What does SEO cost a small business?
The going rate for a retainer is about $1,500 a month for local work and about $2,900 on average, before you know whether any of it worked. The cost that matters is the one you can check.
The best public figure comes from a poll of 439 providers: the average monthly retainer is $2,917; agencies average $3,209 and freelancers $1,348; local SEO averages $1,557; and the most common band is $501 to $1,000 a month. Most bill monthly, and most contracts run six to twelve months. Multiply the band you are quoted by twelve and that is the real number.
What you get for it varies more than the price does. At the low end, a monthly report and a handful of new blog posts. In the middle, new pages, some technical fixes and a call. At the top, a team. What almost none of them include, at any price, is a way to tell what the work was worth: the report shows rankings and traffic, not the difference the work made.
The other cost is the one nobody bills for: the pages you already have, left untouched while new ones are written. The pages that brought you customers three years ago are usually still the ones that could, and they are cheaper to bring back than new pages are to build from nothing.
Provenplot is $149 a month per website for the first 25 websites, $249 after that, with no article counts and no per-page charges. It improves the pages you already have, keeps a matched set untouched so the difference can be measured, and if the improved pages are not ahead after 90 days, the next 90 are free. That is not the cheapest number on this page; it is the only one with a check built in.
Across 439 SEO providers, the average monthly retainer is $2,917: $3,209 at agencies, $1,348 for freelancers, $1,557 for local SEO. The most common band is $501 to $1,000 a month.
439 providers polled
The field's own reference publishers treat ranking guarantees as a warning sign: nobody controls Google's results, and a guaranteed rank can be for a phrase nobody searches.
Ahrefs and Semrush guidance
Unedited AI articles peaked at two and a half months. Their share ranking in the top 100 fell from 28% to 3% over sixteen months and never recovered.
2,000 articles on 20 fresh domains, tracked 16 months
The free check reads your own site and tells you what has gone stale on your website today, before you pay anyone for anything. No account, no estimate, about a minute.