Pricing, explained
Most small-business SEO retainers run between $500 and $5,000 a month, and the reason that range is so useless on its own is that price tracks how much human attention is included, not how much SEO you get. Here is what each band actually buys, and what our own rates are.
For a small business, expect roughly $1,000 to $3,000 a month for work that involves a person looking at your site regularly. In competitive verticals such as law, medicine, or finance, the same quality of work starts higher, because the competition is harder and the content depth required is greater.
The single most useful question to ask any provider is not what does it cost. It is how many hours of whose time does this buy, and what specifically happens in them. A $900 retainer and a $3,000 retainer often describe their deliverables in identical language. They are not describing the same amount of work.
At this price nobody is manually reviewing your site every month. The economics do not permit it. What you generally get is a tool subscription with a report attached, some directory submissions, and a small volume of generated content. It is not a scam in most cases, it is simply arithmetic: a few hundred dollars buys a couple of hours of anyone's attention, and SEO is not a couple-of-hours-a-month discipline.
This is where genuine hands-on work starts to be possible, provided the scope is honest about being narrow. One local business, one location, a defined list of pages. It works when everyone agrees what is excluded. It fails when a national e-commerce catalogue is sold into it and the provider quietly rations the hours.
Most competent small-business and mid-market retainers land here, and it is where our own packages sit. This buys ongoing technical work, content produced on a real schedule, and someone actually thinking about your market rather than running a checklist. In competitive verticals it is the floor rather than the middle.
Legal, medical, finance, insurance, and national e-commerce. The spend reflects the difficulty of the terms and the depth of the competition rather than any difference in the underlying craft. A single competitive legal term can justify this on case value alone.
Ranking a plumber in one suburb and ranking a personal injury firm in a major metro are not the same job by an order of magnitude. The second has better-funded competitors who have been at it longer.
A site with a clean structure and a working CMS starts producing sooner than one that needs a migration, a rebuild, or six years of accumulated redirect debt untangled first.
Content is the largest recurring cost in most engagements. A site that already has depth needs refreshing. One with eight thin pages needs building, and that is a different budget.
A retainer priced for a senior practitioner and a retainer priced for an offshore content mill can look identical on the invoice. Ask who performs the work, by name, and what they do each month.
Our rates are published rather than quoted on a call. Basic is $1,500 a month, Advanced is $2,500, and Elite is $2,999 against a regular rate of $3,500. Those are fixed monthly figures, not starting-at numbers that move once you are on the phone. A Custom tier exists for multi-location, e-commerce, and national sites, which are scoped individually because pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Full deliverables for each tier are on the pricing page. Every engagement is performed by the founder rather than passed to an account manager, which is the main reason the floor sits where it does. If you want the reasoning behind that, it is on the about page.
Before any of that, the sensible step is the free audit, because scope should follow a look at the site rather than the other way around. It also helps to know how long the work takes to show results before committing to a monthly figure.
For a small business with a single location and a defined service area, meaningful hands-on work generally starts around $1,000 to $1,500 a month and rises with competition. Below roughly $500 a month, the arithmetic stops working: that budget does not buy enough of anyone's time to include manual review, so what is delivered is usually automated. Our own published rates start at $1,500 a month, which reflects what a manual, founder-performed engagement costs to deliver rather than what looks lowest on a comparison page.
It depends on what you need. A one-time audit or a technical fix has a defined end, and paying a retainer for it makes no sense. Ongoing content, link acquisition, and competitive maintenance do not have an end, because competitors keep working after you stop. If a provider insists on a retainer for work that is obviously a project, that is worth questioning directly.
Partly because scope genuinely varies, and partly because withholding the number until a sales call is a negotiating position. Both are real. We publish fixed monthly rates because the second reason is not a good enough justification for wasting your time, and because a posted price is a claim we then have to honour.
Paid standalone audits commonly run from several hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on site size and depth. Ours is free, performed by hand rather than generated by a scanner, and delivered in three business days with no obligation attached. That is a deliberate choice about how we start conversations, not a statement about what audits are worth in general.
No, and you should treat any specific promise of return with suspicion. Whether SEO pays back depends on your margins, your close rate, and the value of a customer to you, which are all things we can reason about together but none of which we control. What we can be precise about is what the money buys in work performed, which is why the deliverables for each package are published rather than described vaguely.
The free audit establishes scope first, so any figure that follows is based on your actual site rather than a guess. Three business days, no obligation.
No contract, no card, and no call required to receive the audit.
