How much does SEO cost? Monthly prices plus the costs agencies leave out

SEO provider fees for a US business usually start around $1,000 a month and often run to a few thousand. The largest public pricing survey, Ahrefs' poll of 439 SEO providers worldwide (last updated August 15, 2024), found that 68.8% of providers charge $2,000 a month or less, the most common retainer band is $501 to $1,000, and the average retainer is $2,917. Among providers in the US and Canada, 79.1% charge at least $1,001 a month. Hourly SEO work most often costs $75 to $100 worldwide, and two-thirds of US and Canadian providers charge $75 to $200 an hour. The fee is only part of what you pay. Your team's hours, developer time for technical fixes, content the fee doesn't cover, tools, links and contract terms all add to the real monthly cost.

Most pricing pages stop at the provider's invoice. If you are setting a budget, you need the whole bill, so this page counts the parts you pay for yourself and gives you a worksheet to total them with your own numbers.

The short answer

Prices by model

Average monthly retainer by type of provider, from the same survey: agencies $3,209, consultants $3,250, freelancers $1,348.63.

Source: Ahrefs SEO pricing survey, first published December 17, 2023, visible update date August 15, 2024.

Where these numbers come from and how old they are

Before you put any of these figures in a budget, know what they are and what they aren't.

• The Ahrefs data comes from sellers, not buyers. It records what 439 SEO providers say they charge, checked against their websites. It covers providers worldwide, including countries where labor costs far less than in the US. That is why the US and Canada column sits higher than the worldwide one.
• The averages lean high. Providers answered in price bands, and Ahrefs calculated the averages by assuming each provider charges the top of its band. A provider in the $501 to $1,000 band counts as $1,000. Treat $2,917 as a ceiling for the average, not the middle.
• The data is from 2024 or earlier. The survey doesn't say when it was carried out. Some ranking pages call it 2026 data because the page's hidden metadata was changed in 2026. The visible date and the figures are from 2024.
• The US and Canada subgroup size isn't published. We know the percentages, not how many providers they rest on.

The other source worth reading is a buyer survey of 500 US professionals published on a marketing agency's blog (updated November 7, 2025). It asks the people paying, which makes it the only public view from the buyer's side. It doesn't give a fieldwork date or a breakdown of who answered, so read it as a signal rather than a benchmark. It found buyers pay through retainers (27.2%), per project (26.2%), hourly (17.8%), performance-based deals (16.2%) and a mix (11.4%).

If you read Dutch, see what SEO costs when you outsource it (Dutch).

Many agency pricing pages publish their own ranges with no source. Some contradict themselves on the same page, quoting one hourly rate in the summary and another in the table. If a number has no sample, no date and no method, don't build a budget on it.

The four pricing models

Monthly retainer

A fixed fee every month for an agreed scope: usually some mix of technical fixes, content, reporting and links. It is the most common model by far. In the Ahrefs survey, 78.2% of providers offer retainers.

A retainer suits SEO because the work doesn't end. Pages break, competitors publish, Google changes what it shows. The risk is a scope that drifts. Ask for the deliverables in writing as numbers: how many articles, how many fixes, how many outreach attempts, how many hours. "Ongoing optimization" is not a deliverable.

One-off project

A fixed price for a defined job: a technical audit, a site migration, a keyword map, a batch of pages. 48.9% of providers sell project work, and $2,501 to $5,000 is the most common band.

Projects are good for a known problem with an end date. The trap is the audit that ends as a PDF. A 60-page report of recommendations has cost you money and fixed nothing. Ask whether the price includes making the changes or only listing them.

Hourly

You pay for time, typically for consulting, training your team or reviewing someone else's work. 34.8% of providers bill hourly, and the worldwide average is $111 an hour.

Hourly billing gives you the most flexibility and the least cost control. It works when you have someone in-house doing the work and you want an expert to check it. It works badly as a way to buy ongoing SEO, because nobody has a reason to finish quickly.

Subscription or software

This label covers two very different things, and quotes often blur them.

Software you run yourself. A monthly subscription to a keyword research tool, crawler or rank tracker. You get data. You still do every task, so the real cost is your time.

