How much does SEO cost? What drives the price and how to judge a quote

There’s no standard price for SEO, because you’re paying for work, and the amount of work depends on your site, your market and how much of it you want someone else to do. Two quotes that both say “SEO” can describe completely different jobs. One might be a technical review delivered as a report. Another might include rewriting your service pages every month and reporting on the enquiries they bring in. The useful question is what each quote buys, and whether that work fits where your site is today.

Why there’s no price table here

We don’t publish SEO prices, because we scope each job after looking at the site and agreeing goals with you. We also couldn’t find an independent Canadian benchmark we’d stand behind. The most recent agency pricing survey we found, from SE Ranking (published December 2024), drew on 260 agencies, but only 7 of the 113 agencies in its US and Canada group were Canadian, it doesn’t say which currency its figures are in, and its authors note the sample may be too small to be statistically significant. When you see an “average SEO price” online, check who was surveyed, where, when, and in what currency before you use it to judge a quote.

What we can do is explain what moves the number, so you can tell whether a quote is reasonable for the work it describes.

What drives the price of SEO

How much of the work the provider does

This is often the biggest difference between quotes. An audit that hands you a prioritized list of problems costs less than an engagement where the provider also makes the changes, rewrites pages and checks the results afterwards. If your own team or your web developer will do the implementation, say so up front and ask for a quote on that basis.

The state of your site today

Some sites need foundations fixed before anything else pays off: pages that search engines can’t crawl or index (indexing means Google has stored a page so it can show it in results), duplicate or thin pages, broken links, or a structure that makes it hard to tell what the business offers. A site in good shape needs less of this work. A provider can only tell you which you have after looking, which is why a fixed price quoted before anyone has opened your site is a guess.

How many services and areas matter

Each service you want to be found for usually needs its own useful page. If you serve several towns, each area page needs real substance for people in that area. Google’s spam policies list pages “targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” as doorway abuse. So covering more areas properly costs more, and a cheap offer of dozens of near-identical town pages is a warning sign, not a bargain.

Competition for your searches

A specialist trade serving one town is in a different position from a business competing for broad searches across the GTA. More competitive searches usually need more content, more improvement and more patience before results show. No one can measure this precisely in advance, but a provider should be able to explain how they’ve judged it for your quote.

New content, and who writes it

Writing helpful pages takes time, whoever does it. Content is often the largest ongoing part of an SEO budget. The cost changes a lot depending on whether the provider writes from scratch, interviews you and drafts, or edits what your team writes. Your knowledge of your customers is what makes the content useful, so expect to spend some of your own time either way.

Whether your website is changing

If you’re redesigning or moving platforms, redirects and URL mapping need planning so you don’t lose the visibility you already have. It’s usually cheaper to plan search into a build than to repair it afterwards. On CanCater, a catering platform we designed and developed, the city landing pages and server-rendered pages (so each page arrives as HTML search engines can read) were part of the platform build rather than a separate SEO project. The case study doesn’t claim search results: we don’t publish numbers we haven’t measured.

Measurement and reporting

If you can’t currently tell which enquiries came from search, setting that up (form and call tracking, plus access to Google’s own reporting tools) is part of the early work. How often you want reports, and how detailed they are, also affects the price.

How SEO is usually priced

Retainers are common. In the SE Ranking survey mentioned above, 53% of participating agencies preferred them over other models. A retainer is fine when the work genuinely continues, but ask what you’d get in month four that you didn’t get in month one.

Performance-based pricing sounds safe but often isn’t. Paying per ranking can reward positions for searches that never bring an enquiry, and it sits close to the ranking guarantees Google warns about (more on that below).

How to compare SEO quotes

Put every quote into the same terms before you compare prices. Ask each provider for:

• The specific deliverables in the first three months: which pages are reviewed, which are written or rewritten, and which fixes are made.
• Who implements the changes, and on which platform.
• What’s excluded, such as paid ads, content writing or website changes.
• How success is measured. Enquiries from search should sit alongside rankings and visits.
• How often you’ll get a report, and what’s in it.
• The contract term, notice period, and who owns the content and accounts when the work ends.
• Whether they’ll share every change they make to your site.

Google’s own guide to hiring an SEO suggests asking similar things, including what results to expect and in what timeframe, and how the provider measures success. On timing, Google’s SEO starter guide says some changes can take effect within hours while others take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped. A quote should give you a realistic idea of when you’d expect to see what, without promising a position.

Red flags, including the ones Google lists

Google’s guide to hiring an SEO is direct about this. Deciding to hire one can improve your visibility and save you time, but it can also damage your site and reputation. Be cautious if a provider:

• Guarantees rankings. Google says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and that if someone guarantees first place, you should find someone else. It also warns about claims of a special relationship with Google or a “priority submit”.
• Won’t explain what they’ll do. Google advises caution with companies that are secretive or won’t clearly explain their plans.
• Emailed you out of the blue. Google compares unsolicited SEO pitches to other spam.
• Buys links or talks about link schemes. Google’s spam policies treat buying links for ranking purposes as link spam, and sites that violate the policies may rank lower or not appear at all. Google also says you should never have to link to an SEO.
• Promises large numbers of pages quickly. The same policies describe scaled content abuse, including using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value for users.
• Offers to boost your reviews. Google’s Maps content policy prohibits paid or incentivized reviews, and Canada’s Competition Bureau has warned that anyone who writes or permits misleading reviews could be liable under the Competition Act.
• Sells special files or markup for AI search. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special files or schema needed. Ordinary SEO fundamentals still apply. Work on how your content performs in AI features can be legitimate, so ask exactly what’s being done.
• Wants more access than the job needs. For an audit, Google suggests granting read access to Search Console only.

What you can do yourself first

Some of the most useful steps cost nothing but time, and they make any later quote easier to judge.

Complete your Google Business Profile. Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Accurate details, hours (including holiday hours), the right category, photos and replies to reviews are all within your control.

Keep your accounts in your own name. Set up Google Search Console for your site and stay the verified owner. Search Console has permission levels, so you can give a provider restricted (view-only) or full access without handing over ownership. When a provider leaves, remove their access and any verification tokens they added, otherwise they can re-verify later. The same thinking applies to your analytics, your domain and your Business Profile.

Start tracking enquiries. Even a simple habit of asking new customers how they found you gives you a baseline. It’s hard to judge any SEO spend without one.

List the questions customers ask. Then check that each service you want to be found for has a clear page that answers them. This is the raw material for content, whoever ends up writing it.

Don’t pay for myths. Google’s starter guide says it doesn’t use the keywords meta tag and that content length alone doesn’t matter for ranking. If a quote leans on either, ask why.

When paying for SEO makes sense

Google’s starter guide suggests considering a professional if you don’t have the time to do the work yourself. It’s also worth it when the work is genuinely technical, such as a site migration or indexing problems, when you’re competing for busy searches, or when nobody on your team can write regularly.

Our SEO service starts with a review of your site, audience, search presence and how you measure enquiries, then sets priorities. We agree the scope before you commit, so you can compare what we propose line by line with any other quote you have.