Answer
How much should SEO cost?
Pricing varies by market, scope and seniority, so a single figure would be misleading.
How much should SEO cost?
Pricing varies by market, scope and seniority, so a single figure would be misleading. What matters more is what the fee buys: hours of senior attention, the specific work planned, and whether reporting reaches revenue rather than stopping at rankings.
The longer answer
Quoting a number without the scope is how this question gets answered badly. The same monthly fee can buy a junior executive following a checklist or a senior practitioner doing diagnostic work, and the outcomes differ by more than any price comparison would suggest.
The questions that reveal value are specific: who does the work and what else do they manage, what is planned for the first ninety days and why that order, what will be reported and at what level, and what happens to the assets if the relationship ends. Nonprofit and NGO if the constraint is budget, Real estate and property if the constraint is time.
A useful sanity check is the ratio between the fee and what a single additional customer is worth. If the fee requires several new customers a month to break even in a market with low volume, the arithmetic does not work whatever the quality of the work. Website Design and Development handles the common case; AI Platform Optimization handles the one that catches people out.
The short version
- Ask who does the work and how many accounts they carry
- Ask for the first ninety days as a sequence with reasons for the order
- Require reporting that reaches enquiries or revenue, not rankings alone
- Check the fee against the value of one additional customer in your market
Where this changes by service
The answer is not uniform across the work:
- Answer Engine Optimization: it is the reason keeping published answers accurate as the underlying facts move is scoped the way it is
- Technical SEO, where it is the difference between finding out from the logs where the crawl budget is actually going working and appearing to
- Entity and Semantic SEO, where it quietly limits how far finding the gaps where the site asserts expertise it never demonstrates can go
- Local SEO, where it sets the ceiling on building a page per location that is not the same page with a name swapped
Where this changes by sector
Nor is it uniform across sectors:
- Nonprofit and NGO cannot treat this as optional: two audiences with nothing in common: donors and the people served.
- Marketplaces and platforms feels this more than most, because two sides to acquire, and a programmatic page set that can sink the whole domain.
- In SaaS and technology it matters because product-led companies where the buyer self-educates and the trial is the sales call.
Where this gets more complicated
Cheap and expensive both fail for different reasons. A fee too low to fund senior attention buys a checklist; a high fee with no diagnostic work buys a nicer report. Retainer or Project is the obvious next page from here. SEO or PPC is the one people wish they had read first.
If this answer does not fit your situation, the reason is usually one of the two lists above rather than the answer being wrong. Are backlinks still important? is the reference page for this. Do AI assistants send any traffic? is the one with the examples.
What to check on your own site
Four questions that establish whether this applies to you:
- Whether the thing being reported is the thing you think is being reported
- Whether it holds on a mid-range phone and not only on the machine it was built on
- Whether it survives a logged-out visit from a cold cache
- Whether the exception somebody added two years ago is still needed
Still not answered?
Send the version of this question that applies to your own site. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is the answer you get.
Let us look at where you actually stand
Tell us what you sell and what is not working. We will come back with the two or three things we would look at before anything else.