How Much Does SEO Cost in 2026? Our Real Numbers

Everybody who asks us about SEO eventually asks what it costs. Most articles answering that question quote confident price tiers for the entire industry, with a table of what each tier includes. We are not going to do that, because we do not have access to other agencies' books and neither do the people who publish those tables.

Here is what we can tell you honestly: our prices, the arithmetic that sits under any SEO price, and the things we refuse to promise about what you get back.

Our prices

• SEO: from $450 a month
• Website build: from $750
• Lead capture: from $299 a month
• SEO and lead capture bundled: from $529 a month
• Project work outside a retainer: $100 an hour, standard rate

Every engagement gets scoped on a call before either side commits. These are starting numbers, not a quote, and the reason they are starting numbers is that the work varies enormously depending on what state your site is in.

The arithmetic under every SEO price

SEO is people doing work. There is no version of it where the cost is not hours times a rate, whatever the invoice is dressed up as.

For reference, from our own delivery: a technical audit done properly and written up so a client can act on it is four to six hours. A substantial piece of content, counting research, writing, editing, and on-page work, is eight to twelve hours. A single link placement can be a dozen emails across two weeks and still come to nothing.

Now apply that to a $99 a month offer. At our standard rate, $99 buys one hour. You are not getting an audit, a piece of content, and link building for one hour of anyone's time. Something else is being sold to you, and it is usually one of three things: automated backlinks from sites nobody reads, a white-label dashboard with your logo on it and no human behind it, or bulk generated content nobody wanted.

We are not going to give you a percentage of cheap SEO providers who are scams, because we have not audited a sample and neither has anyone quoting you a figure. We will say the hours do not add up, and ask anyone selling at that price to explain who does the work and for how long.

What our $450 a month buys

Concretely, so you can compare it against your own math.

• A technical audit each quarter, prioritized, with the fixes named
• Two pieces of content a month, written against queries with commercial intent rather than traffic for its own sake
• On-page work across your existing pages: titles, descriptions, headings, structured data, internal links
• A monthly Search Console review reporting impressions, clicks, and position movement, including when they do not move
• Google Business Profile management if you are a local business

What it does not buy: an aggressive link program, a high-volume content operation, or paid media. At this level, we are removing the technical reasons your pages cannot compete, and then giving them something to compete with. That is the whole scope, and it takes months, not weeks.

What more money actually buys

Not a different mechanism. More hours, more often, and specialists instead of generalists doing every part of it. More content per month, faster turnaround on technical work, a real link outreach program instead of an opportunistic one.

The reason we are not printing an industry price table is that we would be inventing it. We do not know what a mid-market agency in your city charges, what their team looks like, or how many accounts their lead strategist is carrying. Neither does the blog post that told you $2,500 to $5,000.

What you can do is ask any agency the two questions that make the price legible. How many hours a month go into my account, and who specifically does them. If nobody will answer that, the number on the proposal does not mean anything.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you your payback period. Doing that requires knowing your average deal size, your close rate on inbound leads, and how much of your future traffic converts, and we do not know any of those before we work with you. Anyone who quotes you a return on SEO before they have seen your numbers is quoting you a number they made up.

We will not tell you SEO always pays for itself. It does not. It fails when there is no search demand for what you sell, when the queries are owned by competitors you cannot displace on this budget, and when the site converts nothing that lands on it. We have watched a site score 98 on Lighthouse and produce zero leads. Technical quality was never the constraint there.

We will not tell you that any one channel is the biggest ranking signal, or that a single link moves you a specific number of positions. Google describes links as important. Nobody outside Google can quantify it, and the numbers you see quoted are estimates from third-party tools, not measurements of Google.

How to decide what to spend

Start from what you can sustain for twelve months, not what you can afford for three. SEO compounds or it does nothing, and a retainer cancelled in month four is money burned. If $450 a month is a stretch, do it yourself for a year and spend nothing. We wrote an honest comparison of DIY and hiring someone, including the cases where hiring us is the wrong call.

Before you spend anything, find out what state your site is in. Run a free audit. It loads your site in Chromium, inspects the rendered DOM, and checks 60+ factors across 9 categories. No signup, no email. If the report is mostly green, your problem is probably competition or demand, and no amount of technical work will fix either. That is worth knowing before you write a check to anybody, including us.

If you want the numbers applied to your actual situation, book a call. We will tell you what we would do, what it costs, and whether we think it will work.