If you ask five SEO companies what SEO costs, you can get five completely different answers. One company may charge $300 per month, another may charge $1,500, and another may quote $5,000 or more. They may all describe what they do with the same basic words: rankings, content, backlinks, technical SEO, reporting, Google Business Profile work, and ongoing optimization.
That makes SEO hard to compare because the price does not just reflect one task. SEO is a mix of research, technical work, content, local search optimization, competitor analysis, reporting, monitoring, and ongoing decision-making. Two companies can both say they provide “monthly SEO” while doing completely different amounts and types of work.
For most local service businesses, I believe good professional SEO starts around $1,000 per month. At YEG Digital, that is where our plans currently begin. Around $1,500 per month is where we normally have more room to add new pages and content, while $2,500 per month and up gives us more time for aggressive content growth, competitor monitoring, gap analysis, deeper auditing, and a more proactive strategy.
That does not mean every business needs to spend $2,500 per month. It also does not mean the company charging $2,500 is automatically better than the company charging $1,000. The right budget depends on how competitive your market is, what condition your website is in, how far behind your competitors you are, what you want to rank for, and how quickly you want to close that gap.
The goal of this guide is to explain what you are actually paying for when you hire an SEO company, what normally changes as the price goes up, what cheap SEO often looks like, what should be included in reporting, and what questions you should ask before handing someone your website and Google accounts.
Why SEO Pricing Is So Confusing
SEO is difficult to price from the outside because most of the work is not obvious. If somebody builds you a website, you can see the finished website. If somebody runs Google Ads, you can see the ads and the money being spent. SEO is different because much of the value comes from research, analysis, monitoring, and decisions that happen behind the scenes.
Someone may spend hours reviewing Search Console, rankings, competitor pages, Google Business Profile information, analytics, technical issues, content gaps, conversion tracking, citations, and algorithm changes before they actually edit a page. Other months may involve much more visible work, such as writing new service pages, building location pages, improving old content, fixing technical problems, or expanding a section of the site.
That is why I do not like SEO packages that promise the exact same deliverables every month. Packages that say “four blog posts, twenty backlinks, ten citations, and five optimized pages every month” are easy to understand because the deliverables can be counted, but they assume every business needs the same thing on the same schedule.
They do not.
If your biggest problem is technical SEO, publishing four blog posts does not solve it. If your site is technically strong but your competitors have twenty useful service pages that you do not have, spending the whole month tweaking title tags will not close that gap either.
Good SEO should start with a much simpler question: what is stopping this website from growing right now? The strategy should come from that answer, and the work should change as the answer changes.
What Does SEO Cost Today?
For local SEO, I would roughly break the market into a few price ranges. These are not fixed industry rules, but they are a useful way to understand what tends to change as the budget increases.
Under $500 Per Month: Very Cheap SEO
This is the price range I am most cautious about.
I have seen businesses paying a few hundred dollars per month and being told they are receiving ongoing SEO, but when we actually look at what is happening, there is often very little meaningful work being done. Sometimes the company changed a few title tags at the beginning and now sends an automated report every month. Sometimes they are publishing cheap AI content with almost no strategy behind it. Sometimes they are doing basic directory submissions and calling that a complete SEO campaign.
One of the worst things I see at this level is bulk link building through cheap SEO vendors, Fiverr, SEO Express-type services, link sellers, content farms, or packages that promise huge numbers of backlinks for very little money. I have seen those links hurt rankings badly.
Backlinks still matter, but a link is not valuable simply because another website links to you. A hundred terrible links are not automatically better than five legitimate local or industry links. When somebody can sell you hundreds of backlinks for a couple hundred dollars, the right question is not “how many links do I get?” It is “where are these links coming from, and why would those websites naturally link to my business?”
In my opinion, it is very difficult to provide good ongoing SEO for a legitimate business for less than about $1,000 per month. There is simply too much to set up, review, monitor, analyze, and implement. Someone has to be paid to actually think about the account, not just move through a checklist.
That does not mean every $400 SEO company is a scam. There may be cases where a very small business is paying somebody for a narrow set of tasks and getting exactly what was agreed to. The problem is when $300 worth of work is being presented as a full SEO strategy.
