SEO Pricing
How SEO Pricing Actually Works
Two published ladders, not one. Retainers for brands on their own stack start at $899/month; local campaigns for sites already running on WorkspaceCMS start at $499/month. Below: every tier, why the two differ, and what moves your number.
Want the full tier-by-tier breakdown of what’s included? See published SEO packages & pricing.
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Read this first
Why “How Much Does SEO Cost?” Rarely Gets a Straight Answer
Two reasons, and only one of them is cynical. The cynical one is that hiding pricing lets an agency quote a number based on how large your company looks. The legitimate one is that SEO has no fixed unit of delivery: nobody can price “SEO” without first knowing how many pages exist, who currently outranks you, how many locations you serve, and what shape the site is in.
What you can reasonably expect from a pricing page is therefore not a single number. It is the pricing model — the structures on offer and how each one bills — plus a candid list of the variables that move your quote up or down, plus the real published figures the agency is willing to stand behind. Anything else on a pricing page is decoration.
This page has all three, and it publishes both of our ladders rather than the flattering one. Where we do not publish a number, you will find the model and the drivers instead of an invented range — because a made-up “typical” figure is worse than no figure at all. It anchors your expectations to a number nobody will honour.
Start here
There Are Two Ladders. Which One You Are On Is Decided First.
Almost every confusing SEO quote comparison comes down to this: the same agency can legitimately quote two very different numbers depending on who controls the platform the site runs on, and whether the target market is local or national. Settle those two questions and the range collapses to something you can actually plan against.
Ladder 1
Standard SEO retainers
For brands on their own stack — Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, or a headless build. Two sub-ladders, Local and National, five tiers each. This is the ladder that applies to the overwhelming majority of eCommerce and B2B sites, and the only one that covers national or global campaigns.
From $899/month Local · from $1,499/month National
Ladder 2
WorkspaceCMS local campaigns
Materially cheaper, and only available if the site already runs on our own platform. Two conditions are non-negotiable and travel with every one of these numbers: an active WorkspaceCMS site plan (the campaign is an add-on on top of the plan, not a replacement for it), and local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global seo.
From $499/month, plus a site plan from $89/mo
Why the second ladder is cheaper — the honest reason
It is not a discount and it is not a loss-leader. When the site runs on WorkspaceCMS we control the platform, so technical implementation, page creation, and schema changes do not burn agency hours negotiating someone else’s theme, plugin stack, or dev queue. On a client-controlled stack, a meaningful share of every retainer is spent getting changes shipped — scoping around template limits, waiting on a third-party developer, re-testing after an app update. Remove that friction and the same SEO work costs less to deliver, so it costs less to buy. Local SEO therefore starts at $499/month on WorkspaceCMS versus $899/month on the standard local ladder.
What it does not buy is scope. A national brand pays the standard ladder regardless of platform, because the cost there is driven by the size of the keyword universe and the strength of the incumbents — neither of which the platform touches.
Ladder 1 — published tiers
Standard SEO: Local vs National, Tier by Tier
Same five tier names on both sides. National costs more at every single level for one reason: the keyword universe is wider and the incumbents are harder, so the content and authority volume required to move a term is higher. Nothing about the service list changes.
| Tier | Local SEO | National SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | $899/month | $1,499/month |
| Essential | $1,599/month | $2,499/month |
| Pro | $2,499/month | $3,299/month |
| Plus | $3,299/month | $4,299/month |
| Premium | $4,499/month | $5,999/month |
Monthly retainers run a six-month initial term and then go month-to-month. What each tier includes — onsite page counts, blog and offsite article volume, listings work — is listed line by line on SEO Packages & Pricing, which is the single source of truth for the table above.
One-time Onsite SEO
Bounded projects, sold as fixed hour buckets. Delivered in 1 to 1.5 months, no contract.
- 5 Hours$1,699
- 10 Hours$3,199
- 15 Hours$4,399
Out of scope & custom
Anything outside an agreed retainer scope, consultative time, and custom scopes built up line by line rather than squeezed into a tier.
$185/hour
Named before you sign, not after you ask for something.
