Cost and budget · 13 min read
How much SEO costs, what moves the price, and how to work out yours
What SEO providers charge according to a published survey of 439 of them, what BOOSTD’s own plans cost, the nine things that move a quote up or down, what each pricing model rewards, and a method for reaching a number you can defend.
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The short answer
What SEO providers say they charge
Most price ranges quoted online for SEO have no source. The one sizeable published dataset is a survey Ahrefs ran of 439 SEO service providers, which it checked by reviewing each respondent’s website. Its headline figures are below, in US dollars.
Monthly retainers: the most common band was $501–$1,000 a month (20.4% of respondents); 42.8% charged between $501 and $2,000; 31.2% charged more than $2,000. Hourly: the most common rate was $75–$100 an hour, and 47% charged between $75 and $200. One-off projects: the most common fee was $2,501–$5,000, and 60.6% charged $1,001 or more.
Read those figures for what they are. They describe what providers reported charging, not what the work is worth or what your situation needs. Respondents were self-selected, spread across many countries and currencies, and the survey does not record what each fee buys. It is also published by a company that sells SEO software. Use it to recognise a quote that is far outside the norm, then use the drivers and the method below to judge the quote itself.
Published figures
Three numbers from the provider survey
- Most common monthly retainer band (20.4% of 439 providers)
$501–$1,000
Most common monthly retainer band (20.4% of 439 providers)
Source: Ahrefs SEO pricing survey
- Most common hourly rate (24% of respondents)
$75–$100
Most common hourly rate (24% of respondents)
Source: Ahrefs SEO pricing survey
- Most common one-off project fee (21.2% of respondents)
$2,501–$5,000
Most common one-off project fee (21.2% of respondents)
Source: Ahrefs SEO pricing survey
Survey figures, in US dollars, as published by Ahrefs. They are self-reported by providers and do not describe the scope each fee covers.
Our prices
What BOOSTD costs, and what each price buys
BOOSTD publishes its platform prices: Starter at $299 per month, Growth at $699 per month and Scale at $1,499 per month. Prices are in USD, billed monthly, before any applicable tax. They are launch prices, marked "Launch pricing — subject to change" on the pricing page, which also lists what each plan covers.
A platform plan is software. It checks your site and search visibility on a schedule, finds and prioritises the work, and prepares or makes changes within your plan and your approval settings. It is not an agency retainer, and comparing its price with one would be comparing different purchases.
Managed by BOOSTD is the done-for-you option: the same software plus specialists who run it with you. Its scope varies too much between businesses to list — number of sites and locations, content volume, outreach, a website build — so it is quoted after a scoping call. That is where the drivers below apply directly.
The variables
Nine things that move the price
Work through these against your own situation. Each one that applies moves the number up, and the combination explains most of the spread between quotes.
- Starting position. A healthy site needs improvement. A site carrying a bad migration, a manual action or years of accumulated technical debt needs repair first, and repair is slower than improvement.
- Competitive intensity. Not how many competitors, but how well funded they are and how long they have been at it. Displacing a rival who has invested for a decade is a different job from outperforming one who has not started.
- Number of markets and languages. Each additional market multiplies research, content and technical complexity, and international configuration is easy to get wrong and expensive to unpick.
- Site size and how many templates it has. Cost tracks unique templates and systems, not page count. A large site with consistent templates is often cheaper to work on than a small handmade one.
- How hard it is to ship a change. If a recommendation takes a quarter to reach production, the programme spends its budget writing documents. Development access is a cost variable disguised as a process detail.
- Content production volume, and who supplies the expertise. Content written from your specialists is faster and better. Content that requires the agency to acquire the expertise first is slower and costs more.
- Whether earned coverage is needed. In competitive categories, digital PR and link acquisition are frequently the largest single line, and they are the hardest to do at low cost without cutting corners that create risk.
- Speed. Compressing a plan into half the time costs more than double, because parallel work needs more people and more coordination between them.
