What SEO Actually Costs, and What You Get at Each Price

Most agencies answer this question with "it depends" and a contact form. We publish our prices, so here is the direct answer first, then the reasoning behind it.

Our starting figures are $5,000 for a website, built, written and launched. $1,000 a month for management, which covers the website, SEO and online reputation. $4,000 a month for the CMO service, which is everything in management plus paid marketing, marketing operations and the consulting that decides what to do and where.

Those are starting figures. What you actually pay depends on the size of the work, and we will tell you the real number before you commit to anything. You can see the same prices laid out on our pricing page.

Why will nobody give you a price?

Because a price commits an agency to a scope, and a lot of agencies do not want to be held to one. "It depends" lets the number float until they have heard how big your business is.

It is also true that the work really does vary. A one-truck plumber in a single city and a roofing company covering half of Southern California are not the same job, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The difference is that the variation should be explained to you, not used as a reason to keep the range secret.

So we do both. We publish where the number starts, and we tell you what moves it.

What does $5,000 buy in a website?

A complete site, built from scratch, written by us, and launched. Not a template with your logo dropped into it.

That figure covers the build itself, the copy on every page, the structure that decides which pages exist and what each one is for, and the technical work underneath that lets a search engine read the site properly. It covers making the phone number and the contact form the easiest thing to reach on every screen size, because a site that ranks and does not convert has only cost you money more slowly.

It also covers launch, which is a real step and not a button. The site has to serve on one host consistently, the tracking has to fire on the right events, and the pages have to be submitted and readable before any of the marketing on top of it is worth paying for.

What moves that number up is scale and complexity. A business offering a couple of services in one city is a smaller build than one offering a long list of services across several counties, because the second is a much larger site with far more pages to write and structure.

What does $1,000 a month of management cover?

Three things: the website, SEO, and online reputation.

Website management is the ongoing half of the build. Pages get added, offers change, services get dropped, seasons shift, and something on a live site is always slightly out of date. Left alone for a year, a site quietly stops describing the business it belongs to.

SEO is the work that decides whether people find you at the moment they need you. That means the pages you rank for, the queries those pages are aimed at, the local signals that decide whether you appear in a given city, and the monthly reading of what actually moved. It is ongoing because the results are ongoing. Competitors publish, Google changes what it rewards, and a position you held in March is not one you own in September.

Online reputation is your reviews and your Google Business Profile. For a trade business this is not decoration. A customer comparing three companies looks at the reviews before the website, and a profile that is thin or unanswered loses jobs to one that is not.

One condition: management is only offered on sites we built. We do not take on sites developed by someone else, because we cannot stand behind work we cannot see inside. If you already have a site and want us to run it, the build comes first.

What does $4,000 a month buy that $1,000 does not?

Everything in management, plus paid marketing, marketing operations, and the consulting layer that decides strategy.

Paid marketing is the part that buys you speed. SEO compounds and paid does not, which is exactly why a business that needs calls this quarter should not be relying on organic alone. Someone has to build the campaigns, write the ads, watch what they cost per lead, and switch off the ones that are burning money.

Marketing operations is the plumbing. Tracking, lead routing, reporting that shows you what a lead cost rather than how many people clicked. Most of the marketing spend we see wasted is not wasted on bad ads. It is wasted because nobody could tell which ads were the bad ones.

The consulting is the part that is hardest to price and matters most. It decides what to do, where to do it, why, and what to do when it did not work. That last one is the real product. Every marketing plan is partly wrong, and the difference between an agency that is worth $4,000 a month and one that is not is whether anybody is paid to notice and change course.

The CMO service also sets up the handoff from marketing into your own CRM and sales process, so a lead arrives somewhere it will actually be followed up rather than into an inbox nobody reads. To be clear about the boundary: we do not do the selling. We deliver the lead into a system your team works.

Why was one quote so much cheaper?

Usually because it is a smaller job than the one you think you are buying.

Cheap monthly SEO is normally a report. Something automated runs, a PDF arrives, and the actual work of writing, building, fixing and deciding never happens. It looks like a service because a document shows up every month.

A cheap website is usually a template with your photos in it, which is fine right up to the point where you want it to rank against a competitor whose site was built to. The site does not fail loudly. It just never appears.

The way to test any quote, including ours, is to ask what is produced each month and who produces it. If the answer is a report, you are buying a report.

How fast does it pay for itself?

Honestly, we will not put a date on that, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

Paid marketing moves first, because you can turn it on and get calls. SEO takes months, not weeks, and how many months depends on how competitive your trade and your cities are and what shape your current site is in. Anyone promising a specific position by a specific date is either guessing or selling.

What we will do is tell you what we expect the work to move and how we will measure it, then show you the calls and inquiries on record, with brand searches and rank-checking robots taken out first.

Where should you start?

If you have no site or a site we cannot work with, you start with the build. If you have a site we built and you want it to keep earning, management is the floor. If you need calls faster than organic can deliver them and you want somebody accountable for the whole marketing picture, that is the CMO service.

More about how we work with trade businesses is on our contractor marketing agency page.

If you want the real number for your business rather than the starting one, tell us your trade, your cities and your services, and we will price the actual job. Get in touch and we will give you a straight figure before you commit to anything.