You asked three SEO agencies for a quote. One came back at $500 a month, one at $3,000, and one at $9,000.
Now you’re more confused than when you started.
That spread is normal. SEO (search engine optimization, the work that gets your website into Google’s unpaid results) has no list price. Two providers can put the same words on a proposal and deliver completely different amounts of work.
Key Takeaways
The average SEO bill. Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO providers and found an average of $2,917 a month; most businesses (63%) spend $500 to $5,000.
What agencies charge. Agencies average $3,209 a month, freelancers $1,348 and local SEO $1,557, per Ahrefs.
Retainers rule. 78.2% of the SEOs in the Ahrefs survey charge a monthly retainer.
What owners actually spend. Backlinko's 2019 survey of 1,200 business owners found small businesses averaged $497 a month.
Cheap SEO backfires. Owners spending under $500 a month were 75% more likely to be dissatisfied.
Four factors drive your price. Competition, business size, your site's condition and how much work you need each month.
SEO and ads work best together. Ads bring in revenue now while SEO builds leads you don't pay for per click.
How Much Does SEO Cost? The Pricing Data
Ahrefs polled 439 SEO providers and found SEO costs usually range from $250 to $10,000 per month, with most businesses (63%) spending between $500 and $5,000.
Where you land depends on whether you hire an agency, a consultant, or a freelancer, and how competitive your market is.
Average SEO Costs By Provider Type
| Provider or Scope | Average Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| SEO freelancer | $1,348 |
| SEO agency | $3,209 |
| SEO consultant | $3,250 |
| Local SEO | $1,557 |
| Global SEO firm | $3,474 |
Source: Ahrefs SEO pricing survey of 439 SEO providers, updated August 2024.
In the U.S. and Canada, 79.1% of providers in the Ahrefs survey charge at least $1,001 per month. Experience shows up in the price too: providers in business for 5 to 10 years average $3,648 a month, more than double the $1,540 average for those in business two years or less.
Why Your Three Quotes Look Nothing Alike
Ahrefs asked the people selling SEO. Backlinko asked the people buying it.
Backlinko and Northstar Research Partners surveyed 1,200 business owners in 2019 and found small businesses averaged $497 a month on SEO. Half of them spent under $1,000 for the entire year.
That’s a long way from the roughly $3,000 a month providers report charging. Part of the gap is age, since the Backlinko numbers are from 2019. The bigger reason is that “SEO” gets sold as very different products. A $300 package and a $5,000 retainer share a name and almost nothing else.
SEO Pricing Models: How SEO Agencies Charge
Most SEO companies structure their fees in one of four ways, and plenty mix them.
| Pricing Model | How It Works | Typical Pricing | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly SEO retainers | Fixed monthly fee for an agreed scope of work | $500 to $5,000+ a month | Ongoing SEO campaigns |
| Project-based pricing | One fee for a defined deliverable | Most common: $2,501 to $5,000 | Audits, site migrations, one-time cleanups |
| Hourly | You pay for time | $111 an hour on average | Consulting, second opinions, team training |
| Performance-based | Fees tied to rankings or leads | Varies widely | Rarely a good fit |
Source: Ahrefs. The most popular per-project fee is $2,501 to $5,000, charged by 21.2% of respondents, and only 1 in 10 providers charge more than $150 an hour.
Performance-based deals sound low-risk. In practice, they tend to reward whatever keyword is easiest to rank, even if nobody searching it will ever buy from you.
Which Pricing Model Fits Your SEO Project?
Need a one-time fix, like an audit before a site redesign? Project-based pricing makes sense. Want more leads from Google month after month? That takes ongoing work, so it calls for a retainer or a sprint-based plan.
SEO is ongoing. Google updates its systems constantly, your competitors keep publishing, and your site keeps changing. A single SEO project rarely keeps you ranking.
Ask every agency this before you sign.
"Ongoing optimization" tells you nothing. If it isn't a deliverable you can see, you can't hold them to it.
What Influences The Cost Of SEO Services?
The average only tells you so much. These factors decide what you’ll actually pay:
- Competition. A roofer in a small town and a software company selling nationwide are competing for very different search results. Tougher competition means more content, more links, and higher SEO costs.
- Local SEO vs. national SEO. Local work averages $1,557 a month in the Ahrefs survey. Providers serving a worldwide market average $3,474.
- The size of your business and website. A 10-page site and a 2,000-page online store need very different amounts of technical SEO and on-page SEO work.
- Your site’s current condition. You need to fix slow pages, broken links, or cleanup from past black-hat SEO (tactics that break Google’s rules) before new work pays off.
- The scope of your SEO strategy. Are you buying strategy only, or strategy plus writing, link building, reporting, and AI visibility?
- Experience. Experienced SEO professionals cost more. You’re paying for fewer mistakes and faster answers.