Around $1,000 Per Month: Maintenance, Foundation, and Local SEO
At YEG Digital, this is where our SEO currently starts.
At this level, the focus is mostly on the technical and local foundation of the account. That normally includes technical SEO, local citations, Google Business Profile optimization and management, keyword research, monitoring, reporting, and improvements to existing website content based on what we are seeing in the data.
We do not promise that we will “optimize five pages every month” because that is not how we want to manage SEO. One month, there may be an existing service page sitting on page two of Google that has a realistic chance to move into the top results. That page may deserve the attention. Another month, the Google Business Profile may need more work. Another month, we may find an indexing issue or a technical problem that needs to be fixed first.
The strategy determines the work instead of the package determining the strategy.
At this level, the business is mostly paying us to maintain, monitor, improve, and react intelligently. There can still be content optimization and ongoing page improvements, but the plan is not designed around producing a steady volume of brand-new pages every month.
For some local businesses in less competitive markets, this can be enough to make meaningful progress.
Around $1,500 Per Month: Active Content and Growth
This is where SEO usually becomes more proactive.
You still get the technical work, Google Business Profile management, citations, monitoring, reporting, keyword research, and optimization from the lower level, but now there is more time available to create new content and build new pages.
That could mean new service pages, location pages, landing pages, blog articles, expanded existing pages, FAQ content, or supporting pages designed to fill gaps in the site. Which type of content gets created should depend on the strategy, not on a promise that says “two blogs and one landing page every month.”
I deliberately do not promise an exact number of pages per month because not all pages require the same amount of work. A straightforward local service page is completely different from a technical page that requires heavy research, detailed client input, multiple rounds of review, and a more complex page structure.
Some clients also review content very closely and want several rounds of changes. Others trust us to handle most of the work and approve the finished draft quickly. Those differences affect how much can realistically be completed in a month.
Every page we create still needs a proper process. That means keyword research, planning, writing, optimization, client review, formatting, internal linking, publishing, and submitting the page to Google. Saying “four pages per month” makes those pages sound interchangeable when they are not.
$2,500 Per Month and Up: More Aggressive SEO
As budgets increase, we can get much deeper into the account.
This is where there is more room for content production, competitor monitoring, content gap analysis, deeper auditing, more frequent improvements, and a much more proactive strategy. Instead of simply asking how your rankings are doing, we can spend more time asking what the companies beating you are doing that you are not.
We can monitor competitors for new service pages, location content, major site changes, new topics, and areas where they are starting to build authority. We can compare your site against theirs and identify gaps before those gaps become bigger.
Maybe a competitor suddenly builds a complete section around a service that is important to you. Maybe they start creating pages around searches your site barely addresses. Maybe they begin gaining ground in a city you want to compete in.
A larger SEO budget gives us more time to notice those things, build a plan, and actually implement the plan.
That last part matters. There is very little value in paying somebody to produce a brilliant 50-page SEO audit if there is no budget left to fix anything in it.
What Are You Actually Paying for With SEO?
This is the same question I encourage people to ask when buying a website.
If one SEO company charges $400 per month and another charges $1,500, where did the extra $1,100 actually go?
Usually, it is not expensive software.
SEO tools absolutely cost money. Professional agencies pay for rank tracking, keyword research, crawling tools, reporting systems, competitor research, content tools, AI tools, and other software. But the software does not do the SEO by itself.
The biggest cost is still the time required to understand the data, decide what matters, create a strategy, implement it, monitor the results, and change direction when necessary.
Initial Setup and Research
A good SEO campaign should begin by understanding where the business is right now. That means reviewing current rankings, organic traffic, conversions, Search Console, analytics, Google Business Profile information, technical problems, indexed pages, existing content, competitors, backlinks, citations, service areas, and keyword opportunities.
There is often a lot of information to work through before deciding what should happen first.
Two plumbing companies in Calgary may need completely different SEO plans. One may have a technically excellent website but almost no useful service content. The other may have 100 pages of content and terrible site architecture. One may already rank fourth for its most valuable keyword, while the other may not appear in the first ten pages.
