If your business has a website, then you’ve definitely heard of SEO—how you need it for Google to find you, how it relates to AI and AEO, and how, yes, it can use quite a bit of your marketing budget.
Maybe you’ve tried to figure out some of the basics on your own. You may have spent hours adding keywords to your website, writing blog posts, or trying to figure out why your competitors keep showing up on Google while your business doesn’t.
Or maybe you hired an SEO company because you knew you couldn’t do it yourself, only to pay month after month without seeing much of a difference in your traffic, leads, or bookings.
And now you’re left wondering (and rightfully so) :
“How much do I actually need to budget for SEO, and is it worth it?”
If your website isn’t bringing you many customers right now, it can be hard to justify spending thousands of dollars every month on something you don’t see an immediate return on.
The questions we often hear at our events and on our consultation calls are:
“How much is enough to invest in SEO to actually see results?”
“How do I know if I’m paying TOO much for SEO?”
“Can I get results with a smaller budget?”
“Why are some SEO companies charging a few hundred dollars a month while others charge several thousand?”
And most importantly:
“If I invest in SEO, will it actually bring me more business?”
Your SEO budget depends on your type of business, your location, your competition, your current website, your goals, and how much work needs to be done.
So let’s break down what you can realistically expect to budget and talk about what you’re actually paying for.
So, How Much Should You Budget for SEO?
As a general starting point, many small businesses should expect to invest somewhere around $1000 – $3,500+ per month for ongoing SEO.
Yes, we know…that is a huge range. But here’s why it varies so much:
A small local business in a low-competition area may need considerably less work than a business trying to dominate search results in a major city.
For example, if you live in a town with only chiropractors, you’ll be much easier to find in that search since you have very little competition.
However, an online business competing nationally or internationally may need a much larger investment than a local business serving one community.
So if you’re an online health coach and you service clients throughout the United States, you’ve got thousands of other businesses competing with you, so it will be much harder to rank on Google for “health coach”. That means it will be a lot more work for an SEO team.
In a survey of 439 SEO providers, Ahrefs found monthly SEO retainers ranging from roughly $250 to $10,000, with an average monthly retainer of about $2,900. Local SEO averaged around $1,500 per month.
That doesn’t mean you should automatically spend $2,900 a month. What this is emphasizing is that there isn’t a single standard price for SEO, which is why we don’t price SEO like a one-size-fits-all service.
How to Determine Your SEO Budget
You’re thinking, “Okay, but if the average is somewhere around $1,000–$3,500 a month, where would my business fall?”
We look at 3 key elements of your business and website to help pin down how much you’ll need to spend on SEO. These include:
- The type of business you own
- How competitive your market is
- The current health and status of your website
Here are some of the biggest factors in pricing:
Local, Online, and Multi-Location Businesses
One of the first things we look at is whether you’re a local business, a multi-location business, or an online business.
If you have a brick-and-mortar location or provide services within a specific geographic area, your SEO strategy will usually focus heavily on local search.
That could mean helping you show up for searches like:
- “med spa near me”
- “hair salon in Boulder”
- “chiropractor near Denver”
The geographic area you’re targeting is more focused, which narrows the audience but also the competition. The approach is very different from an online business trying to reach customers across the country.
If you have multiple locations, the scope can increase again.
A business with five, ten, or twenty locations may need location-specific pages, local keyword research, Google Business Profile optimization and review management for each location, local content, competitor research, citations, and tracking for each area.
Low Competition vs. High Competition
This is a huge factor in SEO pricing.
Let’s say you’re the only chiropractor in a small town.
Now imagine you’re one of 75 chiropractors competing in a major metropolitan area.
Both businesses may have the exact same goal, but the amount of work required to compete isn’t remotely the same.
In a lower-competition market, there may be fewer established websites competing for the same searches. But in a highly competitive market, you may be competing against businesses that have spent years building their websites, creating content, gaining backlinks, collecting reviews, and establishing themselves in search.
So when we look at your SEO budget, we’re not just focused on the industry you’re in, but also who you’re competing against and what it will take to keep up with them.
