What
SEO costs.

Most SEO is sold by the month. Ahrefs found 78.2% of the providers it polled charge a monthly retainer, 48.9% charge per project and 34.8% charge by the hour. Many do more than one.

The average hourly rate was $111. On a retainer, agencies averaged $3,209 a month and freelancers $1,348, so an agency charges more than twice what a freelancer does. For project work, the most common agency fee band starts at $2,501.

That poll was last updated in August 2024, so read these as a guide to the market and not as this month’s prices.

If your customers are within a drive of you, local SEO is the line to read. Ahrefs puts it at $1,557 a month on average, with agencies at $1,819 and freelancers around $1,150.

That work is your Google Business Profile, reviews, service and area pages, and your name, address and phone matching across the web. A retainer that talks mostly about backlinks and blog posts is the wrong one for a local business.

Price SEO against the lead it replaces. LocaliQ’s median home services lead on Google search costs $90.92, so a $1,557 retainer has to bring about 17 leads a month just to match it. A residential agent’s median lead is $157.59, which sets the bar near 10 leads.

If a provider cannot show you how they would count those leads, you are paying for a ranking report. Ask for leads by page, not positions by keyword.

The tools are the cheap part. Ahrefs Lite is $129 a month, and BrightLocal’s Track plan is $31 a month billed yearly for one location. That is about $160 a month, or $5,760 over three years.

The work is the expensive part. Pages get written, profiles get kept up and reviews get asked for every week. If nobody on your team owns that time, the tools sit unused.

Google’s own advice on hiring an SEO says no one can promise a first place ranking, and to walk away from anyone who does. It also warns against claims of a special relationship with Google, and against firms that will not explain what they plan to do.

Its interview questions are worth asking as they stand: can you show me examples of your previous work, do you follow Google’s guidelines, and what results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe.

We publish our prices. Content that moves your numbers on Google and in AI answers is in our Managed plan at $4,000 a month, with every stage of lead to job run for you, month to month. It starts with a free website.

That is more than an SEO retainer, so it only makes sense if you want the rest of it too. If SEO is all you need, a freelancer at the numbers above is the fair comparison. We promise no ranking either.