SEO Pricing & Packages
An SEO invoice is the least legible bill in marketing. Here is what each tier buys, month by month, and how to tell real work from a monthly report.
The least legible invoice in marketing.
An SEO retainer is the only bill many owners pay every month without being able to describe what it bought. The report arrives, the numbers move a little, and nobody can say which of the two caused the other. That vagueness is not accidental — it is the business model of a good number of agencies.
So here is the plain version. SEO is four kinds of work, and any honest retainer is some mix of them. Technical — making the site fast, crawlable, and free of the faults that quietly suppress it. Content — publishing pages that answer what buyers actually search for. Authority — earning mentions and links from places that already have credibility. Local — profiles, reviews, and consistency, if you serve a geography.
The mix should shift over time, and a retainer that never changes shape is a subscription rather than a strategy. Early months are weighted toward technical work and the pages that matter most. Later months tilt toward content and authority, because the foundation is done and does not need redoing.
What you are buying is hours of judgment applied in the right order. That is why the tiers below are honest about scope rather than promising positions. Anyone guaranteeing a specific ranking is either misunderstanding how the auction works or counting on you not to check.
There is a newer wrinkle worth paying for, and most retainers have not caught up to it. Buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling results, and being the business it names is different work from ranking — structured, citable content and the reputation signals that make a machine comfortable recommending you. A retainer sold in 2026 that ignores this is optimizing for a shrinking surface.
The honest test of any SEO invoice is whether you could explain to a partner what the money did this month. If you cannot, that is the problem to solve, whoever you hire.
We will audit what you are getting now — including if you are already paying someone else — and tell you straight whether it is worth the money. Send us the last three reports.
Estimate it yourself
Drag to find your retainer.
Typical figures are what agencies across the United States charge monthly for comparable scope. Ours are half that — the same work, without the overhead of a big agency.
Growth
Multiple services or towns, and competitors who are also paying somebody.
- Everything in the foundation tier
- 3–4 pages or posts a month
- Link and mention outreach
- AI answer visibility tracking
Estimates, not a quote. Retainers scale with how competitive your market is and how much ground there is to make up — send us your last three reports and we will tell you what you actually need.
Get an exact quoteWhat a retainer buys
The four kinds of work
Technical
Speed, crawlability, indexing, and the faults that quietly suppress pages. Front-loaded, then maintained.
Content
Pages that answer what buyers search. The compounding half of the work, and the slowest to start paying.
Authority
Mentions and links from credible places. Earned, never bought — bought links are a liability with a delay.
Local
Profiles, reviews, and consistency across every source a search engine and an assistant checks.
AI visibility
Being named in AI answers, which is different work from ranking and increasingly where the clicks go.
Reporting you can read
Calls, leads, and booked work — not a rankings chart with no dollar attached to it.
Send us your last three SEO reports.
We will read them and tell you plainly what the money bought, what it did not, and whether the retainer is worth continuing — even if the honest answer is that your current agency is doing fine.
Three lenses
How to judge an SEO invoice
Did anything ship?
Ask what changed on the site this month. Real work leaves evidence; a report is not evidence.
Are you being cited?
Rankings can hold while clicks fall to AI answers. If nobody is tracking that, they are measuring the wrong thing.
Did leads move?
Traffic without conversions is a vanity metric. The invoice should tie to calls and forms.
How we run a retainer
Audit
Technical faults, content gaps, authority, and AI visibility, scored against your actual competitors.
Sequence
Fix what suppresses the site first. Publishing on a broken foundation wastes the content.
Publish and earn
Pages that answer real searches, plus the mentions that make them rank.
Report in dollars
Calls, forms, and booked work — so you can say what the month bought.
Questions
Frequently asked
Agencies typically charge four figures a month for a small business, because SEO is hours of skilled work rather than a product. Our equivalent tiers run about half that, starting in the mid hundreds for a single-location business and rising with how competitive the market is.
Four kinds of work in a shifting mix: technical fixes that stop the site being suppressed, content that answers what buyers search, authority earned through mentions and links, and local signals if you serve a geography. Early months skew technical; later months skew toward content and authority.
Technical fixes can show results within weeks, but content and authority compound over three to six months before the trend is clear. Anyone promising fast rankings for competitive terms is either misunderstanding the auction or expecting you not to check.
No, and the guarantee itself is the warning sign. Nobody controls the ranking algorithm, and the only positions that can be bought outright are ads. Judge an agency on the work it ships and the leads it produces, not on a promised position.
Ask what changed on the site this month. Real work leaves evidence — pages published, faults fixed, listings corrected, mentions earned — while a monthly report is not itself evidence. If you cannot explain to a partner what the money bought, that is the problem to solve.
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