Selling both companies the exact same monthly checklist would make very little sense.
Strategy
This is one of the biggest things people are actually paying for.
SEO software can tell us that a keyword gets searches, where you rank, how many pages a competitor has, and what technical issues exist. Someone still has to look at all of that information and decide what should happen next.
Sometimes the best move is creating new content. Other times the better opportunity is improving a page that already exists. A technically weak site may need cleanup before we add anything new, while another business may already have a strong foundation and simply need better service pages or local content.
An existing page sitting in position eight may be a much better opportunity than creating a new page from scratch.
You are paying somebody to make those decisions, then keep making new decisions as the data changes.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is part of almost every campaign we manage because a website cannot perform properly if search engines are having trouble crawling, indexing, or understanding it.
Depending on the site, that can mean work around indexing, redirects, broken links, page speed, Core Web Vitals, duplicate content, canonical URLs, XML sitemaps, schema, internal linking, metadata, site structure, crawl problems, and mobile issues.
Some websites need a lot of technical work at the beginning, while others are already in good shape. This is another reason fixed SEO packages can be misleading. A technically broken site may need far more work here than a newer site that was built properly from the start. Google’s own Search Central documentation is a useful reference if you want to understand these technical basics yourself.
Local SEO and Google Business Profile
For the types of businesses we normally work with, local SEO is a major part of the strategy.
If you are a roofer, physiotherapist, lawyer, plumber, dentist, landscaper, or other service business, Google needs to understand not only what you do but where you do it. That means working on the website and the broader local signals around the business.
Google Business Profile is a big part of that. We look at categories, services, business information, descriptions, photos, reviews, posts, website connections, and the other details Google uses to understand the company.
Citations are another part of the foundation. When we begin local SEO, we normally work from a list of roughly 150 Canadian citation opportunities, then look beyond the general directories for industry-specific and locally relevant places where the business should legitimately appear.
The goal is not to build links simply to increase a backlink counter. The goal is to strengthen the online footprint of a real business and make the location, services, and business information consistent and trustworthy across the web.
What About Backlinks?
Backlinks are still important, but I do not think they are as important as many SEO companies make them sound, especially for local businesses.
The SEO industry spent years selling links because links are easy to count. “We built 50 backlinks this month” looks impressive in a report, but the number by itself tells you almost nothing about whether those links are actually helping.
Where did they come from? Are they from legitimate local websites, useful industry organizations, real business directories, or resources that make sense for your company? Did somebody actually choose to reference your content because it was useful, or did an SEO company pay a link farm to insert your website into 50 articles nobody will ever read?
Those are very different links.
We normally focus first on legitimate local citations, Canadian directories, relevant industry sites, and opportunities tied to the actual business. From there, one of the best ways to attract better links over time is to create content that is genuinely worth referencing.
A useful guide, original research, a strong local resource, or a detailed explanation can earn natural links in a way that another generic 500-word blog post usually will not.
Cheap Backlinks Can Become Expensive SEO
This deserves its own section because I see it often.
A business owner gets an email offering hundreds of backlinks. Or someone buys a package on Fiverr. Or they hire a cheap SEO provider that promises a huge amount of link building every month.
The price looks fantastic until we look at the links later and find networks of low-quality websites, unrelated articles, spun content, questionable directories, and pages that clearly exist for no reason other than selling links.
I have seen this crush rankings.
Cleaning up bad SEO is often much harder than doing it properly from the beginning. If someone is promising you an enormous number of backlinks for a tiny amount of money, ask them to show you examples of the actual websites where those links will appear.
Then look at those websites yourself. Would a real person ever visit them? Would you be happy to have your business mentioned there? Does the website have anything to do with your industry, your market, or your city?
If the answer is no, the number of links does not impress me very much.
Content Is Still a Huge Part of SEO
Search engines need something to rank.
If your competitor has a detailed page about furnace repair and your entire explanation of furnace repair is one bullet point buried on a general Services page, you are probably making Google’s job pretty easy.
Good SEO content fills those gaps, and that content can take many forms. It may be a service page, location page, blog article, FAQ section, landing page, guide, or improvement to something that already exists.
