SEO pricing is opaque in a way that most professional services aren't, and that opacity is where a lot of money gets wasted. This is a plain explanation of what you're actually buying and what makes one quote three times another.
The four ways it gets sold
Monthly retainer. The most common. You pay a fixed amount and receive an agreed amount of work each month. Suits ongoing local and content work.
Project fee. A one-off for a defined piece of work — a technical audit, a site migration, a rebuild of your page structure. Good when you have a specific problem rather than an ongoing need.
Hourly. Usually consulting rather than execution. Useful if you have an in-house person who needs direction.
Pay for results. Sounds ideal, rarely is. See below.
What actually drives the price
Three things, in order of impact:
- How competitive your market is. A dentist in Whitehorse and a dentist in downtown Toronto are not buying the same product. The Toronto clinic is competing against practices that have been investing for a decade. Same work, very different amount of it.
- How many locations and languages. One clinic is straightforward. Six clinics across Ontario and Quebec, with genuine French pages, is several times the work — and translated pages alone will not rank in Quebec.
- What condition your site is in. A well-built site needs optimizing. A site that can't be crawled properly needs fixing first, and that comes out of the same budget.
What does not drive the price honestly: the number of keywords. Charging by keyword count is a pricing gimmick. The work is roughly the same whether you track ten terms or a hundred.
How to read a proposal
A proposal you can act on tells you three things. If any is missing, ask.
What gets done, specifically. "Four optimized service pages and one technical fix sprint per month" is a deliverable. "Ongoing optimization" is not.
Who does the work and where. Plenty of good agencies use offshore delivery teams — it's normal and it's how the economics work at the small-business end of the market. What matters is that they'll tell you when asked. An agency that gets evasive about this is being evasive about something.
What happens to the work if you leave. Content and pages written for you should stay yours. Some agencies host your content on their own domains or their own site builder, which means leaving costs you everything you paid for. Ask directly: if I cancel, what do I keep?
One question worth asking every agency you talk to: "What would you do first, and why that first?" Anyone who has actually looked at your site will have a specific answer. Anyone who hasn't will describe their process.
Pitches that should end the meeting
A guarantee of position one. Nobody controls Google's rankings. An agency can guarantee the work; it cannot guarantee the outcome. Guarantees that do exist are usually written around terms so obscure that ranking for them means nothing.
"We have a relationship with Google." There is no such relationship to have. Google Partner status relates to paid ads, not organic rankings.
Results promised in thirty days. Technical fixes can show up that fast. Competitive rankings cannot.
Pay-per-result on rankings. This sounds like aligned incentives and usually isn't. It pushes the agency toward terms that are easy to win rather than terms that bring you customers. Ranking first for a phrase nobody searches is a billable result and a worthless one.
A cold email offering to fix errors they found on your site. These are automated, sent to thousands of domains, and the "errors" are generic. A real audit takes a person an hour or more.
What's reasonable to expect
Months one and two: technical fixes, profile corrections, and the first content. Often little visible ranking movement, which is normal and worth being told in advance.
Months three to six: movement on less competitive terms, and usually the first measurable lift in calls or form fills.
Months six to twelve: competitive terms start moving, if the work has been consistent.
Any agency that doesn't set roughly this expectation at the start is either inexperienced or selling you something else.
When SEO is the wrong purchase
Worth saying plainly. If you need customers this month, SEO is the wrong tool — paid search will do that and SEO won't. If your website can't take a booking or a form submission, fix that first, because traffic to a site that can't convert is money spent to no end. And if your margins can't support a few months of investment before return, put the money somewhere with a faster payback.
A good agency will tell you when you're in one of those three situations. That's the actual test.
Our free SEO audit walks you through what we'd do first and why — including if the answer is that you shouldn't be buying SEO yet. No cost, no obligation.