How much does SEO cost?

SEO quotes range from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand a month, and the descriptions often sound the same. Here's what SEO actually is, what it costs in 2026, what you should get for the money and when a monthly retainer makes sense.

What SEO is

SEO (search engine optimisation) is everything you do to appear higher in Google's regular results, as opposed to the paid ones. It has three parts:

For a local business, the fourth piece is your Google Business Profile: for searches like "barber near me", the map with businesses shows up above the websites.

What SEO costs

There are no official statistics, so the best guide is surveys of providers. Ahrefs, an SEO software company, polled 439 SEO providers worldwide:

Location matters a lot. In the US and Canada, 79.1% of providers charged at least $1,001 a month, 66.7% charged $75–$200 an hour and 83.3% charged at least $1,001 per project. By provider type, the most common retainer was $500–$1,000 for agencies and $2,501–$5,000 for consultants, while freelancers clustered at a few hundred dollars. SE Ranking's separate survey found a similar pattern: $500–$1,000 a month and $50–$100 an hour were the most popular ranges.

What you should get for the money

A serious SEO retainer has clear deliverables you can check:

• a written plan at the start: which searches you're targeting, which pages are missing, what needs fixing;
• changes made on the site, not just recommendations: titles, new pages, internal links, technical problems resolved;
• new content, if included: how many pages or articles a month, on what topics;
• a monthly report with Search Console data: impressions, clicks, positions, newly indexed pages, plus what was done that month;
• access to your own accounts: Search Console and analytics in your business's name, not the agency's.

If the report only shows "rankings for 10 keywords" and no changes made, you're paying for measurement, not optimisation.

SEO once, at build time, or SEO every month?

The technical part is best done once, when the site is built: fast pages, a written title and description for every page, clear addresses, a sitemap, structured data and a page for each service. A site built that way doesn't need monthly technical repairs.

A monthly retainer makes sense when:

• your field is competitive (lawyers, clinics, home services, real estate, big cities);
• you have an online store with many products and categories;
• you want to rank in several cities, with pages that genuinely have content specific to each;
• you need new content regularly and don't have time to write it.

For a café, salon or practice in one town, a well-built site, a well-kept Google profile and a steady flow of reviews usually do more than an SEO retainer.

SEO or Google Ads?

For reference, WordStream by LocaliQ's benchmarks for April 2025 to March 2026, based on Google and Microsoft Ads campaigns, found an average cost per click of $5.42, a conversion rate of 8.18% and an average cost per lead of $66.69. Legal services had the highest average click, at $9.87. A business that needs 20 leads a month at that average would spend about $1,300 a month on clicks alone, which is the kind of number to weigh against an SEO retainer.

Red flags

Google has a whole page on choosing an SEO provider. A few warnings from it, plus a few more:

• "We guarantee the #1 spot on Google." Google says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and that if someone does, you should find someone else.
• "We have a special relationship with Google." There isn't one. Google doesn't accept payment to rank a site higher.
• Hundreds of links a month or "submission to thousands of search engines". Bought links break Google's rules and can get a site removed from results.
• Secrecy. A provider who won't explain what they change on your site.
• Hundreds of auto-generated city pages with the same text and a different place name. Google treats them as low quality.
• Cold emails saying "I noticed your site isn't ranking on Google".

What you can do yourself

1. Complete your Google Business Profile and keep it up to date.
2. Create a page for each important service, saying what you do, where and for how much.
3. Ask every happy customer for a review and reply to reviews.
4. Check Search Console monthly: which searches bring people in and which pages aren't indexed. If pages are missing, start with why your website isn't showing up on Google.

We handle the technical part when we build the site: titles and descriptions for every page, structured data, a sitemap, clear addresses and pages generated ahead of time that load fast. The details are on our web design page.