Most businesses pay $500 to $5,000 a month for SEO. In Ahrefs’ survey of 439 providers, the average agency retainer was $3,209 a month. At the same survey’s average agency rate of $98.90 an hour, that buys about 32 hours of work. That’s 4 to 8 new pages, if every hour went to pages.
How much does SEO cost per month?
SEO usually costs $250 to $10,000 a month, and 63% of businesses spend between $500 and $5,000. Here’s the average monthly retainer by provider, from Ahrefs’ survey page, last updated in August 2024:
- Freelancers: $1,349 a month
- Agencies: $3,209 a month
- Consultancies: $3,250 a month
You’ll also see $2,917 quoted. That’s Ahrefs’ headline average for SEO as a whole. Ahrefs counted each provider at the top of its price range, so read all of these as upper limits.
What does a monthly SEO retainer buy?
Hours, and fewer than you’d think:
Boulder SEO Marketing, an agency, puts a new page at 4 to 8 hours of work. If every one of those 32 agency hours went to new pages, you’d get 4 to 8 pages a month, with nothing left for fixing the pages you already have, technical work or the report.
So ask every provider two things: how many hours a month, and what will be live on your site at the end of it.
Should you pay by the hour, the month or the project?
Most SEOs sell monthly retainers: 78.2% of the providers Ahrefs polled charge one. Of those who charge by the hour, 90% charge $150 or less. Of those who price by the project, 60.6% charge $1,001 or more.
- By the hourAn audit, a second opinion or one question you need answered.
- By the projectA one-off job with an end, like a list of technical fixes.
- By the monthWork that has to keep shipping: new pages, fixes to old ones and AI answer tracking.
For a software company, we’d pick monthly. AI answers change from run to run and your buyers keep asking new questions, so the pages and fixes have to keep coming.
Is it cheaper to hire an SEO in-house?
Per hour, yes. Indeed puts the average SEO specialist salary in the US at $83,114 a year. That’s about $6,926 a month before benefits and tools, for one full-time person. The catch is that it’s one person. They write, fix, build and report on their own, and you manage them.
How much does AI visibility add to the cost of SEO?
SEO.com, an agency, says AI search visibility “often appears as a separate line item in SEO quotes, or not at all.” Before you pay for it twice, read Google’s line on its AI features: there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” The work that gets you named in AI answers is mostly the same SEO work.
What does cost extra is tracking. A tool that asks AI engines your buyers’ questions and counts your mentions costs $95 to $495 a month at Peec AI, for 50 to 350 questions. It tells you where you stand. Somebody still has to make the changes. Here’s how Peec AI and its alternatives compare.
What’s a red flag at any price?
- A ranking guaranteeGoogle’s advice on hiring an SEO: “If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.”
- Bought linksGoogle’s spam policies list “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as link spam, and sites that break those policies “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”
What does FirstIndex cost?
We do the full plan for software companies. Each month, that’s up to 12 in-depth articles, 50+ fixes to existing pages, comparison pages, free tools, AI answer tracking and fixes, and a weekly report. Hiring that out costs about $25,000 a month at an SEO agency. Here’s the line-by-line math.
We do it for $2,000 a month. Real changes ship to your site every day, and we check each one before it goes live.