How much does SEO actually cost, without the useless range?
Most articles on this answer with "it depends" and a chart running from $300 to $10,000 a month. I run an SEO agency, so here's a more honest answer than that, even though it's not great for my industry: most small businesses paying for SEO right now are overpaying for work that isn't scoped to their actual situation.
Both edges of a wide range are telling you something.
Once you're past $1,500 a month for a genuinely small, local business, you're usually paying for one of three things: a bigger agency's overhead, a sales team's commission, or scope you don't actually need yet, national content campaigns, or link building velocity built for a competitive e-commerce brand, not a local plumber.
At the same time, anything meaningfully below $500 a month almost never includes real, ongoing work. It's either automated reporting dressed up as strategy, or so few hours that nothing happens fast enough to matter.
What you're actually paying for below $500/mo.
A local HVAC company signs up for a $250/mo "SEO package" found through a Facebook ad. Three months in, they have a monthly PDF report showing their site's "SEO score" went from 62 to 71. No calls. No new traffic worth mentioning. No conversation about what's actually happening on Google.
That happens because at $250 a month, there's no margin for an agency to do real work and stay in business. So automation gets sold instead: a tool generates a report, maybe someone spends 20 minutes adjusting meta tags, and that's the engagement. It's not fraud. It's math.
How to spot a generic package, even if it's priced "right."
Price alone doesn't tell you if you're getting scoped work. A $1,200/mo retainer can still be a generic package.
"What does this look like specifically for my business in month one?"
A real, scoped engagement has an answer that's different for a dentist than it is for an HVAC company than it is for a boutique law firm. A generic package gives you the same answer regardless of who's asking, because it's the same package sold to everyone, just with the business name changed in the proposal template.
The proposal mentions deliverables, number of blog posts, number of backlinks, before it mentions your business's actual problem: not enough local visibility, weak conversion on the site, technical issues holding back rankings.
Every tier of their pricing has the same three services, just "more" of them at higher tiers.
Nobody asked about your actual customers, your service area, or your competitors before quoting you a price.
What $500-1,500/mo actually looks like.
Using the same composite HVAC business: a properly scoped $900/mo engagement isn't three separate services bolted together. It's one strategy where those three things support each other, because for a local business, they have to.
Local SEO
Not a one-time setup. Ongoing: keeping the Google Business Profile active and accurate, managing reviews, building and correcting local citations, and making sure the business shows up correctly across the directories that actually influence the local map pack.
Content & On-Page Work
Not a quota of blog posts. Writing, or rewriting, the pages that answer what local customers are actually searching, "emergency AC repair [city]," not generic "HVAC tips" content that ranks for nothing and converts no one. Titles, headers, and on-page structure get fixed alongside this, not as a separate line item.
Technical SEO
The maintenance layer underneath both: making sure the site loads fast, works on mobile, doesn't have indexing errors, and isn't quietly losing rankings to something a crawler tripped over.
None of this is exciting. It's also why it works: the three pieces are scoped against the same goal, this specific business getting found by people already looking for what it does, instead of being three separate services an agency upsold because they had three departments to keep busy.
Ask what month one looks like before you ask what the price is.
If the answer sounds the same as what an agency would tell anyone else, keep looking. If you want a straight, scoped answer for your specific business, let's talk.
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