Ladder 2 — published tiers
WorkspaceCMS Local Campaigns
Local SEO + AI campaigns for businesses whose site already runs on WorkspaceCMS. Read the two conditions under the table before you compare these numbers with anything above — quoted bare, they describe a different product.
| Campaign tier | Add-on price | Plus site plan |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials Local | $499/month | from $89/mo |
| Growth Local | $699/month | from $89/mo |
| Premium Local | $999/month | from $89/mo |
Two conditions, every time
- An active WorkspaceCMS site plan is required, from $89/mo. The campaign is an add-on, billed separately from and in addition to the plan — so the real monthly cost is the campaign tier plus the plan, never the campaign tier alone.
- Local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO. If you are competing nationally, this ladder does not apply to you at any price, and a national brand pays the standard ladder regardless of what platform the site runs on.
Terms: 6-month commitment, then month-to-month. A matching PPC Local ladder runs from $499/month to $1,200/month — Month-to-month — cancel anytime. Ad budget funded directly in your own Google/Meta account.
Full campaign detail: WorkspaceCMS campaigns. Site plans and what they include: WorkspaceCMS platform.
| Your situation | Ladder that applies | Starts at |
|---|---|---|
| Local business, site on WorkspaceCMS | WorkspaceCMS local campaign | $499/mo + plan from $89/mo |
| Local business, site on your own stack | Standard Local | $899/mo |
| National or global brand, any platform | Standard National | $1,499/mo |
| Bounded one-time fix, no ongoing campaign | Onsite SEO hour bucket | $1,699 one-time |
| Out-of-scope or unusual scope | Hourly, built into a line-item proposal | $185/hour |
Pricing models
Retainer vs Project vs Hourly
These are the only three billing structures in common use. Everything else — “performance-based”, “per-keyword”, bundled — is one of these three with different packaging. Choose the structure that matches the shape of the work, then argue about the number.
Monthly retainer
Ongoing campaigns where the goal is compounding organic growth.
A retainer buys a recurring allocation of strategist and specialist time against a standing scope: technical fixes, content production, internal linking, digital PR, and reporting. It is the right structure when the work never really "finishes" — because rankings, competitors, and the search interfaces themselves keep moving. The trade-off is that you commit before you can see the result, which is why the initial term matters more than the monthly number.
Standard Local tiers run $899–$4,499/month; National runs $1,499–$5,999/month. Six-month initial term, then month-to-month.
One-time project
A bounded fix with a definable finish line.
Project pricing suits work that has an end state: a migration that must not lose rankings, a technical cleanup, a category-architecture rebuild, a title-and-metadata pass across a catalogue. You are buying a deliverable, not a subscription, and the price is set by the size of the surface being touched — page count, template count, catalogue depth — rather than by a monthly cadence.
Sold as fixed Onsite SEO hour buckets: 5 Hours at $1,699, 10 Hours at $3,199, 15 Hours at $4,399. Shipped in 1 to 1.5 months, no contract.
Hourly
Out-of-scope requests, advisory time, and custom scopes.
An hourly rate is the honest unit underneath both of the models above — it is what a retainer and a project are ultimately built from. It is used directly for work that sits outside an agreed scope, for consultative time, and as the build-up basis when a scope is too unusual to fit a fixed tier. It is the worst structure for ongoing SEO (it rewards logged time rather than outcomes) and the best structure for an unbounded, occasional ask.
Published rate: $185/hour.
What moves your quote
Six Variables That Set Your Place on the Ladder
The tables above give you the tier prices. These six variables decide which tier you actually land on — and when two quotes for “the same” SEO differ wildly, one of these is almost always the reason. Ask any agency to name which ones apply to you; an agency that cannot will be repricing you later.
Scope of surface
The single largest driver. A 40-page brochure site and a 40,000-SKU catalogue need the same disciplines and radically different amounts of labour. Templates, facets, pagination, and variant handling all multiply the work — a fix applied to one category template may touch thousands of URLs, which is leverage, but auditing which templates need which fix is what costs.
Competition in the SERP
Price tracks the strength of who already ranks, not the keyword's raw volume. A term held by three thin affiliate pages is cheap to win. The same term held by national retailers with a decade of authority requires far more content and link work to move — and the range widens further once AI answer surfaces are in play, because the citation set is narrower than ten blue links.