Types Of SEO Services Included In SEO Packages
Plenty of SEO packages list services without explaining them.
| Service | What It Actually Is |
|---|---|
| SEO audits | A full review of your site to find what's holding it back |
| Technical SEO | Fixing behind-the-scenes issues like site speed, crawl errors, and mobile problems |
| On-page SEO | Optimizing titles, headings, and copy so each page targets the right searches |
| SEO content | New pages and articles that answer what your customers are searching for |
| Local SEO | Your Google Business Profile, reviews, and local listings |
| Link building | Earning links from other reputable websites |
| AI visibility | Helping AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews find and cite your business. You'll hear this called GEO (generative engine optimization) or AEO (answer engine optimization) |
A comprehensive SEO plan covers most of these. A cheap one often includes a monthly report and little else.
"Higher search rankings, more leads, and most importantly, more patients."
Cheap SEO Vs. Professional SEO: What Low SEO Rates Actually Buy
Backlinko’s 2019 survey of 1,200 business owners found clients spending over $500 a month were 53.3% more likely to call themselves extremely satisfied than those spending less. Owners spending under $500 were 75% more likely to be dissatisfied.
Cheap SEO usually gets to its low price one of two ways. It’s either a template applied to hundreds of clients with very little real work behind it, or it’s aggressive shortcuts like spammy links and keyword stuffing that can get your site penalized. Fixing that later almost always costs more than doing it right the first time.
Read more: Cheap SEO vs. Affordable SEO →
Questions To Ask Before Hiring An SEO Agency Or Consultant
Google’s “Do You Need an SEO?” guide says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, and warns against SEOs that claim a “special relationship” with Google. It suggests asking providers for examples of previous work, what results they expect and in what timeframe, and whether they’ll share every change they make and why.
The best SEO providers answer those questions without hesitating. Watch for these warning signs:
- Guaranteed rankings or insider access to Google
- Vague answers about what gets done each month
- No case studies or client references
- A long-term contract with no exit if results don’t show up
- Reports you can’t understand
A reputable SEO agency will welcome the scrutiny.
How To Budget For SEO Alongside Paid Ads
SEO and paid ads work best together.
Read more: SEO and PPC Working Together →
Paid ads (PPC, or pay-per-click, where you pay each time someone clicks your ad) are the fast channel. Turn them on and leads can start this week. Turn them off, and those leads stop.
SEO is your long-term lead source. It takes longer to start producing, but organic traffic keeps coming without a per-click cost. As it grows, you gain more control over how much you spend on ads.
A simple way to set your SEO budget:
- Start with customer value. If a new customer brings in $3,000 in gross profit over their lifetime and SEO costs $2,500 a month ($30,000 a year), you need 10 new customers a year from organic search to break even.
- Use ads to cover the ramp-up. Ads keep revenue coming in while your SEO builds.
- Rebalance as organic grows. Once SEO is producing leads, shift budget toward whichever channel brings in customers at the lowest cost.
How BCC Interactive Prices Custom SEO
We don’t sell off-the-shelf SEO packages. We build every plan around your goals, your market, and your budget.
Bigger businesses work with us on a monthly retainer. Smaller businesses can start with an audit and a fixed-scope sprint. Either way, there’s no long-term contract.
- No long-term contracts. You stay because the work is producing results.
- Direct access to our SEO experts. You talk to the people doing the work, with no account-manager middlemen.
- Reporting in plain English. You’ll always know what we’re working on, why, and what it’s producing in leads and revenue.
- Paid and organic from one team. We run SEO and PPC together, so your ads and your SEO support each other.
- Fortune 500 experience at small business scale. I started agency-side on NBA, NFL, and NASCAR accounts, then managed marketing teams at Comcast and Campbell’s. We bring that experience to small and mid-sized businesses.
Read more: Learn more about SEO services at BCC →
Get a straight SEO number for your business.
- What SEO should cost in your market, not an industry average
- Where your leads are leaking today
- A 90-day plan you can run with or without us
SEO Pricing FAQs
Ahrefs puts the average local SEO retainer at $1,557 a month, with agencies averaging $1,819 and freelancers $1,150. Backlinko’s 2019 survey found small businesses spent about $497 a month, but that money usually buys a lot less work.
For a single-location business in a low-competition market, it can cover basics like your Google Business Profile and a few page updates. In most competitive markets, $500 doesn’t buy enough work to change your results.
Good SEO requires ongoing work from skilled people: research, writing, technical fixes, link building, and reporting, every month. Professional SEO tools alone can run hundreds of dollars a month before anyone touches your site.
Plan on several months before SEO produces meaningful leads, with results building over the first year. Anyone promising page-one rankings in a few weeks is overselling.
Both, if your budget allows. Ads generate leads right away, and SEO builds a lead source that keeps working when your ad budget pauses.
For a small local business, you can handle the basics. Google’s own guide says that if you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself. Once you’re in a competitive market or short on time, it usually makes sense to hire SEO help, whether that’s an agency or in-house SEO staff.
Many ask for a multi-month commitment. We don’t. We’d rather earn your business every month with results you can see.
Yes. SEO isn’t dead. It’s evolving. Google’s “Do You Need an SEO?” guide now lists optimizing for generative AI among the services SEOs provide, and the same work that helps you rank also makes your content easier for AI tools to find and cite.