How much does SEO cost?

The options side by side

Each bar buys something different. Hours from an agency buy judgement and someone to do the technical work. Software buys a steady stream of articles. A person on staff buys both, and costs the most. Most small businesses end up combining two of them.

What agencies and freelancers charge

The most cited figures come from a survey Ahrefs ran among 439 SEO providers, in an article last updated in August 2024. It does not say which year the survey ran.

Three things to know before you quote these numbers.

The article's own introduction gives a different most common hourly rate, $100 to $150 (25%), from the one in its data section ($75 to $100, 24%). We use the data section.

The headline average retainer, $2,917 a month, is pulled up by a small number of large agencies. When 68.8% of providers charge $2,000 or less, the average describes almost nobody.

And the figures are what providers reported about themselves, two or more years ago. Treat them as a guide to the order of magnitude, not a price list.

What a monthly budget buys

The same arithmetic for four common budgets:

The hours column divides the budget by the survey's most common hourly band. The in-house column divides it by the monthly cost worked out below.

Hiring someone in-house

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track SEO as a job of its own. The closest category is market research analysts and marketing specialists, whose median pay was $78,760 a year, or $37.87 an hour, in May 2025.

Pay is not the whole cost. In the BLS employer cost survey for June 2026, wages were 70% of what private employers spent on each employee and benefits the other 30%. Grossing up the median pay by that share gives about $112,500 a year, or $9,400 a month.

That is one person at the middle of the range, in the US, before a laptop, software subscriptions or a manager's time. A senior specialist costs more, and a junior one may need someone senior to direct them.

Paying per article

We could not find a survey of writer rates that states its sample, so we will not quote one. What is measured is time. In Orbit Media's 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers, the average post took 3 hours and 20 minutes to write and ran to 1,312 words. At the survey's common hourly band of $75 to $100, that is $250 to $333 of a professional's time per article, before research, editing and images.

Software that writes articles costs a few dollars each by comparison. The difference is what goes in: a person can add first-hand knowledge, and software cannot unless you give it some.

Paying per link

Link prices come from a test Ahrefs describes in an article last updated in July 2024, with the test itself undated:

• Paid guest posts averaged $77.80, from 180 sites pitched.
• Links added to existing articles averaged $361.44, from 450 sites contacted across nine niches, of which 12.6% agreed to sell.
• A survey of 755 link builders by Authority Hacker, cited in the same article, put the average paid link at $83.

Google's spam policies say buying links that pass ranking is link spam, and that a paid link is fine only when it is marked sponsored or nofollow. Our backlinks guide covers what that means in practice.

What software costs

We read each company's own pricing page on 14 November 2026. Prices are monthly without an annual commitment unless the company shows only yearly prices.

Products that write and publish for you

AI visibility tracking only

What we charge

We have not published our pricing yet, so we are not in the tables. We sell one of these products, so weigh this page accordingly.

What pushes the price up

How competitive the search is, how many pages and languages you have, and whether the site has technical problems to fix before content can help. A local trades business and a national online shop are buying very different amounts of work, and an agency quote that does not ask about any of these is a template.

How long before it pays

Slower than anyone selling it would like. In the one public dataset from an AI publishing product, Outrank's, the median site's Google clicks were 7% higher in its first month, 27% higher by the third and about double by the seventh. A quarter of sites followed for 90 days or more had fewer clicks than when they started. Budget for at least six months before judging the return, whoever does the work. What that study does and does not show.

Red flags in a quote

• A guarantee of rankings. Google's own page on hiring an SEO warns against it. Ask what they will do each month instead.
• Links sold by the hundred. They come from sites that exist to sell links. Ask to see five of the pages the links would sit on.
• No questions about your business. Ask what they would do first on your site and why.
• Reports you cannot check. Ask for access to your own Search Console data, not screenshots of a dashboard.