SEO pricing at a glance
| Pricing model | What surveys report | My pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | $1,000 to $5,000 is the common band; consultants average about $3,250 (Ahrefs) | $2,500 to $8,000, six-month minimum |
| Hourly | $75 to $200 in the US; consultants average $171 (Ahrefs) | Rarely used |
| One-off project | $2,501 to $5,000 is the most popular band (Ahrefs) | Fixed-scope packages, from $8,000 |
| Technical audit | $101 to $750 for 43% of US businesses surveyed; large sites cost far more (WebFX) | Quoted after a free site check |
| Enterprise | Varies widely | $60,000 to $150,000 for a build quarter |
Every survey here is self-reported by providers or vendors who sell SEO, so treat the numbers as ranges to compare a quote against, not as a price list.
What the surveys found
| Source | Sample | Monthly retainer | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs (last updated Aug 2024) | 439 providers | Average $2,917; consultants $3,250; agencies $3,209; freelancers $1,349 | Consultants $171; agencies $99; freelancers $72 |
| SE Ranking (Dec 2024) | 260 agencies | 64% under $1,000; 13% at $2,000 to $5,000; 2% over $5,000 | 45% charge $50 to $100; 40% of US and Canada agencies charge over $125 |
Why they disagree:
- Agency size. SE Ranking found that larger agencies, longer client relationships and more clients all go with higher prices. Its sample includes many small shops.
- Region. US and Canada providers charge more than Europe. In SE Ranking's data, 22% of US and Canada agencies charge over $2,000 a month, against 9% in Europe.
- What's counted. A $500 retainer and a $5,000 retainer can both be called "SEO", and they buy very different amounts of work.
- Age of the data. Ahrefs' survey reflects 2023 to 2024. SE Ranking found 32% of agencies had recently raised prices and 38% planned to.
Work With John
If your site isn't bringing in inquiries, that's fixable.
I work with US service businesses and B2B brands on SEO, websites and lead follow-up. On a free strategy call, I'll tell you what's holding your site back, without a sales pitch.
Get a Free AuditSEO pricing per month and per hour
Ahrefs' pricing survey, last updated in August 2024, is the most widely cited benchmark. It splits providers into consultancies, agencies and freelancers:
| Provider type | Average hourly rate | Average monthly retainer |
|---|---|---|
| Consultancies | $171.18 | $3,250 |
| Agencies | $98.90 | $3,209 |
| Freelancers | $71.59 | about $1,349 |
Consultancies' most common retainer band was $2,501 to $5,000. Location changes the picture: in the US and Canada, 79.1% of respondents charged at least $1,001 a month, and two-thirds charged between $75 and $200 an hour. Providers in India and parts of Central and South America charged far less, which is where the cheapest quotes come from.
Treat these as rough guides. Ahrefs notes that several averages assume each respondent charges the top of their price band, so they lean high, and the data reflects what providers say they charge, not what clients actually pay.
What I charge
My SEO engagements run $2,500 to $8,000 a month with a six-month minimum. The exact figure depends on the scope I find in a free audit of your site, which puts it inside the market ranges above. The six-month minimum exists because measurable leads from SEO usually take 3 to 9 months, and shorter commitments tend to end right as the work starts paying back.
For defined jobs with a clear end, I also run fixed-scope packages, covered further down.
That sits above the cheapest quotes you'll see and inside the range consultants report. I'm not the cheapest option and I don't try to be.
SEO agency pricing
Ahrefs' averages for agencies ($98.90 an hour, about $3,209 a month) are close to consultants' monthly figures. SE Ranking's agency sample skews lower, because it includes many small shops. The difference that matters is who does the work on your account each week, and SEO consultant vs agency compares the two.
Website SEO price: one-off projects
If your site needs a defined fix, you pay per project. Ahrefs found the most popular band is $2,501 to $5,000, with the typical consultant project in the $5,001 to $10,000 band. SE Ranking found 66% of agencies charge $500 to $2,000 per project, with 18% over $3,000, which shows how wide the spread is. I sell fixed-scope packages for defined jobs:
- Website Optimizer Pack: $8,000 to $18,000, one time
- Business Launch Kit: $15,000 to $30,000, paid in milestones
- Local Growth Booster: from $2,500 a month, six-month minimum
- Enterprise Growth Engine: $60,000 to $150,000 for the build quarter
See all of them on the packages page.