- Governance overhead. Legal review, brand approval, multiple stakeholders and formal reporting are real work. They do not improve results and they must be paid for.
What a price is made of
Price is a function of days, seniority and risk
Every quote you are holding is these four terms multiplied. Not one of them is your revenue, which is what a surprising number of prices are quietly based on.
- Days of skilled work
- The specific jobs, written out and estimated in days. Work nobody can describe that way cannot be priced or compared.
- Seniority of who does it
- Who does each part. Quotes that differ by an order of magnitude usually differ here and in scope, not in margin.
- Risk carried at the start
- A healthy site needs improvement. One carrying a bad migration or a manual action needs repair, which is slower.
- Compression
- Speed multiplies rather than adds. Halving the timeline costs more than double, because parallel work needs more people.
Four pricing models and what each one rewards
Every model creates an incentive. Knowing which one you have created is the most useful thing you can take from this page.
| Dimension | What you are buying | What it quietly rewards | Best fit | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | Continuous capacity and attention across a programme. | Staying busy and staying engaged. Not necessarily finishing. | Ongoing programmes where priorities shift and continuity matters. | Activity reports replacing outcomes. Agree what the retainer is for, and review against that. |
| Fixed-scope project | A defined deliverable with a start and an end. | Efficiency, and staying inside the written scope. | Audits, migrations, restructures, one-off builds. | Scope-shaving, and a change-request process that reprices anything unexpected. |
| Hourly or day rate | Access to a specialist for a measured amount of time. | More hours. The unit of value is time spent, not progress made. | Advisory work, second opinions, supporting an in-house team. | Cost drifting upward without a scope to anchor it. Cap it. |
| Performance-based | A share of an agreed result rather than the work itself. | Whatever is easiest to attribute, including demand you already had. | Rare. Narrow, well-instrumented situations with a clean baseline. | Brand searches counted as wins, and avoidance of slow structural work with no attributable result this quarter. |
Reading a proposal
What a defensible SEO quote contains
Should be in there
- The work expressed as days by discipline, with the seniority of who does each part.
- What specifically gets delivered in month one, month three and month six.
- A named starting position and what has to be repaired before improvement is possible.
- What is excluded, and what would trigger a change in price.
- Who owns the accounts, the documentation and the content at the end.
Should make you ask questions
- Tiered packages named after metals, with the difference expressed as a number of keywords.
- A price that scales with your revenue rather than with the effort involved.
- Any predicted ranking position, traffic figure or return, presented as a forecast.
- A monthly fee with no description of what a month contains.
- A twelve-month lock-in with no defined deliverables inside it.
Do the working
How to arrive at your own number before you get a quote
This produces a figure you can defend internally and compare quotes against. It takes an afternoon.
Write down what the work is
Not "SEO". The specific jobs: fix the crawl issues, restructure the service pages, produce twenty pages of content, earn coverage in three publications, implement conversion tracking properly. If you cannot list them, buy an audit first — that is a smaller purchase with a clear output.
You get: A task list, not a service name
Estimate each task in days of skilled work
You will be wrong, and it does not matter. What you need is an order of magnitude. Is the content programme two days a month or twelve? Is the technical work a week or a quarter? Suppliers can correct your estimate, which is a far better conversation than asking what it costs.
You get: A rough monthly day count by discipline
Decide what a customer is worth to you
Take the value of a customer and your gross margin on it, and be explicit about whether you are using first-order value or lifetime value. Spending against lifetime value requires the cash to survive the gap between the two.
You get: A contribution figure per customer
Work out how many extra customers would justify the spend
Divide your candidate annual spend by contribution per customer. That gives the number of additional customers the programme must produce to break even. Illustration only, with placeholder numbers: if a customer contributes £2,000 and you are considering £40,000 a year, you need twenty. Put your own figures in.
You get: A break-even customer count
Sanity-check it against available demand
Ask whether twenty additional customers plausibly exist within the searches you could realistically compete for. This is the step that stops well-run programmes from being aimed at markets too small to pay for them, and it is the question most quotes never raise.