One of the first things we do in our SEO audit is perform a competitive analysis for your business, area, keywords, and niche.
How Many Services or Products Are You Trying to Rank For?
A business with three core services has a very different SEO workload from a business with thirty.
Think about a beauty business that offers facials, chemical peels, microneedling, laser treatments, injectables, body contouring, acne treatments, and skin tightening.
If you want each of those services to generate organic traffic, each one represents another opportunity that may need keyword research, an optimized service page, supporting content, internal links, competitor research, and ongoing monitoring.
The same thing applies to e-commerce.
A store with 20 products is a very different SEO project from a store with 2,000 products.
More pages don’t automatically mean better SEO. But more products, services, and search opportunities can mean more work to properly optimize and support them.
How Competitive Are the Keywords You Want to Rank For?
There can be a massive difference between trying to rank for a specific search with relatively little competition and trying to rank for a broad, highly competitive term.
For example, ranking for a very specific local service may be considerably easier than trying to rank nationally for a broad industry term.
Earlier we talked about how a term like “hair salon in Boulder” is easier to rank for (lower competition) than a general term like “health coach”.
So we look at which keywords are actually worth pursuing, and how difficult it will be to compete for them. We also look at search intent. Does the keyword make sense based on what we know about search behavior?
How Much Foundational Work Does Your Website Need?
This is another major factor.
If your website already has a strong technical foundation and well-optimized pages, we can spend more time building on what’s already there.
But if Google is having trouble crawling your website, important pages aren’t being indexed, your site structure needs work, your service pages aren’t optimized, or there are years of technical issues to clean up, that work needs to happen.
This is one of the biggest reasons posting more blog posts won’t necessarily help you rank. We have to fix that foundation first.
How Much Content Does Your Business Actually Need?
Content can be an important part of SEO, but the amount you need depends on your business and your competition.
Some businesses may have dozens of useful topics their ideal customers are searching for. Others may have far fewer relevant topics.
It’s much more effective to create content that targets a relevant search, answers a question, supports a service, demonstrates expertise, or helps move someone toward becoming a customer than to publish a pile of generic blog posts just to hit a monthly quota.
How Quickly Are You Trying to Grow?
Spending more money does not guarantee faster SEO results. However, a larger budget lets us work on multiple issues at once, which can help us make progress more efficiently.
What Does This Mean for Your SEO Budget?
As a general planning guideline, you might see ranges like:
Small local business in a lower-competition market: $1,000+ per month
Established local business in a competitive market: $2,500+ per month
Highly competitive local business: $3,500+ per month
Multi-location business: Dependent on number of locations and scope, but typically over $3,500 per month.
Online business targeting a national audience: Varies, based on industry, but ideally $3,500+ per month
Competitive e-commerce business: $3,500 – $10,000+ per month
These aren’t prices you should assume automatically apply to your business, but they can help you see the level of investment that may be involved. We look at the business, the website, the competition, the goals, and the opportunity, and then determine what work actually needs to happen.
It’s also worth noting that SEO doesn’t always have to mean an indefinite monthly retainer. Some businesses may start with an audit, technical cleanup, or another defined project before moving into ongoing SEO. The right approach depends on what your business actually needs.
What Is the Bare Minimum You Should Expect From an SEO Package?
When someone tells you they can “do your SEO” for a few hundred dollars a month, it’s fair to ask:
What exactly are they doing?
Because SEO is not simply adding keywords to your website or writing a few blog posts a month. An SEO strategy that’s actually worth your time and money should include:
Technical SEO
Technical SEO helps make sure search engines can properly crawl, understand, and index your website. This can involve everything from site structure and page indexing to redirects, broken links, mobile performance, duplicate content, site speed, and other technical issues.
If you have technical issues, the rest of this list won’t apply. You have to start with this foundation; otherwise, you are literally throwing money away.
On-Page SEO
This is where we optimize the pages on your actual website.
That can include titles, headings, content, URLs, internal links, images, metadata, and the overall structure of each page.
The goal is to make each page clear, useful, relevant, and aligned with what people are actually searching for.
Keyword Research
You need to know what your potential customers are searching for. That research helps determine which terms and topics we should target throughout your website and content.
