SEO quotations vary tenfold because the work does.
The same three letters cover fixing a broken site, writing forty pages, and earning links from people who have never heard of you. Those are not the same job and should not be one line item.
What you are paying for
Four jobs wearing one name.
Technical work fixes what stops a page being indexed or loading. On-page work makes an existing page answer the question it targets. Content adds pages for questions you do not currently answer. Off-page earns the citations that decide whether Google trusts the site at all. Most SMB sites need the first two before the last two are worth buying, and most proposals sell the last two first because they recur monthly.
If a proposal is priced per month with no scope for the first year, ask what it does in month one that it does not repeat in month six.
What moves the number
What actually makes it expensive.
Who else wants the ranking
Ranking for a term that three national brands are buying is a different project from ranking in one city for one trade.
The state of the site
A site that cannot be crawled, is slow on 4G or was built without headings needs fixing before anything published on it will rank.
How many pages you need
One page per question you want to answer. The honest driver of content cost is how many questions your buyers ask, not a monthly word count.
Whether anyone will cite you
Links are earned by publishing something worth citing or by relationships. Both take time, and this is where cheap proposals buy links that later cost you.
Local or national
A single-city business competes with a handful of others and can move quickly. A national term is a longer, dearer campaign.
How fast you need it
SEO does not respond to urgency. If you need enquiries this quarter, that is a paid-search budget, and a proposal that promises otherwise is selling you a timeline it cannot control.
Questions
How long before it works?
On a site that is technically sound and in a market that is not crowded, movement in three to six months and something worth reporting by month six to nine. On a broken site, the first months are repair and nothing moves. Anyone offering a date is guessing at an algorithm they do not control.
Is a monthly retainer the right shape?
For content and links, yes, because they accumulate. For technical and on-page work, often no — that is a project with an end, and paying for it monthly forever is how SEO gets its reputation.
What about the reports?
Ask what a report would look like in a month where nothing improved. If the answer is that it would still be full of green arrows, the report is a product and not a measurement.
Does AI search change this?
It changes what winning looks like more than what the work is. Answer engines lift clear, specific, well-structured answers, which is what good on-page work already produced. It raises the value of being the page that answers a question plainly and lowers the value of ranking for a term you do not really serve.
Talk to us
Tell us what you are trying to grow.
A short note is enough. We will come back with a straight answer about whether we can help, usually within one working day.
- No obligation and no sales script
- A reply from someone who does the work
- Your details are never sold or shared