Why there is no standard price for SEO
Ask five providers what SEO costs and you will get five very different answers. That is not only because some charge too much or too little. It is because "SEO" covers very different amounts of work.
A well-built website for a niche B2B company in a smaller city may need careful content and a handful of technical fixes. A multi-location clinic group competing in Toronto and Vancouver, or a large ecommerce store with thousands of product pages, needs far more: technical work at scale, content for every service and location, and a serious effort to earn authority. Both are called SEO. They are not the same job.
That is why we do not publish ready-made packages, and why you should be cautious with anyone who quotes a fixed monthly price before they have looked at your site and your market.
What drives the cost of SEO
These are the factors that move the price up or down. A good provider will be able to tell you which of them apply to you.
The condition of your website
A site with indexing problems, slow pages, duplicate content or a messy structure needs repair work before anything else pays off. If a redesign or platform change is planned, the SEO work around the migration is a project in itself.
Competition in your market
Ranking for searches where established national brands compete takes more content, more authority and more time than ranking in a less contested niche. Competition also differs by city: the same service can be much harder to rank in a large metro area than in a smaller one.
Scope: services, locations and languages
Every service you want to rank for needs a strong page. Every location you genuinely serve may need its own signals. A bilingual English and French site doubles the structure and requires native-quality French content, not a machine-translated copy.
Content creation
Who writes the pages, and to what standard, is one of the largest cost factors. Expert content for regulated professions such as law, dentistry or finance takes more research and review than general copy. See our SEO content writing service for how we approach it.
Authority and links
Earning links and mentions from relevant, respected sources takes real effort: useful resources, partnerships, outreach. It is slow work, and it should be. Bought links in bulk are cheaper and break Google's spam policies.
Reporting and involvement
How much strategy, analysis and contact you want with a senior person affects the price as much as hours of execution.
SEO pricing models compared
Providers bill SEO in a few common ways. None is right or wrong in itself; what matters is whether the model fits the work and whether you know exactly what you are paying for.
| Model | How it works | Works well for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed-price project | A defined scope (for example an audit, a migration or a content build) at an agreed price | Clear, bounded work with a start and an end | Scope that is too vague to check whether it was delivered |
| Monthly retainer | An ongoing monthly fee for agreed activities | Long-term SEO where work continues every month | Retainers where nobody can say what was done for the fee |
| Hourly rate | You pay for time spent, often by a consultant | Advice, reviews and ad-hoc questions | Open-ended bills without a cap or plan |
| Performance-based | Payment tied to rankings or traffic | Rarely a good fit | Incentives to chase easy, low-value keywords or use risky tactics |
Local SEO pricing
Local SEO is often sold as a cheaper, smaller package, and for a single-location business in a modest market it can be a contained piece of work. The cost goes up with the number of locations, the size of the city, how competitive the category is and how much the website itself needs to change.
A proper local SEO scope usually includes the Google Business Profile, consistent business details across key directories, location and service pages that are genuinely useful, a review process that follows Google's rules, and tracking of calls and direction requests. Our local SEO services page explains what we include. If a local package consists mainly of directory submissions, ask what else you are getting.
What a good SEO proposal contains
Whatever the price, a proposal should let you check later whether the work was done. Look for:
- A diagnosis. What is wrong or missing today, in plain language, and why it matters for your business.
- Concrete deliverables. Which pages, fixes, content pieces or outreach activities, in what order.
- Who does the work. A senior strategist, a junior executor, freelancers, or a subcontractor abroad.
- Measurement. Which numbers will be reported (organic visits, enquiries, calls, rankings for a defined set of searches) and how often.
- Honest timelines. SEO typically takes months; the proposal should say so.
- Terms. Contract length, notice period, and who owns the content, accounts and data. You should always own your website, analytics and Google Business Profile.
- Taxes. Whether the price is shown before or after GST/HST or provincial sales tax.
Hidden costs to ask about
The quoted fee is not always the whole cost. Ask specifically about:
- Developer time for technical fixes, if the SEO provider does not build the site themselves.
- Content: is writing included, or only "recommendations" you must write yourself?
- Translation for French pages if you serve Quebec or bilingual markets.
- Tools and licences passed on to you.
- Photography or design for new pages.
- Link costs: if a provider budgets for "link placements", ask exactly what that means.
When cheap SEO becomes expensive
Low prices are not automatically bad, but some patterns reliably cost more in the end:
- Guarantees. A promise of a specific ranking or "page one in 30 days" signals either ignorance or risky tactics.
- Bulk links. Hundreds of links for a small fee usually come from low-quality networks. Cleaning up afterwards takes time and money.
- Thin content at scale. Dozens of near-identical city pages can hurt more than they help.
- Vanity reporting. Reports full of rankings for searches nobody uses, with no link to enquiries.
- Lock-in. Long contracts where the provider owns your accounts or content.
Google's own page Do you need an SEO? lists sensible questions to ask any provider before you hire them.
Consultant, agency or in-house?
The cost structure differs by who does the work. An independent SEO consultant often costs less in total and offers direct senior contact, but may need others for development or content. An agency brings more capacity under one roof, with more overhead. An in-house hire gives full focus, but one person rarely covers technical work, content and authority equally well, and needs tools and direction.
Many companies combine them: an in-house marketer who owns the day-to-day, with outside specialists for strategy, technical work and content. If you are weighing SEO against paid search, our comparison of SEO vs PPC and our guide to Google Ads cost may help.
How we arrive at a fixed price
We work with a limited number of companies at a time and do not publish project prices, because they depend on the factors above. The first step is a paid strategy session: a 50-minute conversation with the founder about your ambition, your market and whether we are the right fit. It costs CA$375 excluding applicable taxes. It is a conversation, not an audit or a written plan.
Afterwards we decide whether we can take on the project. If so, you receive a proposal with a fixed scope and a fixed price, so you know exactly what you are paying for. Our pricing page explains how we structure our work.