How Much Should SEO Cost for a Small Business? (2026 Numbers)

SEO pricing looks arbitrary from the outside because you are shown a number and never told what work sits behind it. It is not actually arbitrary. Here are the published figures.

What the surveys say

Real numbers, from providers rather than from buyers:

• Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO providers and found an average of $3,209 a month, with 78.2 percent billing as a flat monthly retainer.
• SE Ranking's agency survey found 64 percent charge under $1,000 a month.
• A survey of 300 plus agencies run in April and May 2026 found 43.3 percent charge under $1,500 a month, and that group is mostly the one serving local businesses.
• Local SEO specifically is reported around $1,557 a month on average, with single-location service businesses commonly landing between $1,000 and $2,500.

The spread is enormous and it is real. An agency taking on a national brand and somebody looking after one plumber are doing different jobs with the same two letters on the invoice.

What the money is supposed to buy

For a local business, a monthly service should be doing roughly six things:

1. Posting to your Google Business Profile. For anything with "near me" in it, Google shows a map with three businesses above the normal results. That box is driven mostly by your profile, your reviews and where you are. For most local businesses it matters more than the website does.

2. Citations. Your business name, address and phone listed consistently across the directories that carry them, and added where they are missing. Inconsistent details are a genuine and boring problem.

3. At least one real page a month, written to answer a question people actually type, not stuffed with keywords.

4. Reviews. Asked for after a job, and replied to.

5. Rank tracking on the handful of searches that bring you work, not on a hundred vanity terms.

6. A report you can read, that leads with calls and enquiries rather than with impressions.

If somebody is charging monthly and cannot tell you which of those six they did last month, that is the question to ask before the price one.

How to spot the bad version

A guarantee. Nobody can promise you a position on Google. Google says so publicly. Anybody promising one is either lying or about to do something that gets your site penalised.

A report made of impressions. Impressions go up on their own. Calls are the number.

No named deliverables. "Ongoing optimisation" is not a deliverable.

Instant results. This takes months. Anybody saying otherwise is selling you something.

Nothing you can see. You should be able to open the pages that were written for you.

The uncomfortable part

SEO is slow, and the slowness is why the business model works so well for the seller. Nothing measurable happens for months, so nobody cancels early, and by the time results are due the invoices have been paid either way.

That is not an accusation. It genuinely does take that long. But it means the honest sellers and the lazy ones look identical for the first several months, and the only thing separating them is whether the six things above are actually being done. Ask for them by name.

What we charge

One hundred and fifty dollars a month, doing the six things above. There is nothing to own, because it is not a product, it is work somebody does every month. Stop any month and you keep every page written for you.

That is well under the figures at the top of this page, and we are not going to pretend there is a clever reason. We are new at selling this, we would rather have clients than margin, and the price is how you compete when you cannot yet compete on a track record.

What we will not tell you is that we will get you to the top of Google, or by when. Nobody can. What we will do is the work, every month, and send you a report straight enough to show you when it is not working.

It is on the build page as the one recurring thing we sell.

Sources: SEOProfy local SEO pricing, Digital Applied 2026 SEO pricing.