it.
When cheap is expensive
You pay for a year and get nothing. $600 a month for twelve months is $7,200 for a service that was never scoped to move anything. The money is gone and you are twelve months behind, which is the real cost. Remember that 82% of the switchers in the Backlinko survey left over results — this failure mode is common enough to plan for.
You buy a penalty. Bulk links and mass generated content are the two purchases that can actively suppress the pages on your site that already work. Cleaning that up is billable, and you pay for it twice.
You lose your own assets. This is the expensive one, and it has nothing to do with the monthly price. If the contract has the agency owning the content, the website, the ad accounts or the Google Business Profile — RF-09 — then leaving means losing everything you paid for. We see this most often on the cheapest retainers, because the lock-in is what makes the low price work for them. Same with RF-14, where the agency registers your domain “on your behalf”. If they hold the domain, they hold the business.
Read the termination clause before you read the price. An agreement with no cancellation clause at all (RF-13) or a silent auto-renewal (RF-05) turns a cheap monthly number into a commitment you cannot size.
How to use a number as a buyer
You do not need to become an SEO expert. You need three questions answered in writing.
1. What am I getting, in numbers? Not “content marketing” — “four articles per month, 1,200 words minimum, topics agreed in advance, published to your site”. Every line item should have a quantity, a cadence and a definition of done. If you cannot count it at the end of the month, you cannot hold them to it.
2. How does this turn into money? The report should show organic sessions, then calls, forms, bookings or sales. Rankings and impressions are inputs. Nobody has ever paid a wage with an impression. A proposal whose only success metric is keyword positions (RF-06) can report success forever while your phone stays quiet.
3. What happens if I want out in month four? Thirty days’ written notice, no penalty, accounts and content handed back. Anything longer than a three-month initial term is a bet on their confidence, and a long minimum term (RF-04) moves all of the risk onto you.
If those three are answered clearly and the price sits inside the ranges above, you are probably looking at a fair deal. If the answers are vague and the price is low, you are looking at the expensive kind of cheap.
The honest summary
There is no single right price. There is a right price for your number of pages, your number of locations, your market, and the volume of work in the document. A $1,200 proposal with counted deliverables, monthly lead reporting and a 30-day exit is a better buy than an $800 proposal that promises everything and specifies nothing.
If you are holding a proposal right now and you cannot tell which one you have, that is exactly what this service is for. Send it over, and you get a line-by-line written verdict in plain English: fair, negotiable, or walk away.
Sources
- Ahrefs, How Much Does SEO Cost? — survey of 439 SEO providers, published 2023, updated August 2024. Average retainer $2,917/mo; local SEO $1,557/mo; agencies $3,209 against freelancers $1,348; average hourly rate $111; 78.2% use retainers; most common project band $2,501–$5,000.
- Backlinko, SEO Services Statistics — survey of 1,200 business owners, 2019. Average small-business spend $497.16/mo; 30% would recommend their provider; industry NPS 0; 82% of switchers left over results, 81% over cost.
- Credo, Digital Marketing Industry Pricing Survey — SEO agency rates — 85.49% of agencies charge $50–200/hr; just over 60% set a retainer minimum above $1,000/mo.
- Per-article, per-audit, per-location and hours-per-deliverable figures are given as commonly published ranges: they recur across agency pricing pages, but no single survey establishes them.