Geographic footprint
One location, one metro is a contained local problem. Multiple locations multiply listing management, review operations, location pages, and citation hygiene roughly linearly. National scope removes the local layer entirely but widens the keyword universe — which is exactly why every National tier sits above its Local counterpart in the table above.
Regulated categories
Alcohol, supplements, firearms, cannabis, medical, and finance carry compliance review, restricted advertising channels, publisher reluctance for digital PR, and stricter quality thresholds on the content itself. The same ranking outcome takes more review cycles and more careful sourcing, and that shows up in scope.
Starting condition
A site with clean architecture, a working sitemap, and no historical penalty starts producing sooner than one carrying a decade of redirect debt, duplicate faceted URLs, and a spam backlink profile. Remediation is real work that produces no new rankings on its own — it removes a ceiling. Budget it separately rather than resenting it inside month one of a retainer.
Platform
Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, and headless stacks each impose different constraints on URLs, faceted navigation, template control, and rendering. On someone else's stack the platform rarely changes the tier price — it changes which problems exist and where the hours go. The one case where the platform genuinely changes the price is our own: a site already running on WorkspaceCMS, covered in the next section.
The fastest way to convert these variables into a real number is a diagnostic first — see SEO Audit Services for what a scoping audit covers, or multi-location SEO if the location count is the variable doing the work in your case.
What you actually get
What Changes as the Budget Goes Up
A useful thing to know before you compare proposals: in most tiered SEO pricing — ours included — the list of services barely changes between tiers. The throughput does.
Entry level
Launch — $899 Local, $1,499 NationalAt the lowest tiers the honest description is focus, not breadth. You get the setup work — technical and onsite audit, keyword research, sitemap submission, analytics and Search Console configuration, a spam backlink audit — plus a modest ongoing content and optimisation cadence aimed at a deliberately narrow keyword set. It is enough to build a foundation and win contained terms; it is not enough to contest a competitive national head term.
Mid level
Essential and Pro — $1,599 to $2,499 LocalThe same core services with the volume dials turned up: more onsite pages optimised each month, more published content, broader keyword coverage, and offsite work at a rate that meaningfully moves authority. Across the published tiers the core service list is constant — what changes between tiers is content volume, onsite page scope, and offsite article output. That is the honest shape of most agency tiering, ours included.
Top published level
Premium — $4,499 Local, $5,999 NationalThe highest tiers exist for catalogues and keyword universes large enough that the mid-tier cadence would take years to cover them. The work is the same work; the throughput is what you are buying. This is also where AI-visibility work — crawler accessibility, answer-surface optimisation, citation tracking — stops being an experiment and becomes a standing line item.
Custom scope
Priced up from $185/hour, not down from a tierVery large catalogues, multi-geography operations, regulated categories, and deep AI-visibility programmes are scoped individually and built up from the hourly rate into a line-item proposal. The reason is structural: a fixed tier only works when the work is predictable, and these engagements are not.
Scope context by discipline: SEO Services, eCommerce SEO, Local SEO, and generative engine optimization for the AI-answer-surface work referenced above.
Before you sign anything
Five Questions That Expose a Bad Quote
- What is the initial term, and what happens after it? A long lock-in with no explanation is a financing arrangement, not a strategy. Ours is a six-month initial term on monthly retainers, month-to-month after that, because the first two months are largely audit and remediation and judging results before month six is unfair to both sides. WorkspaceCMS local SEO campaigns carry the same shape: 6-month commitment, then month-to-month.
- Is the headline price the whole price? Ask what has to be running underneath it. A campaign price that assumes a platform subscription is not comparable to a retainer that does not — which is exactly why the WorkspaceCMS numbers on this page are never printed without the site plan alongside them.
- What counts as out of scope, and what does it bill at? Every retainer has a boundary. The question is whether the agency will name it and name the rate before you sign, or after you ask for something. Ours is $185/hour.
- Who actually does the work? Strategist time, specialist time, and outsourced content are not interchangeable. A cheaper quote is often a cheaper labour mix, which is a legitimate trade — but only if you know you are making it.
- What is the deliverable in month one? If nobody can tell you, the price is unanchored to anything you can inspect.
Related budgets you may be weighing this against: paid acquisition on eCommerce PPC management, ongoing content marketing, or a managed website plan on WorkspaceCMS (site plans from $89/mo, and the prerequisite for the campaign ladder above).
