SEO pricing: what agencies charge each month, and what a contract should say

What moves SEO pricing?

Two agencies can quote the same business monthly fees that sit far apart. The price of SEO follows six things, and a proposal worth signing names each one.

• Locations: WebFX prices local SEO per location, so its calculator climbs with every location you add, from one to five, ten and twenty-five. A business with one service area pays for one; a business with several pays for each.
• How contested your searches are: Coalition Technologies prices a campaign aimed at a neighborhood or suburb below one aimed at a metro area, where more businesses compete for the same searches.
• Content each month: new pages and articles are where much of the monthly time goes. Percepture’s packages step up from two content pieces a month to eight or more.
• Links and digital PR: link work is often a line of its own. Percepture sells link building as an add-on to each package, and Thrive adds competitive link building at its middle level and digital PR at its top one.
• Reporting and calls: Percepture moves from monthly calls to calls every two weeks as its packages rise. More meetings and deeper reports take more of the team’s time each month.
• The state of the site: a site with technical errors, thin pages or a messy history needs fixing before new work pays off. That first round of fixes is what many setup fees pay for: go-seo’s covers a technical audit, a competitive analysis and the strategy, and Pronto’s a site-wide technical error report with suggested titles and headings. When the fixes add up to a new site, that becomes a website project, and website design cost gives the market’s ranges for it.

Your field can move the price inside a level as well. Coalition Technologies prices regulated fields such as financial, medical and legal services above its local, B2B and e-commerce campaigns, so the same scope can cost more in one field than in another.

What do SEO packages include at each level?

SEO packages are a starting scope, and the market’s packages step up much as the three levels on this page do. Pricing for SEO services climbs as the work widens:

• Established local business: citations and review management, on-page local SEO, content, foundational links and technical fixes, with tracking of what the work returns (WebFX and Thrive).
• Multi-location or regional: a full keyword strategy, more content, technical audits and competitive link building, with the local work repeated for each location (Thrive and WebFX).
• National: enterprise technical SEO, content at scale, digital PR and management across locations (Thrive), with more content pieces and more frequent calls at the top tiers (Percepture).

Not every agency sells packages. Coalition Technologies argues against fixed SEO packages, saying each campaign’s needs are unique, and gives typical prices by type of campaign instead. WebFX’s own ladder of SEO packages comes with a six-month commitment and lists the target phrases, pages and AI-answer prompts each step covers.

Whichever form the price takes, read the scope line by line: how many pages get work each month, how many content pieces, which link work, which reports and how often you meet. Two packages at the same price can hold very different amounts of work.

How much does GEO add to SEO pricing?

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the work that makes a site easier for AI answers to find, read and cite. It builds on the same site, content and links as SEO, and the guides we read price it as an addition to an SEO retainer. The market’s figures take one of two forms:

• As a share of the SEO fee: 20% to 40% on top (Demand Local, Frase, Space & Story, Frizerly and OutreachBloom).
• As a flat amount: $1,500 to $3,000 more a month for an established local or a regional business, and $4,000 to $6,000 for a national one (AOK Marketing and Digital Agency Network).

Some agencies fold AI search work into every SEO package instead: Percepture includes it at every tier. We found no independent survey of GEO prices, so the figures above come from the guides alone.

What moves the GEO price is close to what moves SEO: how many AI platforms are tracked, how many prompts are watched each month, how much content is written for AI answers, and how much citation, mention and digital PR work happens on other sites. Search work of either kind is reported against targets, not promises. For what the work involves, see generative engine optimization services, and for how the two fit together, our guide to GEO vs SEO.

What should an SEO contract say?

An SEO contract is where a monthly fee turns into work you can check. Four things belong in it.

• The scope by month: which pages get work, how many content pieces, what link work and which reports, so each month you can see what the fee bought.
• The term and the notice: terms vary. Digitaleer works month to month with 30 days’ notice, while WebFX’s SEO packages and 1Digital Agency start with six months.
• The setup fee: many agencies charge a one-time fee for the first month’s audit, research and fixes. The market’s bands are $1,000 to $2,500 for an established local business (HigherVisibility and Kolonell, with The Local SEOs, Pronto and go-seo charging less), $2,500 to $7,500 for a multi-location or regional one (HigherVisibility and Arc4, with BayouEdge charging more for two or more locations) and $5,000 to $15,000 for a national one (BayouEdge, Neil Patel and AgencyAnalytics), read October 2026. Others fold that work into the first months of the plan: OuterBox sets months one and two aside for setup, 1Digital Agency puts its audit inside the first month’s price, and Digitaleer treats onboarding as part of the engagement rather than a separate invoice.
• Access and reporting: Google’s guide to hiring an SEO advises giving only read access to Search Console at the audit stage, and asking whether the SEO will share every change it makes to your site, with the reasoning behind it.

Google’s guide also suggests asking what results the SEO expects, in what timeframe and how it measures success, and checking its business references. It is blunt about promises: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” A contract that promises rankings by a date is one to walk away from.

What does our monthly SEO work include?

We don’t sell SEO packages. The price of our SEO work is set by what it includes, and it runs as monthly work after a proposal scoped to one business. This is what the monthly plan covers:

• Fix the site: titles and descriptions, structured data, re-index requests, and merging posts that overlap.
• Build and grow: service or job pages with markup, articles each month, location pages where demand and local proof back them, links we earn, and monthly tracking of mentions in AI answers.
• All year: a weekly site check, a monthly link check, a quarterly review, and a one-page report on the last day of each month that puts leads first.

What we leave out matters as much. We don’t promise rankings, we don’t sell link counts and we don’t manage ads. We earn links, never buy them. We set targets, not promises, then measure and report against them. The SEO services page covers the work in full, with local SEO services, SEO for multiple locations, link building services and technical SEO services for each part.

When is SEO not worth paying for?

SEO isn’t the right spend for every business. Google’s own guide says an owner-run local business can probably do much of the work itself, and it points to its SEO starter guide as the place to begin. If your buyers don’t search for what you sell, or your work comes from a few relationships, monthly SEO is the wrong tool.

Google also says it never accepts money to include or rank sites in its search results, and that appearing in organic results costs nothing. What an SEO fee buys is the work: the fixes, the pages, the links and the measurement. It pays when the searches exist, your site can compete for them, and the customers they bring are worth more than the fee.

If SEO isn’t the right call for you, we’ll say so. To see what the work would involve at your level, book a 15-minute call.

How were these SEO price ranges gathered?

Each market figure on this page is the band that agency price pages, pricing guides and an Ahrefs survey support at each level, read on October 31, 2026, and each card shows our own range under it. Each level names its publishers, and where a band rests on a single publisher, the card shows it: the regional monthly range is WebFX’s alone. Every page we read is listed under Sources. We check each source again every April and October, and the page’s updated date shows when we last did. The pricing page lines up SEO against websites, custom software and AI work, level by level.