Local SEO is usually sold as a monthly retainer, and the most common price is $500 to $1,000 a month. Most agencies charge under $1,000, while about one in five in the US and Canada charge more than $2,000. One-time projects, such as a listing cleanup, most often run $500 to $2,000. Those ranges come from a survey of 260 SEO agencies, almost all of which serve small or local businesses. The price you're quoted depends less on the word "local" than on what the agency actually does each month: whether it builds and writes pages, or only tidies your listings and sends a report.
Below are the survey numbers, what each price level tends to buy, and the questions that tell two quotes apart.
What agencies charge
SE Ranking and Duda surveyed 170 agencies and added rates from 90 more in SE Ranking's agency catalog. 94% of the agencies in that SEO pricing survey focus on small or local businesses, so it's a fair picture of what a local company will be quoted. The authors note the sample may be too small for statistical significance. Treat the figures as a guide.
| How it's billed | Most common range | What the survey adds |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | $500 to $1,000 a month | 64% of agencies charge below $1,000 a month; 22% of those in the US and Canada charge over $2,000 |
| Hourly | $50 to $100 per hour | 45% of agencies charge in this band |
| Per project | $500 to $2,000 | About 66% of agencies charge in this band |
Most agencies bundle the work: 85% of those surveyed sell SEO as packages.
What the money buys at each level
Agencies name their tiers differently. The work inside them lands in five buckets.
Listings and cleanup. Setting up or correcting your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and the big directories so your company name, address and phone number match everywhere. It's often sold as a one-time project. A small monthly fee keeps it accurate.
Pages. Writing or rewriting service pages and location pages, fixing titles and headings, adding local schema (code that tells search engines your address, hours and service area). This is where most of the cost difference lives, because it's skilled writing time.
Ongoing content. Blog posts or guides on a schedule. One post a month and one post every business day are very different budgets, written by different numbers of people with different amounts of research behind each piece, and both show up on a proposal under the same single word: content.
Technical work. Page speed, mobile fixes, crawl errors, sitemaps. Some include it. Others bill by the hour when something breaks, which is fine until a plugin update takes down your contact form late on a Friday and nobody can say how many hours the fix will take.
Reporting. Nearly everyone includes a monthly report. Ask to see a sample before you sign.
The cheapest packages tend to cover the first bucket and the last. Website work costs more.
A few things you shouldn't pay for
Your Google Business Profile is free to create and manage, and Bing Places is free too. Paying someone to set them up well is reasonable. The listing costs nothing.
You also can't buy your way up the map. Google states there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and it names three things it uses instead: relevance, distance and prominence. An agency that hints at a special arrangement with Google is telling you something Google says doesn't exist.
The same goes for guarantees. Google's advice on hiring an SEO says plainly that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
How to compare two quotes
Lay the proposals side by side. Then ask each agency the same five questions, in writing if you can, because the answers usually explain a gap that looks unreasonable on the price line and they give you something to hold the agency to six months later.
- What will you do in a normal month, in hours or deliverables?
- Will you write and publish pages on my website, or only work on listings?
- Who owns the website, the content and the listings if we part ways?
- How long is the contract, and what happens if I leave early?
- What isn't included? Ask about ads, reviews, social posting and hosting by name.
Before any of those calls, it helps to know your starting point, so you can tell whether an agency's audit is telling you something new. Our Free AI Visibility Check looks at your website, your mobile speed, whether you come up in a local search, and what an AI assistant says when a buyer asks who to call. No email needed.
Where Inbound SDR sits on that scale
Inbound SDR starts at $1,000 per month on a 12-month term, which puts it above the most common retainer band in the survey. The price covers more than listings. We build a website of up to 100 pages in the first month, planned around every service you sell and every area you serve, and we host and maintain it. A new blog goes out every business day and is posted to up to 3 social platforms. We optimize your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listing, keep your name, address and phone number consistent across 65 or more directories, suppress duplicate listings, and handle technical SEO. You get a dedicated strategist and a monthly report.
It isn't for everyone. If your listings are a mess and your website is fine, a one-time cleanup project will cost less and may be all you need. And if you're looking for someone to run paid ads, manage reviews or post to your Business Profile, those aren't part of the package.
Short answers
Is a cheap local SEO package worth it?
It can be, if what you need is listing cleanup. Read the deliverables closely. A low monthly fee that never touches your website won't add pages for the services you sell.
How long should I give it?
Google's hiring advice suggests asking any SEO what results they expect to see, in what timeframe, and how they measure success. Get that answer in writing before the contract starts.
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