SEO audit price
Published audit prices vary a lot because vendors define "audit" differently. In WebFX's survey of 250 US businesses, the two largest groups paid $101 to $500 (20.7%) and $501 to $750 (22.4%), while 12.1% paid $1,001 to $2,500 and a small share paid more than $9,000. WebFX says site size, turnaround time and audit scope set the price, and that comprehensive audits of large sites can reach $12,001 to $15,000.
I don't publish a flat price, and here's why. An audit of a 40-page site on one platform with no history is a different job from an audit of a 600-page site with three old migrations. Three things set my price:
- How many pages and page types the site has. More templates means more to check.
- The platform. Shopify, WordPress and custom builds each break in different ways.
- History. Old redirects, past redesigns and migrations add real work.
I quote in writing after a free site check, before any work starts, and the plan I deliver is yours to keep. Google's own guidance says an audit "should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved", and that is the standard I hold mine to. See the technical SEO audit service for what's included.
The pricing models, and what each one hides
Monthly retainers are the standard for ongoing SEO, because rankings come from months of technical work, content and links rather than one burst of activity. A retainer buys a block of hours and a plan for using them, not a subscription to rankings. The risk is a fixed fee with no defined scope. If month one needs forty hours and the fee funds twenty, the work either stretches into month two or quietly narrows to fit, and the report still says everything is on track. Ask where the hours went.
Hourly billing suits small, defined pieces of work or ongoing advice where the hours are hard to predict. It's transparent about where the time goes and gives a consultant little reason to pad the scope, because padding shows up line by line. Without a cap, though, the total can move more than you expect, especially in a first month full of unknowns. Ask for a monthly cap.
Project fees cover finite work: a technical audit, a site migration or a content strategy. In Ahrefs' data, 83.3% of US and Canadian providers charged at least $1,001 per project.
Performance pricing, where fees track rankings or traffic, sounds appealing until you look at what it rewards. Rankings move for reasons that have nothing to do with the work, such as a competitor's site going down, a seasonal spike or an algorithm update. A consultant paid on rankings has every reason to claim credit for movement they didn't cause and to skip the slow technical work that doesn't move a dashboard next week. I've never priced an engagement this way.
Why per-keyword pricing is a red flag
Some providers quote a price per keyword: so much a month for each term they promise to rank. It sounds measurable. In practice it rewards picking easy, low-value keywords that rank quickly and bring no customers, and it ignores how search works, since a good page ranks for dozens or hundreds of related searches rather than one. What you want to pay for is the work that brings inquiries, measured in leads and revenue.
Guarantees are the close cousin of per-keyword pricing. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO puts it plainly: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google."
Packages or a custom quote?
Fixed packages and price lists work when the scope is predictable, such as launching a new local business site or optimizing pages that already exist. My packages cover jobs like that.
Ongoing SEO is different, because the work list depends on the site. Picture two service businesses in the same industry asking for "SEO." The first has a five-year-old site with clean code, a decent content library and steady traffic. The second has a site that creates duplicate URLs for every filter combination, almost no content and an old domain move that never got proper redirects. If both get the same quote, either the provider hasn't looked, or one client is paying for hours they don't need while the other isn't getting the hours they do. The first site's budget should go mostly to content. The second site can't responsibly start content until the duplicates and redirects are fixed, so its first months cost more.
That's why I quote ongoing work only after an audit. A number given before anyone has checked indexing, existing content and competition is a guess.
What drives SEO consultant cost
Size and complexity. A 10-page local service site needs little technical work. A site with thousands of dynamic pages, a JavaScript framework and several regions needs specialist time.
Technical debt. Indexing problems, duplicate pages and broken redirects have to be cleared before new content can pay off, so an older site carrying years of problems can cost more than a newer one in the same industry.
Competition. If your competitors publish strong content and earn links every month, matching them takes more work than ranking in a quiet niche. A single-location business competing in one metro area usually needs a smaller scope than a national brand.
Business stakes. Changing the URL structure of a site that brings in millions carries real risk, and that work needs careful staging and testing. Consultants price that care in.
Expertise. A specialized B2B supplier may pay a higher hourly rate for someone who understands its field well enough to write about it credibly.
