Ask an agency how much SEO costs and you get a range wide enough to be useless, usually followed by a form. Ask Google and you get the same ranges, written by the agencies. This piece does the thing neither of them does. It says what the work is, what we charge for it, what moves that number, and when you should not spend it at all.
The short version. Our SEO is $1,350 a month as a standalone service, or $1,100 a month as the SEO and content line inside the $2,400 Grow retainer. Both are on the pricing page. Among the agencies in our study that publish an entry-tier SEO retainer, the median is $2,200 a month. WebFX publishes a floor of $3,000 a month. What moves the price is scope, not how urgently you need it.
- SEO has no unit price, so a floor with its scope attached is honest and a range with no scope is a sales device.
- The work is six jobs: technical, keyword strategy, content, schema, AI search visibility and reporting. A quote covering two of them is a smaller service, not a cheaper one.
- Ours is $1,350 a month standalone or $1,100 inside the $2,400 Grow retainer, on a rolling thirty-day term with no setup fee.
- What moves the price is a second market, more content, a large catalogue, or a site that has to be rebuilt first. Urgency does not.
- Divide any quote by the content pieces it includes for a per-piece cost. It is the fastest way to compare two retainers.
Why every answer is a range
Three reasons, and only one of them is honest.
The honest one is that SEO is not a product with a unit price. A five-page consultancy site and a two-thousand-product store do not need the same work, so an agency that quotes without seeing the site is guessing. The fix is to publish a price with its scope attached, which is what a floor does. A range with no scope is a different thing. It is a number designed to get you on a call.
The second reason is that the ranges are written by the people selling the service. Every ranking guide we checked for this question sells SEO, and the range each one publishes lands conveniently around its own tier.
The third is that agencies do not want to be compared. In our study of 50 top-listed agencies, 78.6% published no prices at all. An agency with no published price can charge you whatever you look able to pay, and hidden pricing exists mainly so that it can.
What the money actually buys
SEO is six jobs that have to happen together. Here is each one in plain words, because a quote you cannot decode is a quote you cannot compare.
A quote that covers two of the six is not cheaper. It is a different, smaller service, and the missing parts will be sold to you later as extras.
What it costs from us
$1,350 a month covers all six jobs above, including four pieces of content and the AI search line, for a single-market small business site. It runs on a rolling thirty-day term with no setup fee and no cancellation fee.
Inside the Grow retainer the same work is $1,100 a month, because it sits alongside paid search management, conversion work and AI search visibility in one $2,400 package, and bundles get the better rate. Every line of both is on the pricing page, and the SEO service page sets out what happens in each of the first ninety-nine days.
Divide any SEO quote by the number of content pieces it includes and you have a per-piece cost. It is the fastest way to compare two retainers, including ours.
Ours works out at $1,350 for four pieces plus the technical, schema and AI work around them.What moves the price
Published prices are floors with a scope, not a flat rate for every business. Four things push SEO above $1,350 a month, and all four are scope.
- A second market or language. Ranking in the UK and the UAE is two sets of pages, two sets of signals and hreflang between them. That is the second-market localisation line in Scale, $1,400 a month on top of Grow.
- More content. Four pieces a month is enough for one topic area to build depth in a quarter. Ten pieces a month, for a business with several distinct services, is the $1,200 content line in Scale.
- A large catalogue. An e-commerce store with hundreds of products is a different technical job from an eight-page site. The store itself starts at $5,900 to build, and the SEO on it is scoped separately.
- A site that has to be rebuilt first. If the site cannot convert, SEO sends more people to a page that does not work. A custom build of up to eight pages is $4,900, itemised in what a website actually costs, and it already includes the technical SEO foundation as a $500 line, so nothing is paid twice.
What does not move the price: how urgently you need results, how large your business looks, or anything discovered after the scope is agreed. The scope is written down before the first month and the number does not move after that.
What the market charges
For context rather than comparison. In our study, entry-tier SEO retainers among the agencies that publish one had a median of $2,200 a month, from a sample of four, with tiers reaching $10,000 a month. WebFX, which ranks for most versions of this question, publishes an SEO entry floor of $3,000 a month. Most of the agencies we sampled published nothing.
None of those figures tells you what is inside them, which is the problem with the whole category. A $3,000 retainer that includes eight pieces of content may be better value than a $1,350 one that includes four. You cannot know until both are itemised, and only one of them is.
The $1,350 standalone rate, the $1,100 SEO and content line, the $2,400 Grow and $5,800 Scale retainers with their lines, and the $4,900 build with its $500 technical SEO line are our published prices, listed on the pricing page. The $2,200 median entry-tier SEO retainer (n=4), the $10,000 top tier and the 78.6% no-published-price figure come from our August 2026 study of 50 top-listed web design agencies, linked in the text. The $3,000 WebFX entry floor is from WebFX's own published pricing, captured 24 August 2026. The six-job breakdown, the sixty-to-ninety-day expectation and the three situations where we decline the work are our editorial position. The 47% organic traffic figure is from our own client engagement and its measurement is set out on the case study page.
When you should not buy SEO
Three situations where we say no, or not yet.
The website cannot convert. If the first screen does not say what you do and how to get in touch, more visitors means more people leaving. Fix the site first. It is cheaper, and it is a prerequisite.
You need revenue this month. Expect movement in sixty to ninety days and compounding after that. If the business needs customers in weeks, paid search is the honest answer and SEO is a distraction dressed as progress.
Nobody searches for what you sell. Some businesses win every customer through referral. If yours is one, ranking for searches nobody makes is an expensive way to feel busy.
When none of those apply, the number to hold in mind is the ninety-day one. For a UK fashion house we cleared the technical debt first and then published against real buyer questions. Organic traffic rose 47% in ninety days while paid spend came down. The case study sets out what was done and how it was measured.