How much does SEO cost?

The honest answer is that it depends, which is the answer nobody wants. So rather than leave it there, here’s what it depends on, roughly what the market charges, and how to work out what it should be worth to you specifically.

The five things that move the price

1. The state of your website

If your site is fast, cleanly built and structurally sound, the work starts on content and authority. If it’s slow, awkwardly structured or built on something fighting you at every turn, months go into fixing foundations before anything can grow.

This is the single largest variable, and it’s the one most often discovered after the quote.

2. Competition in your industry

Ranking a specialised industrial supplier isn’t the same job as ranking a personal injury lawyer. Some sectors have well-funded competitors who have been at this for fifteen years. Others have competitors whose sites haven’t been touched since 2018.

Competition determines how much has to be done before anything moves, and it varies more than any other factor.

3. Geography

A single-location service business competing across one city is a considerably smaller job than a national campaign across every capital. More markets means more pages, more content and more competitors.

4. How involved you can be

If you can supply subject expertise, review drafts, provide photography and answer questions promptly, less has to be outsourced and the work moves faster. If you need everything handled end to end, that’s entirely reasonable and it costs more.

5. Who you hire

There’s a genuine spectrum here, and price is an imperfect guide in both directions.

At the low end, a few hundred dollars a month usually buys automated reporting, a monthly article generated with minimal thought, and directory submissions. At the high end you can spend a very great deal on a large agency where your account is handled by someone eighteen months into their career.

Neither extreme correlates reliably with results. Ask who’s actually doing the work.

What the industry charges

These are not our prices. They’re what Australian agencies publish, gathered from their own pricing pages so you can go and check them:

Global surveys land in a similar place but disagree with each other in a way worth knowing about. Ahrefs surveyed 439 providers and found an average monthly retainer of $2,917, with 63% of clients paying between $500 and $5,000. Backlinko put the most common range at $1,000 to $2,500. SE Ranking surveyed 260 agencies, 94% of whom serve small and local businesses, and found 64% charging under $1,000 a month.

Three surveys, three different answers, because they polled different populations. If someone quotes you a single industry average, ask them whose.

Below roughly $700 a month, there isn’t enough time in the budget for anyone to do meaningful work. That doesn’t mean nothing happens. It means what happens is automated, and automated SEO in 2026 mostly produces reports.

Where we sit, since you’re going to ask

We deliberately come in well under those numbers. In practice our monthly engagements tend to run at around half the published agency ranges above for comparable work.

That is not us being cheap for the sake of it, and it’s worth understanding why we can do it, because the reasons are the same reasons the big numbers exist elsewhere.

We’re small and the director does the work, so you aren’t funding an account management layer between you and the person touching your site. We don’t have offices in three cities. We don’t have a sales team whose commission is priced into your retainer. And we build on modern static infrastructure, which means the sites we look after cost less to run and take less time to maintain than the equivalent WordPress stack.

We also offer pay-per-lead as an alternative to a monthly fee, where you pay for enquiries that arrive rather than for hours spent. Which of the two suits you depends on your margins and on what happens to an enquiry once it lands. We’ll tell you which we think fits, including when the answer is neither yet.

What we won’t do is quote you a number before we’ve looked at your site. Anyone who does is either guessing or selling a package that was priced before they’d heard of you.

The calculation that actually matters

Forget benchmarks. Work out your own number.

1. What’s a new customer worth to you, on average, over their whole relationship with your business? Not the first invoice, the lifetime value.
2. What proportion of enquiries become customers? Most service businesses land somewhere between one in three and one in ten.
3. Multiply. That’s what one enquiry is worth.

If a customer is worth $4,000 and you convert one enquiry in four, each enquiry is worth $1,000. Five extra enquiries a month is $5,000 of value against, say, $2,500 of cost. That works.

If a customer is worth $200 and you convert one in ten, each enquiry is worth $20. You need a hundred and fifty extra enquiries a month to justify $3,000, and in most industries that isn’t realistic. In which case SEO may not be your best channel, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.

Run this before you take any quote seriously, including ours.

Fixed monthly versus pay-per-lead

Most agencies charge a fixed monthly retainer. It’s predictable and it’s easy to budget, and its weakness is that you pay the same whether the work produces anything or not.

We also offer pay-per-lead, where you pay based on the enquiries actually delivered. It aligns the incentives properly and it’s the model we’re best known for.

It doesn’t suit everyone. Very high-margin, low-volume businesses where three leads is a big month can find it lumpy. Very high-volume, thin-margin businesses can find per-lead pricing hard to reconcile. We look at your numbers and recommend whichever genuinely fits, then show you why.

Questions worth asking any provider

• Who specifically does the work, and how many accounts do they carry?
• What did you do last month, in specifics rather than categories?
• Can I see a client whose enquiries went up, not just rankings?
• What happens if I leave? Do I keep the content, the accounts and the data?
• What would make you tell me not to hire you?

That last one is the most useful. Anyone who can’t name a situation where their service is the wrong fit hasn’t thought about it, or isn’t going to tell you.

What we’d actually suggest

Start with an analysis rather than a retainer. Find out what’s wrong, what’s already working and what the opportunity actually is. Then decide, with real numbers in front of you, whether ongoing work is worth it.

Get in touch and we’ll tell you straight, including if the answer is no.