What actually moves the price
Four things, and the agency's hourly rate is not among them.
- Competition. Ranking a roofer in a Chicago suburb where four competitors have invested for a decade is a different job from ranking one where nobody has bothered
- Locations. The local pack is decided per location, so five branches is close to five times the work — each needs its own page, profile, citations and reviews
- Content volume. Most of what makes a site rank is pages that did not exist before, and writing them is the single largest line in any honest SEO budget
- Starting condition. A fast site with sound structure needs less remedial work than a template build that has to be fixed before anything else helps
Why the cheap tier is the expensive one
A few hundred dollars a month cannot buy meaningful work, so it buys the appearance of it — a report with traffic numbers that move for reasons unrelated to anything done, a monthly post nobody searched for, submissions to directories that have not mattered in a decade.
The real cost is not the fee. It is the year you spend believing SEO is being handled while competitors who are actually investing pull further ahead, and that lost year is not recoverable by spending more later.
Occasionally it is worse than nothing. Cheap link building still means paid placements and private networks, and those carry genuine risk to a site that was previously fine.
If a few hundred a month is the budget, we would rather you spent it on Google Ads, where it buys a real if modest number of clicks, than on SEO theatre. That is an honest answer that costs us a retainer.
How to tell a real programme from an expensive one
Ask what will actually be produced each month, and expect specifics: which pages, what technical work, how links will be earned. Any answer that cannot name deliverables is describing a reporting subscription.
Ask what success is measured on. Rankings alone are a weak answer, because a position on a term nobody searches is worthless and easy to manufacture. Enquiries and booked work are the real measures, and an agency that pushes toward those is one that expects to produce them.
Ask who writes the content and see a sample. In most programmes writing is the largest cost, so an agency that is vague about it is either outsourcing it cheaply or not doing much of it.
Ask what happens if you leave. Pages built on your own site are yours. Rankings dependent on links from a network you were renting disappear with the retainer, which is a materially different product sold under the same name.
How long before it pays
Meaningful movement usually takes three to six months, and competitive markets longer. That lag is the real cost of SEO and the reason it should rarely be the only channel running.
The arithmetic that matters is the comparison against paid. SEO costs more in the first year than the traffic would have cost through ads. Somewhere in the second year that reverses, and then the gap widens for as long as the work is maintained — because the pages keep producing after the invoice stops, which is the one thing advertising never does.
That is also why cutting SEO is a quiet decision rather than an immediate one. Nothing happens for a few months, and then positions decay gradually while competitors keep publishing.
What we charge
We price to scope and do not publish a rate card, for the same reason we do not quote a website blind: a single-location contractor and a multi-state distributor are not buying the same thing under the same word, and a headline number would be wrong for both.
What we scope against is the four factors above — competition, locations, how much content has to be written, and what condition the site is in. We will also tell you when SEO is the wrong first spend. If the site is slow or has no page for what people search, that gets fixed first, and if the budget available cannot fund real work in your market we will say so rather than take it.
The free assessment scores your site, search presence and reputation, and is the fastest way to find out which of those is actually costing you money.