A done-for-you subscription. A fixed monthly fee for a service that does the work, often an AI SEO service that plans, writes and fixes pages inside your CMS. You get predictable cost and output without managing people. You give up the custom strategy calls and bespoke deliverables an agency builds around you, and the scope is whatever the plan includes. FoundWell is in this category.

A note on performance-based pricing

16.2% of the buyers in the US survey above pay based on results. It sounds safe. Read the definition of a result carefully. Rankings for obscure keywords nobody searches are easy to deliver and worth nothing to you. A provider paid only on fast results also has a reason to take shortcuts, such as buying links, that can hurt the site later. If you accept this model, tie payment to clicks or leads measured in your own accounts, not to rankings measured in the provider's tool.

What the monthly fee doesn't include

These are the costs you pay yourself. None of them shows up on the provider's invoice, and none of the agency pricing pages counts them.

Your team's hours

Someone on your side has to do the kickoff call, grant access to the CMS, Google Search Console and analytics, explain your products and customers, answer questions, review drafts, fact-check claims about your business, approve changes and sit through the monthly report. That person is usually the owner or a marketing manager, whose time is expensive.

To put a dollar figure on it, multiply the hours by an hourly rate for the role. If you don't know your own internal rate, use the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. The latest release is the May 2025 data. Look up the mean hourly wage for the occupation code that matches whoever does the work:

• 11-1021 General and operations managers (a reasonable stand-in for an owner's time)
• 11-2021 Marketing managers
• 13-1161 Market research analysts and marketing specialists
• 15-1254 Web developers
• 27-3043 Writers and authors
• 27-3041 Editors

We haven't printed the dollar figures here. Pull them from the BLS pages when you fill in the worksheet, so you are working from the current release. BLS wages exclude benefits and overhead, so the true cost of an employee's hour is higher than the wage. Add your own markup if you know it.

Developer time for technical fixes

Many providers recommend technical changes and leave you to make them. Redirect maps after a URL change, faster page templates, structured data, fixing duplicate pages from Shopify collection URLs, adding fields to Umbraco document types, cleaning up a WordPress theme that loads 40 scripts. If your developer or web agency does this work, it is part of what SEO costs you.

Ask every provider one question: who applies the changes, and is that in the fee? If the answer is "we send you a ticket", budget developer hours. A site with years of technical problems needs more of them in the first months.

Writing and editing

Check what the content line in the quote actually means. Some retainers include finished articles. Some include "content strategy", meaning a list of topics you write yourself. Some include drafts that need heavy editing before they are accurate about your business.

Ask how many articles a month, of what length, with what level of editing, and whether images and formatting in your CMS are included. Then count the hours your team spends reviewing each piece. A subject expert checking a technical article for 30 minutes is a real cost.

Tools

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free and give you the most reliable data on how your site performs in search. Beyond those, you or your provider may pay for keyword data, a crawler and a rank tracker. Prices vary widely by plan, so get current quotes rather than relying on a figure from an article.

Find out who owns the tool accounts. If the provider pays for the tools, the cost is in the fee, but the history (rank tracking, past crawls) usually stays with them when you leave.

On WordPress or Umbraco, our free plugins run an AEO audit of every page, add schema automatically and generate an llms.txt file, which covers some of what you might otherwise pay a tool for.

Links and PR

Getting other sites to link to you takes outreach, digital PR or content worth citing. Some providers include it, some charge extra, and some buy links. Buying links that pass ranking credit breaks Google's spam policies, and the risk lands on your site, not theirs.

Ask how links are earned, whether you can see each one, and whether any are "rented" placements that disappear when you stop paying.

Contract terms that change the real cost

Two quotes with the same monthly fee can cost very different amounts once you read the contract.

Minimum term and notice period

A minimum term means you pay for a set number of months, even if the work disappoints. A notice period adds months on top. Here is the arithmetic with made-up numbers: on a 12-month contract at $2,000 a month, deciding in month 4 that it isn't working still leaves $16,000 to pay. Add a 60-day notice period after the term and the exit costs more again.

Before signing, write down the total you are committed to: monthly fee × minimum months, plus fees during the notice period. That is the real price of trying the provider.