The type of content should come from the strategy.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating “content” and “blog posts” as if they mean the same thing. For many local service businesses, the next five pages I would build are not blog posts at all. They may be missing service pages, location pages, a pricing guide, or a page explaining a complicated service customers are already searching for.
Publishing blog posts simply because “Google likes fresh content” is not much of a strategy.
How We Use AI for SEO Content
We use AI all the time, and we would be foolish not to.
It helps us research, summarize information, organize ideas, analyze large amounts of data, work through content, and create drafts much faster than we could a few years ago. The important part is how it is used.
For SEO clients, we build custom projects that contain information about the business, its services, previous conversations, client calls, strategy, important details, voice, and other context we have gathered. That gives us a much stronger base when we create content.
AI can then help make sure we are not missing something the client told us three months ago. It can help organize a complicated service, create a first draft, summarize research, or check whether important details from our notes made it into the page.
The goal is not to produce more words. The goal is to use AI to make the strategy and content better.
There is a huge difference between that and telling an AI tool to “write 50 roofing blogs.” Mass-producing content without a real search opportunity, client knowledge, review process, or strategy is simply a faster way to create a lot of mediocre content.
More SEO Budget Usually Means More Time
This is probably the simplest way to understand the different SEO tiers.
When you move from $1,000 per month to $1,500 or $2,500 per month, you are mostly buying more knowledgeable time applied to your website and market.
That additional time may go toward creating content, monitoring competitors, finding new opportunities, researching keywords, improving existing pages, reviewing data, building citations, working on the Google Business Profile, solving technical problems, or adjusting the strategy.
There is no magic $2,500 SEO plugin that the $1,000 client does not get.
A higher budget simply gives us more room to do more work and more room to be proactive instead of reactive. At $1,000, we may identify ten good opportunities but only have enough time to address the most important ones. At $2,500, we can work through far more of that list while continuing to look for the next opportunities.
How Competitive Is Your Market?
Competition has a huge effect on what SEO should cost.
Imagine you are a plumber in a small Alberta town and only a few competitors are seriously investing in their websites. You may not need an enormous SEO budget to make progress.
Now imagine you are a personal injury lawyer in Calgary and every company on page one has a large website, years of content, strong backlinks, aggressive local SEO, and an agency working on the account every month. Those are completely different SEO problems.
You are not only trying to improve your own website. You are trying to improve it faster than the businesses already ahead of you are improving theirs.
The condition of the website matters too. If your site is technically solid, has good content, and simply needs an ongoing strategy, we can spend our time moving forward. If the site is, for lack of a better term, hot trash, then some of the SEO budget has to go toward fixing the foundation before we can make much progress.
A business entering a highly competitive market with a weak website and no previous SEO is starting a long way behind. That does not mean SEO cannot work. It means the budget and expectations need to reflect reality.
How Long Does SEO Take?
This is one of the most common questions I get, and the answer really is: it depends.
We generally ask clients to approach SEO with at least a six-month mindset, but our agreements are still month to month. We are not trying to trap somebody in a long contract. We want enough time to do the work, have Google process the changes, collect useful data, and see whether the strategy is moving in the right direction.
In a less competitive market, you may see meaningful movement sooner. In a very competitive market, six months may simply be the beginning.
What matters more to me is the trend. Are important keywords moving up? Is organic visibility improving? Are we getting more qualified traffic? Are leads increasing? Are the pages we create starting to gain traction?
SEO rarely works like flipping a switch. It compounds.
How Long Do I Have to Keep Paying for SEO?
I actually like this question because it gets at something people often misunderstand.
A lot of businesses think about SEO like a website project. You do it for six months, reach the top, and then it is finished.
Search does not really work that way.
Your competitors are not finished. Google is not finished. Your market is not finished.
Search behaviour changes. Competitors create new content. Websites improve. New businesses enter the market. Google changes how results are displayed. AI becomes more prominent. Search algorithms are being adjusted constantly.
If your competitors are investing in SEO every month and you stop the moment you reach the top, you should not be surprised when somebody eventually catches you.