If we’re targeting the wrong searches, we can spend months creating content and optimizing pages that don’t actually help your business.
Local SEO
This is a non-negotiable if you operate locally. Local SEO includes your Google Business Profile, local search visibility, location pages, reviews, citations, local content, and other signals that help search engines understand where you operate and what you offer.
Content
Content gives your business more opportunities to appear in search. But we don’t believe in publishing blog posts just so you can say you published a blog post.
Content needs a purpose.
It should help you reach people searching for relevant information, answer questions, support your service pages, demonstrate expertise, and ultimately move the right people closer to becoming customers.
Why Does SEO Cost So Much?
Budget can be a barrier to SEO for many businesses. However, we don’t recommend tackling SEO on your own. A lot happens behind the scenes that you don’t see when you visit a website.
An SEO campaign can involve technical analysis, keyword research, competitor research, website optimization, content strategy, content creation, local SEO, authority building, conversion analysis, reporting, testing, and ongoing adjustments.
And unfortunately, SEO isn’t a one-and-done process. Search engines, search behavior, competitors, and your business offerings keep evolving. We’re also seeing changes in how people use AI to find information and businesses.
So we also pay attention to AI-powered search experiences and AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. However, AEO doesn’t replace SEO. The fundamentals still need to be in place.
- Your website needs to be accessible and understandable.
- Your content needs to be useful.
- Your business needs to demonstrate relevance and authority.
The information about your business needs to be clear enough for search engines and AI-powered search experiences to understand.
That’s another reason SEO is ongoing. We regularly monitor changes in search and AI, including significant updates, so we can adjust strategies as needed and give our clients the best possible chance to be found.
Don’t Choose SEO Based on the Cheapest Price
If you’re paying $300 a month and receiving a generic report, a handful of automated changes, and a few blog posts that aren’t connected to an actual strategy, you may not be getting the help your business needs.
It needs to be clear what you’re paying for, what is being optimized each month, which KPIs to watch, and the strategy behind the changes being made to your website.
It’s also good to be aware of black hat SEO practices or practices that break rules in order to attempt to trick search engines into surfacing your content. While these practices worked over a decade ago, they can now cause a short-term boost followed by a long-term loss or worse, manual actions from Google.
Examples of Black Hat SEO Tactics to Look For and Avoid
- Keyword stuffing: Putting a ton of keywords into a page to trick the system.
- Hidden text: Making text or links invisible to people by matching the text color to the background, while search engines can still read them within the HTML.
- Cloaking: Showing one version of a page to a user and a different version to the search engine or AI bot.
- Private link buying: Buying a massive amount of links to try and build equity and authority instead of gaining links naturally or pitching editors and quality publications for PR mentions
- Mass producing AI-generated low-quality content at scale to attempt to gain keyword rankings quickly
Understanding Google’s spam policies can help you identify when SEO tactics may be harmful to your website or future business goals.
Is SEO Actually Worth It?
For the right business, yes, SEO can absolutely be worth the investment. If people are searching for what you offer and there’s an opportunity to put your business in front of more of them, SEO can help turn that visibility into leads, bookings, and revenue.
Moreover, your SEO strategy keeps working in your favor, compounding over time. So an early investment can pay dividends later. To see some examples of our success stories, visit our case studies page.
That’s also why we don’t believe in selling every business the same SEO package. Your business, competition, website, goals, and budget are different, so your SEO strategy and investment should be, too.
What Does an SEO Strategy Look Like for Your Business?
If you’ve been wondering whether SEO could actually help your business (or you’ve been burned by SEO in the past), we’re here for you!
Let’s look at your business and figure it out.
When you book a call with our team, we’ll talk about where your website is currently, what you’re trying to accomplish, how competitive your market is, and what kind of SEO work would make sense for you.
From there, we can give you an exact estimate based on your business and your needs, rather than putting you into a generic SEO package.
And if we don’t think SEO is the right investment for your business right now, we’ll tell you that, too.
Ready to find out what SEO could look like for your business? Book a call to get your exact SEO estimate and find out if SEO is the right investment for your business.