Typical local SEO cost
The best public data we know of is an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers (data collected in 2023):
- Local SEO averaged $1,557 a month: about $1,819 from agencies and about $1,150 from freelancers.
- Across all SEO work, the most common monthly retainer was $501 to $1,000.
- The most common hourly rate was $75 to $100, with an average of $111.
Treat these as a rough guide. Prices have moved since, and a single-town chimney sweep and a multi-city mover need very different amounts of work.
What drives the price
- How many services you want calls for. Each needs its own page and its own tracking.
- How many towns you want to rank in. More towns means more pages, more scans and more local links.
- How strong the top three are. If the businesses in the pack have 400 reviews each, you need more work to catch up than in a town where they have 20.
- The state of your website. A broken or slow site may need fixing before SEO can work. Our contractor website design covers that when it's needed.
- How much is already done. A profile with the right categories and steady reviews starts further ahead.
Common pricing models
- Monthly retainer: the most common. Ongoing profile work, pages, reviews, links and reporting.
- One-time audit or setup: a fixed fee to find and fix problems, after which you or your team keep it going.
- Hourly: useful for specific fixes or advice.
- Pay per lead: sometimes offered, but the leads may be shared with competitors, and you don't own what's built.
Our local SEO services are a fixed monthly fee, quoted after a free audit, so you see the full scope before you agree to anything.
Red flags when comparing local SEO cost
- A guarantee of first place. Nobody controls Google's rankings.
- No before and after measurement. If there's no baseline scan, nobody can tell what the work changed.
- Very cheap packages. At $99 a month, the work is often automated directory submissions or posts nobody reads.
- Fake reviews or keyword-stuffed business names. They can get your profile suspended.
- Long contracts with no exit. Good work keeps clients without a lock-in.
How to tell if it will pay for itself
Work it out from one job, not from traffic. Take what an average job is worth to you, then ask how many extra jobs a month the work needs to bring in to cover its cost. If one or two extra calls cover it, the question is whether the agency can show those calls, with tracking that counts calls and form requests rather than visits.
Then judge it on the same map grid before and after. For a Grand Rapids general contractor, the share of the grid in the top 3 went from 24% to 68%, measured the same way each time.