Get a real number
Tell us the scope and we'll price it
Send your site, your platform, your catalogue size, and the markets you sell into. A senior strategist replies within one business day with the ladder and the tier that fit — or an honest “you need a project, not a retainer.”
Prefer to talk it through first? Contact us.
SEO Pricing FAQ
How much does SEO cost?
It depends which of our two ladders applies to you, and both are published. On the standard ladder — for brands on their own stack — Local SEO runs $899/month at Launch to $4,499/month at Premium, and National SEO runs $1,499/month to $5,999/month, National costing more at every level because the keyword universe is wider and the incumbents are harder. One-time Onsite SEO is sold as hour buckets from $1,699, and out-of-scope or custom work is $185/hour. If your site already runs on WorkspaceCMS, local campaigns start lower — $499/month — but only with an active site plan from $89/mo and only for local scope. Where you land inside those ranges depends on catalogue size, location count, incumbent strength, whether your category is regulated, and how much technical debt the site is carrying.
Why is WorkspaceCMS local SEO cheaper than the standard Local ladder?
Because we control the platform. When the site runs on WorkspaceCMS, technical implementation, page creation, and schema changes don't burn agency hours negotiating someone else's theme, plugin stack, or developer queue — so the same work costs less to deliver and therefore less to buy. That is a structural saving, not a promotional discount. Two conditions come with it and neither is flexible: it requires an active WorkspaceCMS site plan from $89/mo (the campaign is an add-on billed on top of the plan), and local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global seo. Entry point is $499/month versus $899/month on the standard local ladder.
Can a national brand use the cheaper WorkspaceCMS campaign pricing?
No — and this is the most common misread of that ladder. Local only — single and multi-location businesses, not national or global SEO. A national or global campaign pays the standard National ladder, from $1,499/month, regardless of what platform the site is built on. The reason is that platform control removes implementation friction; it does not shrink a national keyword universe or weaken national incumbents, which are what drive the cost of that work.
Why does National cost more than Local at every tier?
Breadth and difficulty. A local campaign targets a contained keyword set inside a defined geography, and a meaningful share of the work is listings, reviews, and location pages — bounded, repeatable tasks. A national campaign competes for a far wider keyword universe against incumbents with years of accumulated authority, so it needs more content, more offsite work, and more sustained volume to move the same distance. That is the whole of the gap between $899 and $1,499 at the entry tier, and between $4,499 and $5,999 at the top.
Retainer or one-time project — which one do I need?
Ask whether the work has a finish line. Migrating a site without losing rankings, cleaning up titles and metadata across a catalogue, or rebuilding a category architecture all end — those suit an Onsite SEO bucket, from $1,699 for 5 hours up to $4,399 for 15 hours, with no contract. Competing for a keyword universe against motivated competitors does not end — as soon as you stop, the competitors keep going. Many brands run both in sequence: a project to fix the foundation, then a retainer to compound from there.
Why do two agencies quote wildly different prices for the same site?
Usually one of three things. Different scope assumptions — one quote includes content production and digital PR, the other is technical-only. Different labour mixes — senior strategist hours versus outsourced writing cost very different amounts to deliver. Or different reads of the competitive difficulty, which is genuinely a judgment call. A fourth, specific to comparing against us: check whether the cheap number assumes a platform subscription underneath it. Put the two proposals side by side on deliverable volume per month rather than on the headline number, and the gap usually explains itself.
Do you charge a setup or onboarding fee?
No. On the published monthly tiers, the first month's price covers the technical and onsite audit, XML sitemap submission, keyword research, blog strategy, spam backlink audit, and GA4 / Search Console setup. There is no separate onboarding invoice. This is worth asking every agency you talk to, because it is the single most common reason a quoted monthly figure understates the real first-quarter cost.
What if my scope doesn't fit any published tier?
Then it gets scoped individually and priced up from $185/hour into a line-item proposal rather than squeezed into a tier that doesn't describe the work. Very large catalogues, multi-geography operations, regulated categories, and deep AI-visibility programmes usually land here. The tell that you need a custom scope is that the standard tier descriptions keep needing an asterisk when you read them.