That is why I view SEO very differently from a short advertising campaign. Google Ads can be turned on when you want more paid traffic and turned off when you do not. SEO is much closer to an ongoing business investment.
If search is an important source of customers for your company, I think the best approach is finding the right SEO partner, building a relationship with them, and treating SEO as a long-term line item in the business.
The best results I have personally seen tend to come from clients who have stayed consistent for two years or longer. That gives us time to fix the foundation, create content, learn what works, build authority, respond to changes, and keep stacking improvements.
I have also seen businesses do SEO for six months or a year, get very good results, stop because they think the job is finished, and then begin losing those gains within the following months.
Consistency matters.
What Should an SEO Company Report?
Every SEO company should report.
There are too many good and affordable reporting tools available today for an agency to take your money every month and give you no clear idea what is happening. If the agency does not show you what it worked on, does not explain what it plans to work on, and does not report on performance, I would be asking why.
At minimum, I want to look at three broad areas: rankings, organic traffic, and conversions.
Rankings
Rankings still matter.
People sometimes say rankings are meaningless now because search results are changing, AI answers take up more space, Maps are different, and results can vary by user and location. There is some truth to that, but rankings are still fundamentally one of the things you hired an SEO company to improve.
If your most valuable service goes from position 40 to position 4, that matters.
We should still monitor it.
Organic Traffic
As rankings improve, we generally want to see organic traffic improve too.
Traffic needs more context today because bot activity has become a bigger issue and can distort analytics. Not every session is a potential customer, and raw traffic numbers can look healthier than the real audience actually is.
That does not make traffic useless. It means we need to understand what the traffic represents instead of celebrating a chart just because the line went up.
Conversions
This is the one that ultimately matters.
Are people calling, filling out forms, booking appointments, requesting quotes, or buying?
If conversion tracking is not configured properly, that should be fixed.
You can rank for hundreds of keywords and generate thousands of visitors, but if none of those people become customers, we need to ask whether we are targeting the right searches and whether the website is doing its job once they arrive.
The purpose of SEO for a business is not to win a ranking report.
It is to generate business.
Be Careful With Reports That Only Show Good-Looking Numbers
Reports can also be used to hide weak SEO.
A report with 40 pages does not automatically mean a lot of work happened. I have seen reports filled with impressions, domain scores, hundreds of insignificant keyword movements, backlink counts, technical scores, and graphs that look impressive but tell the business owner almost nothing about whether the campaign is actually working.
The agency should be able to talk you through the report in normal language. What changed? What did we do? What worked? What did not work? What are we doing next?
Those questions matter far more than how fancy the dashboard looks.
Local SEO vs National SEO
Most of our own work is focused on local SEO and service businesses, and that matters when talking about cost.
A physiotherapy clinic trying to rank in St. Albert is a different project from a national insurance company trying to rank across Canada. A roofer competing in Edmonton is different from a software company trying to rank internationally for very competitive terms.
National SEO, ecommerce SEO, SaaS SEO, large publishers, and enterprise websites can require much larger budgets because the competition, number of pages, technical complexity, and authority needed are completely different.
For the average local service business, you do not necessarily need a giant national SEO campaign.
You need a good local strategy executed consistently.
Does the SEO Company Need to Be Local?
Not necessarily.
Just like web development, SEO can be done from almost anywhere. The issue is whether the person doing the strategy understands your market.
Someone working from another city, province, or country can absolutely do excellent SEO for an Alberta business if they take the time to understand Alberta, the city, the competitors, how people search locally, and how the business actually works.
A good SEO specialist should be able to learn a market.
The problem is cheap outsourced SEO where nobody actually learns anything. The account gets dropped into a production system, generic content gets published, generic links get built, and the same checklist is applied whether you are a roofer in Red Deer or a dentist in Toronto.
That is not a location problem.
It is a strategy problem.
You should be able to ask the person responsible for your SEO why they are targeting a keyword, why they created a page, why rankings changed, who your biggest search competitors are, and what they want to do next.
They should have an answer.
What Questions Should You Ask Before Hiring an SEO Company?