Setup fees

Some providers charge an onboarding or audit fee before the monthly fee starts. Ask what it buys. If it pays for an audit, ask whether the fixes from that audit are included afterwards or billed again.

Who owns the content and accounts after you leave

This is where leaving gets expensive. Check each of these in writing before you sign:

• Google Search Console: verified under your Google account, with the provider added as a user
• Google Analytics: your property, your account
• Google Business Profile: you as primary owner
• CMS logins: your admin account, with the provider on a separate user you can remove
• Domain registrar and hosting: in your name, never the provider's
• Content: you own the copyright to everything you paid for, including drafts
• Tool data: whether you get an export of rank history, keyword research and audits
• Links: whether any links depend on an ongoing payment

If a provider won't put your accounts under your ownership, treat that as a cost. You will pay it when you leave.

What switching providers costs

Switching has costs nobody quotes. Your team spends hours rebuilding access and briefing the new provider from scratch. Research and history that lived in the old provider's tools is gone. Output drops while the new team learns your site. Rented links vanish, and pages that relied on them can lose ground. Spread an estimate of these costs over the months you expect to stay, as the worksheet below does.

Worked example: your total monthly cost

The formula:

Total monthly cost = provider fee + (your team's hours × hourly rate) + (developer hours × hourly rate) + content not included in the fee + tools + links or PR + (setup fee ÷ 12) + (expected switching cost ÷ months you expect to stay)

Fill in the middle column with your own numbers. The example column uses made-up inputs to show the math. They are not benchmarks and not BLS figures.

In this example the real cost is about 76% higher than the $2,000 fee. Your result will differ. The point is to compare providers on the bottom line, not the first line. A cheaper fee that leaves all the fixes to your developer can cost more than a higher fee that includes them.

DIY vs. freelancer vs. agency vs. AI SEO service

What each option trades away:

DIY costs the least cash and the most time. It suits an owner who enjoys the work and has 5 to 10 spare hours a week, which most owners don't. The hidden cost is the hours priced at your own rate, and the mistakes you don't know you're making.

A freelancer is cheaper than an agency and often more senior per dollar. The risks are capacity (holidays, illness, other clients) and scope: one person rarely covers technical work, writing and outreach equally well.

An agency brings a team and a strategy built around you. You pay for account management, meetings and minimum terms, and your team still spends time on briefings and approvals. We cover agency retainers and their trade-offs in detail on our SEO agency comparison.

An AI SEO service gives you a fixed price and daily output with little of your time. It doesn't suit everyone. It is a poor fit if you want a weekly strategy call with a named consultant, if your site needs a large custom development project, or if your site runs on a platform the service doesn't support. A brand-new site with no search history also has less to work from in the first months. You can see how these categories compare on other dimensions on our comparison pages.

What a small business should budget for in year one

Year one isn't twelve equal months. Plan for a heavier start.

Year-one cost = (monthly fee × 12) + setup fee + your team's hours in months 1 to 3 + your team's hours in months 4 to 12 + developer hours for the technical backlog + content, tools and links not in the fee

Months 1 to 3: setup

Expect more of your own time here. Granting access, the kickoff, approving a keyword plan, answering questions about your products, reviewing the first drafts closely. If the first audit finds a technical backlog, this is when your developer is busiest. Record your Search Console baseline before anything changes (see below).

Don't judge results yet. Use these months to check that the work is actually shipping: pages fixed, articles live, outreach sent.

Months 4 to 12: steady state

Approvals should become routine, and your hours should drop. If they don't, that is a cost signal: the provider needs too much hand-holding, or the drafts need too much correcting. Check results against your baseline at around day 90, then again at months 6 and 12.

What a very small budget can and can't buy

At $500 a month and the Ahrefs worldwide average of $111 an hour, you buy about 4.5 hours of work a month. At the $75 to $200 range most US and Canadian providers charge, that is 2.5 to 6.7 hours. That can cover a few technical fixes or roughly one well-researched article. It can't cover a content program, technical work and link building at the same time.

The buyer survey supports caution here: over 25% of businesses spending $500 to $2,500 a month said SEO was "not really worth the price." If your budget is small, put it into one thing done well (usually fixing the site and publishing a few strong pages) rather than a thin slice of everything.

