SEO Company Prices: The Four Shapes a Fee Can Take, and What Each One Owes You

You are after a number, and what you will find is four different shapes. One company quotes an hourly rate, one quotes a figure per month, one quotes a project, and one quotes a fixed scope at a fixed price. Those are four different purchases, and the digits on the end are the last thing to compare. They divide the risk differently and they oblige the provider to different things, so the first step is to put them into one unit. We will do that with you here, one shape at a time.

The one question that makes two quotes comparable

Ask each provider for two lists. The first is what they will do in a month, written as things that happened to named pages. The second is last month's version of that list for an existing client, written at the time, with dates, with the client details removed. Whatever shape the fee takes, both lists exist or they do not. A provider who keeps that record can send it. A provider who says they could put something together is telling you the record is assembled for meetings rather than kept as the work happens, and that is a useful thing to learn before you pay rather than after. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO puts a version of this in its list of questions to ask: will they share with you all the changes they make to your site, and the reasoning behind them.

The four shapes, and what each one is really selling

By the hour

You buy time. It suits a defined piece of work with an end, like a one off review or a technical fix, and it is the easiest shape to audit because the invoice is a log. Its weakness is that search work is not a task with an end, so an hourly arrangement tends to stop when the budget stops rather than when the job is in a good state. If you buy hours, buy them for something with a finish line.

A monthly retainer

You buy availability and a rough scope. This is the shape an ongoing arrangement tends to take. In a post on a public forum, one owner paying a monthly fee described a complaint that can come with it: not knowing what the month bought. The owner wrote that they were decently satisfied with their call volume and did not mind the fee if work was being done, but the company could not point to any specific examples of it. The retainer itself is not the problem. The problem is a retainer with no list attached. A retainer with a written scope, a stated volume of work, and a record of what was done is a different purchase from a retainer that says ongoing SEO management and nothing else, even at the same figure.

By the project

You buy an outcome with a boundary: a migration, a rebuild of your page structure, a one off audit with a written set of recommendations. The price is knowable in advance and so is the end. What it does not buy is anything after the end. A project price and a monthly price answer different questions, and a quote that mixes them is worth splitting into its two halves before you read the total.

Fixed scope at a fixed price

You buy a stated quantity of work at a published figure: so many changes to your site in a period, on a schedule, with the scope written down. It is the least flexible of the four and the easiest to check, because the promise is countable. Its weakness is the mirror of its strength. If your site needs something outside the stated scope, it is outside the stated scope, and the scope has to say so in writing for the shape to be honest.

How much does an SEO company cost, and how much does SEO typically cost?

These two questions are the top of this search and the honest answer is that the range is wide enough to be useless on its own, because the same phrase covers a two hour audit and a full time team. What is worth more than a figure is knowing which shape you are being quoted and what it obliges. Then a number means something. We publish ours rather than quoting on a call, together with the line by line split of what a subscription covers and what it does not, on our pricing page. You can hold it against the other three shapes without speaking to anyone.

Per hour or per month, and what a cost calculator can know

Both phrasings turn up beside this search, and so do calculators. A calculator can tell you what the market it was built from charges for a given input, and that is genuinely useful as a sanity check on a quote that looks strange. What it cannot know is the state of your site, how many pages it has, how much of the work has already been done, or whether the provider quoting you keeps a record. A calculator prices an average site. You are buying work on a specific one, and the gap between those two is the thing the quote is supposed to explain.

The line every quote should contain, whatever the shape

One sentence sorts a good quote from a vague one: what is in scope, what is out of scope, and how often. A provider who has thought about the work can write that sentence. A provider who has not will describe an approach instead. That one line is also what makes a price reviewable later, because in six months you can hold the invoice against it and see whether the work matched. The wider set of questions, for when the price is settled and the provider is not, is in how to choose an SEO agency.

What the fee is buying, in any shape

Underneath all four shapes the work is the same handful of things: the titles, headings, and descriptions that decide how your page reads in the results, making sure two of your pages are not competing for one search, the links inside your site and the text behind your images, the speed of the pages, the links that go nowhere, and whether Google can reach and read everything you want listed. Then measuring what moved. It is ongoing because the search results keep changing around you, which is the part a project price cannot cover and our guide to ongoing SEO sets out week by week.

Before you compare the numbers

Put each quote into the same unit first. Name the shape, get the scope in a sentence, ask for the monthly list and last month's record. A quote that survives all four is worth comparing on price. Once your quotes are in the same unit, the price starts to mean something and the choice gets easier. If one quote will not fit the unit, that is the one to ask about before you decide.

We use the fourth shape: one website, one published price, a fixed number of optimizations to your site each week, cancel any time, no contract, and the scope written down so you can see the edges of it. What it covers and what it does not is set out line by line on our pricing page, including the work that is on the not included list.

And if you have two or three quotes in front of you in different shapes and want help putting them in the same unit, 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.