SEO Pricing: What's the True Cost Breakdown?
Getting a consistent price for SEO work is difficult, to say the least. For this reason, I wanted to build a calculator that had some real methodology to it. The SEO calculator below is backed by real data, among other things. Prices here represent what a competent, professional SEO campaign actually costs to have a real chance of working (primarily by an agency). It's primarily for small-medium sized businesses, doing under 25 million annually. These business have real money to put towards digital marketing, but still have to keep a proactive eye on budgets, staff, products, and launches.
It's not the cheapest you'll find, and that's intentional. Commodity pricing produces commodity results. But it's far from the most expensive either, as enterprise-level activities/prices are purposefully left out.
This tool is primarily built on real, sourced data (see footer), some anecdotal research with colleagues, and nearly two decades of personal experience in SEO. My personal goal here is that you can walk into any SEO conversation knowing what "doing it right" costs and the dependencies involved.
Step 1 — Select Your Business Profile
eCommerce scope defaults to national.
Step 2 — Select Your Services
Below are common SEO services. They are all weighted based on the typical costs for them based on the data gathered, and weighted based on your business profile. For example, a franchise business that has 7 locations will be more sensitive to the local SEO section, while a large ecommerce store will be more sensitive to technical SEO and analytics. Click a category tile to select all services, or pick individual services. Per-link and per-unit services show a quantity input when selected.
Technical SEO
Technical Audit
One-time
Structured Data
One-time
Migration / Redesign Support
One-time
Performance Optimization
One-time
Local SEO
GBP Setup
One-time per location
Citation Management
Monthly per location
Review Management
Monthly per location
Listing Management
Monthly per location
Content Marketing
Content Optimization
Monthly
Money Page Creation
Per page, one-time
1
page(s)
Ongoing Content Creation
Per piece / month
1
piece(s)/mo
Link Building
Link Audit
One-time flat fee
Outreach Link Building
Per link
1
link(s)
Link Insertions
Per link
1
link(s)
Analytics
GA4 & GSC Setup
One-time
Conversion Tracking Setup
One-time
Dashboard Setup
One-time
Ongoing Reporting
Monthly
STEP 3 — SERVICE GLOSSARY
The services you chose above will be highlighted below in the glossary so you can see how they work and why they cost what they do.
Technical SEO
Technical Audit
This is the diagnostic that tells you what's actually broken, what's silently hurting your rankings, and what order things need to be fixed in. A real audit isn't a crawl report with a hundred red flags dumped in a spreadsheet, it's a prioritized roadmap built around your specific site, CMS, and goals. Without it, you just have a list...at best.
Structured Data
Structured data tells search engines and AI platforms what your content means, not just what it says. Done right, it builds a verifiable entity graph around your brand and content, which can influence how you appear in rich results, knowledge panels, and AI-generated answers. Done wrong or skipped entirely, and you're leaving that interpretation up to an algorithm.
Migration / Redesign Support
A site migration is one of the fastest ways to destroy organic traffic that took years to build. They're like fingerprints, no two are the same. This covers the full SEO lifecycle of a redesign or platform move. Redirect mapping, crawl validation, site architecture, keyword mapping, pre and post-launch audits, are all vital to the success of such a big overhaul. The cost of skipping this is almost always higher than the cost of doing it.
Performance Optimization
Core Web Vitals and page speed are both a ranking factor and a user experience problem. Slow pages lose rankings and lose conversions, often at the same time. This covers the technical work of identifying and resolving the specific issues dragging your scores down, not a generic checklist applied to every site the same way. Developer help will often be needed here.
Local SEO
GBP Setup
Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a nearby customer sees — before your website, before your reviews, before anything else. A properly optimized profile with accurate categories, services, attributes, and verified information is the foundation every other local SEO effort is built on. Getting it wrong from the start means fixing MASSIVE problems later. While Bing Places isn't quite priced in here because most agencies just don't do it, I highly recommend setting that local profile up as well.
Citation Building & Management
Citations are mentions of your business name, address, and phone number (NAPs). These are gathered from directories, data aggregators, and local platforms. Inconsistent or outdated information across these sources actively suppresses local rankings. This covers the cleanup and ongoing management of those listings so the data ecosystem around your business stays accurate.
Review Management
Reviews influence both rankings and conversions, and are important to say the least for local businesses of all types. This covers the setup of a repeatable system for requesting, monitoring, removing, and responding to reviews across the platforms.
Ongoing Listing Management
Regardless of platform, keeping those listings current isn't glamorous work, and it can even be a house of cards. But the cumulative effect of doing it well is enormous, often rivaling Universal Search efforts. It should be noted that some agencies bundle review management and citation management into an entire listing management "package" sometimes. Nothing is wrong with that, just a difference in bundling.
Content Marketing
Content Optimization
Admittedly, this is a bit of a catch-all line item. Depending on the agency you work with, this could include on-page optimization, periodic content refreshes, closing keyword gaps, improving topical depth, adjusting search intent, or even content pruning as a result of algorithmic hits. Since it's such a vast umbrella, this is a monthly item in the calculator.
Money Page Creation
These are the pages directly tied to revenue and conversions. They include service pages, location pages, product pages, even paid landing pages. They require a different level of strategic intent than a blog post, for example. Pricing here reflects the research, competitive analysis, customer journey, and careful construction needed to give a page a legitimate shot at ranking and converting. Blog posts can do the same thing, but money pages have to.
Ongoing Content Creation
Consistent, relevant content output is how sites build topical authority over time. The price per piece reflects work that's actually built to rank: researched, properly structured, and written with search intent in mind. Content should be moving the needle somehow or it shouldn't exist.
Link Building
Link Audit
A link audit evaluates the quality, relevance, and risk profile of your existing backlink profile. It primarily does two main things: it 1) identifies what's helping, what's neutral, and what may be actively working against you, as well as 2) establishing the competitive baseline for what a realistic link building strategy needs to achieve moving forward.
Outreach Link Building
This is a bit of a catch-all, as almost all proactive link building is based in outreach. The tactics that fall into this category is really only limited to the imagination: image link building, broken link building, link reclamation, even phone outreach (can be super successful btw).
Link Insertions
This is technically a tactic, but it's so prevalent now that it should have its own line item for pricing estimation. Link insertions place your link into existing content. Done well, with vetted placements on legitimate sites, they're an efficient way to build link equity. Unfortunately, this is a tough tactic to depend on because either 1) the link builder is cheap and goes for the lowest-priced website that says "yes" first, or 2) there isn't any editorial oversight on the website itself. The next thing you know your link is on a garbage site that is one step away from having all their outbound links discounted by the search engines.
Analytics
GA4 & GSC Setup
This is by far the most common pairing when it comes to monitoring the health and performance of a website. This covers full property configuration, permissions, and verified connectivity between both platforms so your data is accurate from day one.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Knowing your traffic levels is close to useless without knowing how that translates into revenue. This covers the full implementation of trackable actions (form fills, calls, purchases, bookings) mapped to your actual business outcomes, not just vanity events.
Reporting & Dashboard Setup
A dashboard is a huge help with seeing at a glance what your traffic is doing, and why. Agencies will use various tools to build their dashboards, but they all accomplish largely the same thing: tracking the KPIs that are important for the business.
Ongoing Reporting
Many agencies automate the bulk of this, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But those tools need maintenance, calls need to be taken, findings need to be explained, and even handwritten elements of those reports are often needed.
Service Details
SEO Pricing
Updates as you select services