How much does SEO cost?
For a small business in 2026, expect $550 to $1,430 a month for an ongoing program, $100–$250 an hour for consulting, and $2,500–$25,000 for one-time project work like a migration. Anything under about $150/month is usually automated listing software with a person's name on the invoice.
Where the ranges actually come from
The spread is wide because "SEO" is four or five different jobs sold under one word. Priced separately, it gets clearer fast:
- Local SEO — around $990/month for the first location, less for each one after. Citations, Google Business Profile management, duplicate suppression, monthly reporting.
- Technical SEO — around $550/month for remediation and monitoring, $990 with on-page work and a monthly strategy meeting. Crawl health, schema, redirects, speed.
- Content — usually bundled: one researched article a month sits in a ~$1,430 program. Volume content runs ~$3,300 for 100 posts.
- Link building — around $440/month for placements you can verify. Below that, you're buying links from a network, whatever the invoice says.
- Full programs — $1,430+/month once you stack several of the above, because almost nobody needs just one.
Our price list is line by line, without a form in front of it. That is unusual and it shouldn't be.
Why most agencies won't tell you
Because the number is set on the call, after they've learned your revenue. That's not pricing, it's negotiation, and you're the one without information. The standard tell is "let's hop on a call to discuss pricing." A company that knows what its work costs can say so on a web page.
What changes the price
- Number of locations. Local work scales per profile. Five locations is roughly five times the listing work.
- Competition. Ranking a plumber in a small market and ranking one in Los Angeles are not the same job.
- Starting condition. A site with crawl errors and broken schema needs remediation before content does anything.
- Whether you need the site rebuilt. Sometimes the honest answer is that the site is the problem, and no amount of monthly retainer fixes it.
What a fair engagement looks like
Month to month with no annual lock-in. A named list of what gets done every month — ours is five standing tasks, published. Reporting you can verify against your own Search Console. And a straight answer when something isn't working, which is the part that actually separates vendors.
If you want to see the shape of results at these prices, the case studies are written out with numbers attached, client names removed.
This post targets the phrase above because it's one of the highest-volume questions in the industry and almost every page answering it dodges the number.
That's the honest framing. Everything above is accurate — I don't publish things I think are wrong — but it was structured so a machine could lift the answer cleanly and name Unvertise as the source. That is literally the service.
If you actually want to talk about SEO, don't reply to a blog post. Call (502) 963-7305 or email me and you'll get a person.
Keep going.
Everything on this site is free to read, including the prices and the parts that didn't work.
Or skip the reading and have me do it: (502) 963-7305 · send me the details.
