WHAT THINGS COST
How much does SEO cost per month?
A monthly number, what it buys, and why the cheap version is worse than nothing.
Short answer
Ongoing search and AI visibility work costs $1,500 a month here, paid in advance and stoppable at the end of any paid month. A one-off technical audit, if you only want to know what is wrong, is $900 and takes five days.
Start with the audit, not the retainer
Most sites that are invisible are invisible for one or two structural reasons, not for a hundred small ones. A $900 audit finds them in five days and gives you a list ranked by impact, written so your own developer can work through it. Plenty of clients buy that, fix the top three items themselves, and never need a retainer.
A retainer bought before anyone has looked is how agencies sell twelve months of activity reports. If a studio proposes a monthly fee before diagnosing anything, ask what the first month will contain.
What a retainer actually contains
Technical fixes as the site changes, content briefs and optimisation of pages that already exist, and measurement of both search results and AI citations. The same person doing the work writes the report, which is why the report is short and why it says what did not move as well as what did.
There is no minimum term. A retainer that needs a twelve-month contract to survive is not working, and the contract is there to stop you leaving rather than to make you stay.
Why very cheap SEO is worse than none
Below a few hundred dollars a month, the only way to fill a report is with things that are cheap to produce: directory submissions, low-quality links, and content written at scale by a model and published under your name. All three now carry a real risk of a penalty, and a penalised domain costs far more to recover than the work cost to buy.
We do not sell backlinks or link exchanges at any price, and we will say so if you ask. That is not a moral position, it is that the practice stopped working and started costing.
What nobody can sell you
A guaranteed ranking. Position depends on what your competitors do, what the algorithm does, and what the searcher actually wanted, none of which a studio controls. Our terms say this in writing, and anyone promising otherwise is either lying or planning to rank you for a phrase nobody searches.
What can be promised is the work and the measurement: what was changed, what it was measured against, and what happened afterwards.
Search and AI are now two jobs
Classic search optimises for a ranked list of links. Assistants optimise for a passage worth quoting, and the sites they cite tend to be the ones that state facts plainly, mark them up as data and publish a machine-readable surface. The two overlap heavily, and the retainer covers both.
If you want the AI half specifically and as a project rather than a subscription, there is a two-week sprint at $2,500.
What moves the number
- Pushes it up
- A large site, several languages, a competitive category, content production
- Pushes it down
- A small site with one or two structural problems. Buy the audit
- Should not affect it at all
- How badly you want to rank. A price that reacts to urgency is not a price
The packages behind these numbers
Each one lists its full scope, what it excludes and how the work runs.