Local SEO Services Pricing: You Are Being Quoted for One of Two Halves

Two local SEO quotes land on your desk and one is well under the other. Before you read that as a bargain or a warning, there is a plainer explanation to rule out: local SEO is two different jobs sold under one name, and a quote does not have to say which one it covers. Until that is settled, the two figures may be measuring two different jobs. The one question below tells you which half you are being quoted for, and it is the question we would want answered if we were in your seat.

The question that makes two local quotes comparable

Send both providers the same sentence: does this fee cover my business profile and the map result, my own website, or both, and what will I see at the end of each month for each part you are covering. That is one email and you can send it tonight. The answers separate three kinds of provider straight away. One will name a half and describe the monthly work in it. One will say both and be able to split the fee. And one will answer with an approach rather than a scope, which is its own answer.

The two halves of local SEO

The first half lives off your website, on your business profile: the listing that appears in the map result with your hours, your categories, your photographs, your reviews, and the replies to them. You hold that listing in a separate account from your site, you can open it yourself, and work done on it does not touch a single page of your website. The second half is your own website: the page titles and descriptions a searcher reads in the results, the pages that describe what you do and where, the internal links, the speed, the pages Google can and cannot reach. Both halves influence whether a local customer finds you. They are separate accounts, separate skills, and separate work, and they get bundled under one name because customers search for one name.

Why the two halves are priced differently

The profile half has a lower ceiling on the work and a shorter loop: the fields are finite, and once they are accurate the ongoing job is posts, photographs, new reviews, and answers to questions. The website half has no fixed end, because the pages, the competitors, and the search results keep changing. A fee for the profile half is therefore easier to size and easier to finish. A fee for the website half is an ongoing commitment by nature. When one quote is well under another, the likeliest explanation to check first is not that one provider is cheap, it is that the two quotes contain different halves.

The shapes a local quote can take

Whichever half is in scope, the fee will arrive in one of four shapes: an hourly rate, a monthly retainer, a fixed project, or a stated scope at a published price. They divide the risk differently and they are not comparable as they stand, which is a separate conversion from the one on this page and is set out in full in how to choose an SEO agency. For a local quote the order matters: settle which half first, then the shape, then the number. Doing it the other way round is how two incomparable quotes get compared on price.

How much do people charge for local SEO, and how much should SEO services cost?

These are the two questions at the top of this search and a range answers neither, because the range covers a profile tidy up and a year of work on a large site. What is worth having instead is the pair of lists: what will be done in a month, and what was done last month for an existing client, written at the time, with dates. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO makes a version of this one of the questions it suggests you ask, namely whether the provider will share all the changes they make to your site along with the reasoning. Our own figure is published rather than quoted, with the split between what it covers and what it does not, on our pricing page.

What each half owes you every month

For the profile half, a month should produce things you can see in your own listing without asking anyone: posts published, photographs added, questions answered, reviews replied to, fields corrected. You can open the listing and check every one of them. For the website half, a month should produce a list of changes to named pages, each with a date and a note on why, plus the measurement of what moved afterwards. That one you cannot see by looking at your site, because the page titles and descriptions live in the markup and in the search result rather than on the page, so the provider has to hand you the list. A provider covering both halves owes you both lists, and should be able to say which part of the fee went to which.

Can I do local SEO myself?

Some of it, and Google says so in its own words: its guidance states that if you run a small local business you can probably do much of the work yourself, and points at its starter guide. The profile half in particular is yours already, needs no permission, and an hour spent making the hours, categories, and photographs right is an hour well spent whatever you decide about paying anyone. The website half is where the hours add up and where the work does not stop, which is the part our guide to ongoing SEO sets out week by week so you can judge whether you want to carry it.

What is the best thing to do for local SEO?

Decide which half you are buying before you buy anything. If your customers find you through the map result, the profile half is where your money should go and a website retainer will feel like it is doing nothing, because for your customers it largely is. If they find you by searching for what you do and reading the links, the website half is the one that pays, and a profile tidy up will not move it. Getting that order right is worth more than any single change either half contains.

Which half we sell, in writing

We sell the website half only. The business profile and the local listings are on our not included list, published on the pricing page beside what is included, and so are new pages, redesigns, custom development, off page link building, and the other marketing channels. If you are not sure which half your customers use, that is a good first question for the free consultation below, and you will get a straight answer even when the half that matters for your business is the one we do not sell.

One website, one published price, a fixed number of optimizations to your site each week, cancel any time, no contract. It is the website half and it says so. What it covers and what it does not is set out line by line on our pricing page, including the not included list, so you can put it beside a quote that covers the other half.

And if you have two local quotes and want help working out which half each one is really covering, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.