Nobody publishes this, which is why everyone asks. Here is how the pricing actually works, what drives the number, and how to sanity check a quote.
The three ways SEO is sold
One-off audit. A fixed fee for a full technical and content audit plus a plan. Usually a few days of work. You keep both documents.
Monthly retainer. The common model for ongoing work. Covers a defined amount of technical work, content and links each month.
Project. A migration, a replatform, a one-off content build. Priced on scope.
Hourly exists and we avoid it. Billing by the hour rewards filling hours, and SEO has an unlimited supply of tasks that fill hours without moving anything.
What actually drives the number
Six things, in rough order of impact:
1. How competitive your market is. The single biggest factor. Ranking a plumber in a town of 40,000 and ranking a personal injury firm in a major city are different orders of magnitude. Look at the referring domain counts of the pages currently ranking. If they have thousands, this is expensive.
2. Site size. A 20 page service site and a 20,000 product catalogue need different amounts of technical work before anything else can start.
3. How much content is needed. If you have no service pages, that is a build. If you have good pages that need improving, that is much cheaper.
4. How many links the pages need. The most variable line item. Compare your referring domains against the pages that outrank you. That gap is the budget.
5. How much your team can do. If you write your own content and your developer ships the technical fixes, you are buying strategy and oversight rather than delivery. That is considerably cheaper.
6. Starting position. A site with a clean technical base and existing authority moves faster and costs less than one starting from a penalty or a failed migration.
Sanity checking a quote
Rather than publishing numbers that will be wrong for your market, here is how to check any quote you receive.
Work out the hours. Ask what the monthly plan includes in units: how many pages, how many links, how many hours of technical work. Divide the fee by the implied hours. If the result is below what a competent specialist charges in your market, the work cannot be what is described.
Check the link cost. Ask what a link costs them and what the quality tier is. Links are usually the largest variable cost, and a plan with a big link count at a low price is buying from somewhere you do not want to be.
Ask what is not included. Content beyond a certain count, development hours, tool licences, link placement costs. Anything that appears later as an extra should be named now.
Ask for the deliverable list. A month of SEO should produce a list of things: pages shipped, fixes made, links placed. If the answer is a description of activity rather than a list of outputs, the fee is buying activity.
The floor nobody mentions
Below a certain price, the work cannot exist.
If a plan costs less than a few days of a competent person's time, what you are buying is automated reporting, spun content and links from sites that sell them in bulk. The links get devalued, the content never ranks, and the cleanup costs more than the plan saved.
This is the most common way small businesses come to distrust SEO entirely, and it is the reason we publish our own pricing on a page rather than behind a call.
What it should include at any price
- An audit before any ongoing work starts
- A written plan naming the pages and keywords being targeted
- A monthly list of what shipped
- A report that names what went down as well as what went up
- Access to every account and document, so you can leave
If any of those are missing, price is not your main problem.
Contract length
Three months minimum is reasonable, because that is the shortest honest window to judge whether work is landing. Twelve months locked with no exit is not.
After the minimum, monthly with 30 days notice is the standard that protects both sides.
Is it worth it
The arithmetic is simple. Estimate the monthly search volume for your commercial terms, apply a conservative click-through rate for position three to five, apply your actual conversion rate, and multiply by your average order or client value.
If that number is several times the monthly fee after six to twelve months, it is worth it. If it is not, spend the money on ads, on your offer, or on a channel where your buyers actually are. We have told people that and lost the sale, because the alternative is a client who is unhappy in month five.
Our pricing explains how we structure it, and the free audit gives you a price for your specific site before you commit to anything.