Where the hours go in the first six months
The first two or three weeks are mostly diagnosis: crawling the site, comparing your content with competitors' and finding where traffic and conversions stall. Little of it is visible, which is why some owners wrongly conclude nothing is happening.
Months one and two usually lean technical, because indexing gaps, crawl errors and structural problems cap the return on everything built on top of them. Months three and four move toward an even split as content production starts on a stable base. By months five and six, content and internal linking usually take the larger share, since the remaining gap against competitors is almost always content and authority.
By around week twelve you should see early signals: fixed technical errors, pages entering the index and rankings starting to move on less competitive terms. How to tell SEO is working before rankings move covers what to watch.
A retainer priced too low compresses all of this. Ten hours a month can't do a job that needs thirty, so the technical work drags, content starts late, and nothing looks broken except the results.
Ongoing SEO vs one-off costs
Not every cost is a retainer. A technical audit, a content strategy or a migration plan is usually a one-off project fee. Once the foundations are fixed and the key pages exist, some businesses move to a lighter maintenance level: monitoring Search Console, catching technical problems early and refreshing pages that slip. That costs less than a full build-out, but stopping all work has a cost too, because competitors keep publishing.
Consultant, agency or in-house hire?
Ahrefs' data shows agencies and consultancies charging almost the same monthly average, $3,209 against $3,250, while consultancies bill more per hour. The bigger difference is who does the work. Some agencies send senior people to the sales meeting and hand the account to junior staff after you sign. SEO consultant vs agency compares the two in more depth.
A full-time hire looks cheaper until you add up the real cost. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for market research analysts and marketing specialists, the category that includes most in-house marketing roles, at $78,760 a year as of May 2025. The BLS's employer cost data shows benefits making up 30% of total compensation for private industry workers in June 2026. Add tools such as a crawler and a rank tracker, and one in-house hire costs well over $100,000 a year. A consultant on a $4,000 retainer costs $48,000 a year and brings experience from many sites, though they split their attention across clients.
The choice usually comes down to how much your site changes. A large site that changes weekly often needs someone in-house. A stable service business site that needs strategy, content and periodic technical work is usually better served by a consultant. Plenty of businesses combine the two.
Red flags in cheap SEO
A $500-a-month offer from a provider in a high-cost market almost always means corners get cut. Watch for reports that are raw tool exports with no analysis of what the numbers mean for your business.
Be wary of link building that sounds too easy. Google's spam policies prohibit buying links to manipulate rankings, and a site caught in a link scheme can lose visibility while it cleans up.
Google's hiring guidance adds a few more checks: ask for the business's references and whether past clients saw positive results, grant only read access to Search Console and never write access, and ask to be told about every change made to your site.
Cheap work usually isn't fraud. It's too few hours for the job. Fixing it later means paying twice: once for the original retainer, and again for someone to catch the site up to where it should already be.
Working out what you can afford
Base the budget on your own economics rather than a market average. Start with what a new client is worth over the relationship and what you currently pay to win one.
If a single contract is worth $40,000 over its lifetime, winning two extra clients a year through search more than covers a $3,000 monthly retainer. If your average sale is $30, the same retainer needs huge volume to break even. The free SEO ROI calculator turns your search volume, conversion rate and customer value into a projected monthly figure.
Sometimes the right budget is zero. A broken checkout, an unanswered phone or a product that doesn't fit its market won't be fixed by more SEO hours, and when SEO won't fix your business problem covers the signs.
Questions to ask before you sign
Ask what the first deliverable is and when you get it. A properly scoped engagement should produce a written technical and content audit within the first few weeks.
Ask how hours are tracked and how success is measured beyond traffic. A good consultant talks about qualified leads and pipeline, and ranks actions by business impact rather than burying you in a 50-page automated export.
Ask who will do the work day to day.
Ask what happens if the site needs more work than the quote assumed. Sites with hidden technical debt often do, and a consultant who has seen it before will tell you the quote may change after the audit rather than quietly cutting corners.
Then keep checking. Revisit the scope every quarter as well as at renewal. Scope creep runs both ways: deliverables that keep their names on the invoice while their depth thins, or extra requests absorbed without discussion until something else on the list gets less attention. If you'd like to see how I scope an engagement, the SEO service page sets it out.
