Professional SEO service pricing, on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to compare professional SEO proposals

1. Get the deliverables written down per month. Pages produced, technical fixes shipped, queries tracked, reports delivered and by whom. A proposal that describes only strategy and outcomes cannot be compared with another one, and cannot be enforced in month six when the output has quietly halved.
2. Ask who does the work and where. Content, technical development and digital PR are frequently subcontracted, which is normal and not a red flag. It changes accountability, turnaround and margin, so ask which parts leave the building before you compare two quotes as though they described the same team.
3. Separate the build phase from the ongoing month. Most of the value in the first year lands in the first quarter: audit, fixes, the initial page set and the tracking setup. Ask for that itemised separately, and ask what the retainer buys once the build is finished, because that is when a badly scoped contract starts feeling expensive.
4. Check the link practice explicitly. Google's spam policies treat link schemes, including buying links and large scale exchanges, as a violation, and the consequences land on your domain rather than the vendor's. A monthly link quantity with no description of where the links come from is a number without a product behind it.

What agencies publish, and what that tells you

Our index records what each agency states on its own site, with the date we checked it, rather than what a survey reports. Publishing a price is a competitive decision rather than a quality signal: providers selling defined packages to small businesses publish more often because a comparable number wins the click, while providers selling multi channel programmes publish nothing and scope on a call. What publication does predict is how much of your evaluation happens by reading rather than in meetings, and how quickly you can establish the market rate for your scope.

Use the published half of a shortlist to fix a reference price, then take that number into the conversations with the providers who publish nothing. Ask each of them for the same three figures: the minimum engagement, the monthly retainer for the scope you described, and the hourly or day rate for work outside it. Two of the three are usually available even from agencies whose site says nothing about price, and the third tells you what happens the first time you need something extra.

What a professional engagement actually contains

Four components, in roughly this order of value. A technical baseline: crawlability, indexation, site structure and speed, fixed rather than merely reported. A content programme aimed at named queries where you can realistically compete, produced at an agreed rate by named writers with subject knowledge. An authority plan describing where mentions and links will genuinely come from. And measurement that reports movement on your queries rather than an aggregate visibility score.

Google's own starter guide is worth reading before you evaluate any of this, because it describes the fundamentals in ordinary language and makes clear that most of what matters is making a genuinely useful site that search engines can read. Read alongside a proposal, it usually reveals that the technical half is standard practice rather than proprietary method. That is fine. It simply means you are paying for judgment, capacity and consistency, and pricing the proposal on that basis is a more honest conversation than pretending there is a secret.

Questions people actually ask

What is a reasonable monthly retainer?

It depends far more on content volume and competition than on the provider's label. Read the range off what agencies publish for a comparable scope rather than off the first quote you receive, and make sure the quotes you are comparing include the same amount of writing, the same technical work and the same reporting depth.

Can any agency guarantee rankings?

No. Google states plainly in its guidance for buyers that nobody can guarantee a top position, and a guarantee in a proposal is a claim contradicted by the search engine it concerns. Where guarantees do appear they usually cover terms with no meaningful search demand, which is satisfied on paper and worthless in practice.

How do I know if the work is actually happening?

Ask for the deliverable list monthly and check it against the site. Pages either exist or they do not, fixes are either deployed or they are not. This sounds obvious and it is the single most common gap in failing retainers, where reporting continues long after production has quietly stopped.

What should I own at the end?

The site, the content, the analytics property, the Search Console access and any tracking numbers, with no licence that expires when the retainer does. Create the accounts yourself and grant access rather than accepting accounts the agency created for you, so a change of provider costs you an afternoon rather than your history.

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