Set your budget by payback period, not appetite
Work out how many months you can fund before the programme needs to pay for itself. That number, not enthusiasm, is what determines whether you should be buying organic search at all right now.
You get: A funded runway in months
Questions
Cost questions people ask before buying SEO
How much does SEO cost per month?
In the one large published survey of providers — Ahrefs polled 439 SEO service providers — the most common monthly retainer band was $501–$1,000 (20.4% of respondents), 42.8% charged between $501 and $2,000 a month, and 31.2% charged more than $2,000. The most common hourly rate was $75–$100, and the most common one-off project fee was $2,501–$5,000.
Treat those as a description of what providers said they charge, not as what your work should cost. The survey was run by a software vendor, respondents were self-selected, figures are in US dollars across many countries, and it does not say what work each fee buys. The drivers further down this page explain why two quotes for the same brief can differ tenfold.
Why do SEO quotes for the same brief differ so much?
Because the same words describe very different amounts of work. "SEO for a ten-page site" and "SEO for a ten-page site with a broken migration, three languages and a CMS nobody can deploy to" are the same brief and not remotely the same job.
Each supplier prices the scope it assumed. The cheapest quote is usually the one that assumed the least work, which is why converting every quote into days by discipline is the only fair comparison.
What does BOOSTD cost?
The platform plans are published: Starter at $299 per month, Growth at $699 per month and Scale at $1,499 per month. Prices are in USD, billed monthly, before any applicable tax. They are marked "Launch pricing — subject to change". Each plan sets how many websites, local areas and pages the software covers and how often it checks them; the pricing page lists the limits.
Managed by BOOSTD is different: specialists run the work with you, and the scope — sites, locations, content, outreach, website build — is agreed per account, so it is quoted after a scoping call rather than listed. A platform plan and a managed engagement are different purchases, so compare each with its like: software with software, a managed service with an agency retainer.
How do I compare two very different quotes?
Convert both into days of work by discipline. Ask each supplier how many days per month go to technical work, content, links or digital PR, analytics and account management, and who does each. Then compare on that basis rather than on the headline figure.
A quote that cannot be broken down that way is not a quote, it is a price. The difference between two proposals is nearly always scope and seniority rather than margin.
Is a cheap SEO package ever worth buying?
Sometimes, for a narrowly defined job. A small local business that needs its business profile corrected and a handful of pages written can get real value from a modest, well-scoped engagement.
It stops being worth it when the price is low because the work is automated, outsourced without review, or consists of reporting on things that were going to happen anyway. Ask what would be delivered in month three specifically. Vague answers are the signal.
Which pricing model should I choose?
Match the model to the shape of the work. A defined piece with a clear end — an audit, a migration, a rebuild of the information architecture — suits fixed-scope project pricing. Ongoing programmes suit retainers. Occasional advice suits hourly.
Treat performance-based pricing with care. It sounds aligned but tends to reward whatever is easiest to attribute, which is often demand you already had.
What makes SEO more expensive for one business than another?
Mainly: the state of the site you are starting from, how well funded your competitors are, how many markets or languages you need, how difficult it is to ship a change, whether links and earned coverage are required, and how fast you want it done.
Speed is the one people underestimate. Compressing twelve months of work into six costs more than twice as much, because it needs more people working in parallel and more coordination between them.
Should the price go up as my business grows?
Only if the work does. Pricing based on your revenue rather than the effort involved is common and hard to defend, because it means paying more for the same days of work.
It is reasonable for costs to rise when scope expands — more markets, more pages, more channels to coordinate. Ask which of those changed before accepting an increase.
Want a scope before you talk about a price?
We would rather look at the site, the competition and the starting position and then tell you what the work is. If the answer is that the budget is better spent somewhere else, we will say that instead.
If we don't deliver the work we agreed to deliver for reasons within our control, you don't pay for the undelivered work. Read our guarantee
References
Sources
The primary documents and published research this page relies on. Platform rules change, so check the source before acting on a detail.
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