How to tell whether it's paying off

Set a Search Console baseline before you start

In Google Search Console, open the Performance report, set the date range to the last 28 days and note total clicks and impressions. Export the queries and pages. If you can, filter out searches for your brand name, because brand searches reflect your reputation more than your SEO. Save the file with the date. Without it, every later report is a story you can't check.

Compare clicks, then leads and revenue

At around day 90, compare a later 28-day window with your baseline. FoundWell's own guarantee uses this method: clicks in days 63 to 90 against the 28 days before the site was connected. If your business is seasonal, also compare with the same period last year so a busy month doesn't look like SEO success.

Clicks are the start. Then check organic leads or sales in your analytics, using the Organic Search channel. A simple payback test: (extra organic leads per month × your close rate × gross profit per customer) compared with your total monthly cost from the worksheet. If the first number is climbing toward the second, it is working. If clicks rise and leads don't, the content is attracting the wrong searches.

Track AI answers as well

More buyers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews before they click anything. Once a month, ask those tools the questions your customers ask and record whether your business is mentioned and what is said about it. It is a rough measure, but it shows a trend that Search Console doesn't. Our guide on getting your business recommended by ChatGPT explains what influences those answers.

What FoundWell costs, in full

FoundWell is an AI SEO service for WordPress, Umbraco and Shopify sites. It is $1,000 per month per website, month to month, with no contract. If you cancel, the subscription runs to the end of the month you paid for. The plan includes up to 12 articles and up to 5 outreach pitches a month, a daily site audit with fixes for what it finds, indexing checks, weekly tracking of what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI answers say about you, a weekly report, and a monthly keyword map, content plan, outreach plan and PDF report. The work happens inside your own CMS, so you aren't paying a developer to apply it. Outreach is drafted, never sent in your name.

Your time cost depends on the mode you choose. In approval mode nothing goes live until you approve it. On autopilot it runs without you. You can see how FoundWell works and get started.

The guarantee: 25% more clicks from Google in 90 days, or FoundWell keeps working for free until you get them. Clicks in days 63 to 90 must be at least 25% higher than in the 28 days before you connected the site, measured in Google Search Console. It applies when the site has at least 90 days of Search Console data at connection, stays connected for the 90 days, and runs on autopilot or you answer approvals within a week.

Run your numbers through the worksheet above, then connect your site and start.

Frequently asked questions

How much does SEO cost per month for a small business?

Provider fees for a US small business usually start around $1,000 a month. In Ahrefs' survey of 439 providers worldwide (updated August 15, 2024), 79.1% of US and Canadian providers charged at least $1,001 a month, while the most common band worldwide was $501 to $1,000. Add your own costs on top: staff time for approvals, developer time for fixes, content not in the fee, tools and links.

Is $500 a month enough for SEO?

It buys a small amount of work. At the Ahrefs worldwide average of $111 an hour, $500 covers about 4.5 hours a month, enough for a few technical fixes or roughly one solid article. In a 2025 survey of 500 US buyers, over 25% of businesses spending $500 to $2,500 a month said SEO was not really worth the price. On a small budget, focus on one thing done well.

What costs are not included in an SEO quote?

Usually your team's time for briefings and approvals, developer time if the provider only recommends technical changes, writing or editing beyond the agreed scope, tools you pay for yourself, link building or PR, setup fees, and the cost of switching providers later. Ask each provider who applies the changes and what is excluded.

How long before SEO shows results?

Plan to check work output in the first three months and results from around day 90. Compare clicks in a later 28-day window in Google Search Console with a 28-day baseline taken before you started, and use a year-over-year comparison if your business is seasonal. Then check whether organic leads or sales follow.

Should I sign a 12-month SEO contract?

Only if you have worked out the full commitment: monthly fee times the minimum months, plus any notice period. Also confirm in writing that you own your Search Console, Analytics, Google Business Profile, CMS logins and all content. Month-to-month terms cost you nothing extra to leave if the work isn't paying off.

About the author

Peter Sinke, Founder

Peter Sinke builds websites at Datapad in the Netherlands and made FoundWell from the daily AI SEO routine he ran for Datapad's own site.