You do not need to become an SEO expert before hiring one, but asking the right questions can tell you a lot. For a deeper walkthrough, see our guide to hiring an SEO.
What Will You Actually Do Every Month?
Be wary of both extremes. “We will do SEO” is too vague, but a rigid checklist of exactly the same twenty tasks every month can also be a problem.
The company should be able to explain the areas it works on and how it decides what gets prioritized.
How Do You Decide What Content to Create?
The answer should involve more than “we publish four blogs per month.”
Ask how they research keywords, evaluate search intent, analyze competitors, identify content gaps, and decide whether an opportunity needs a service page, location page, article, or improvement to something already on the site.
How Do You Build Backlinks?
Ask this directly.
If the answer is vague, keep asking. Where do the links come from? Can they show examples? Are they buying links? Are they using link networks? Are they focusing on local and industry opportunities?
“Twenty backlinks per month” is not enough information.
How Will I Know Whether SEO Is Working?
They should be able to explain their reporting. You should expect visibility into rankings, organic traffic, conversions, work completed, and upcoming priorities.
Who Is Actually Doing My SEO?
Outsourcing is not automatically a problem.
The important thing is knowing who owns the strategy and whether that person understands your business and market. If every question has to be forwarded to someone you never meet, I would want to understand the working relationship before signing.
Do You Guarantee Rankings?
If the answer is yes, I would be very cautious.
No SEO company controls Google. We can make good decisions based on data, testing, experience, and what Google tells us about search, but we cannot guarantee that Google will rank a specific page first.
How Long Do You Expect Me to Do SEO?
Be cautious if the answer is “we guarantee results in 30 days.”
I would also be cautious if the company has no answer other than locking you into a long contract. A good provider should be able to explain how SEO progresses, how they evaluate results, and why your particular market may move faster or slower.
What Does YEG Digital Charge for SEO?
Our SEO plans currently start at $1,000 per month.
At that level, the focus is primarily on technical SEO, citations, Google Business Profile optimization and management, keyword research, monitoring, strategy, reporting, and improvements to existing content where we see opportunities.
At around $1,500 per month, we have more room to create new content and pages. That may include service pages, location pages, landing pages, articles, or other content based on the strategy.
As budgets move higher, we increase the amount of content, competitor monitoring, content gap analysis, auditing, and proactive work we can complete.
We do not sell SEO based on a fixed number of pages or blog posts because different businesses need different work, and different types of pages require very different amounts of time.
Everything is month to month.
We ask clients to approach SEO with at least a six-month mindset because it needs enough time to show us what the strategy can do, but we would rather keep a client because the work is creating value than because a contract prevents them from leaving.
How Much Should Your Business Spend on SEO?
The answer depends mainly on where you are starting and who you are competing against.
If you operate in a less competitive market, have a strong website, and your competitors are doing very little SEO, you may not need a huge monthly budget. If you are competing in Calgary or Edmonton against companies that have invested in SEO for years, the amount of work required to catch them can be much greater.
The condition of your own site matters too. If it is technically strong, has good content, and simply needs a consistent strategy, we can spend more time pushing forward. If the website is poorly structured, missing key pages, technically weak, and has never had proper SEO, there may be a lot of foundational work required first.
That is why I prefer looking at the site and the market before telling someone exactly what they should spend.
The better question is not:
“What SEO package should I buy?”
It is:
“How much work is required to get from where we are now to where we want to be?”
That is a much more useful conversation.
The Biggest Thing to Remember
SEO is not a product you buy off a shelf. You are paying for time, analysis, experience, strategy, implementation, content, monitoring, and adjustment.
The SEO company has to understand where you are now, decide what should happen next, do the work, measure what happened, and then change the plan based on what the data tells them. That cycle never really ends because search never stops changing.
When comparing SEO companies, do not only ask, “How much does SEO cost?”
Ask:
What are you going to spend your time doing for my business, why are you doing it, how will we measure whether it worked, and what will you change if it does not?
A good SEO company should be able to answer every part of that clearly.
And just like website pricing, that answer will usually tell you much more about what you are buying than the monthly number at the bottom of the proposal.
