SEO pricing should be a function of the work, not the asking price. We publish what affects our quotes — site size, keyword competitiveness, content velocity, link acquisition needs, regulatory friction — and we won't quote you without seeing your Search Console first.
Honest answer: in the US and EU markets we work in, full-service SEO retainers run between USD 800 and USD 25,000+ per month. The midpoint isn't meaningful — it's a bimodal market. The lower end is solo consultants, freelancers, and white-label agencies operating at thin margins. The upper end is enterprise programmes covering multiple markets, technical SEO at scale, content production teams of 8–15 people, and link acquisition with budget to actually move things.
Most small and mid-market businesses sit between USD 1,000 and USD 5,000 per month for a single-market programme. That bracket buys you: technical SEO foundation work, 4–8 published pieces per month, modest link acquisition, and reporting. Below USD 1,000, you're paying for someone's time but not their attention. Above USD 5,000 starts to make sense when you have multiple markets, regulatory complexity, or content velocity above 10 pieces per month.
One-off SEO audits run between USD 500 and USD 8,000 depending on depth. A USD 500 audit is a checklist run through a tool. A USD 8,000 audit includes manual review, Search Console reconciliation, competitor analysis, and a written 30-page implementation roadmap. We offer both a Free Audit (one-page summary, automated baseline) and engagement-grade audits for clients planning a migration or replatform.
Deciding if SEO is your next investment. We crawl your site, pull your Search Console data, and send a one-page written summary of what's working, what's holding rankings back, and the three highest-ROI moves we'd ship first. No sales call required, no obligation.
Small and mid-market businesses with one primary market, an active site, and a desire to compound on organic. The retainer covers technical SEO, content strategy and brief production, link acquisition, and weekly reporting.
90-day minimum commitment, then monthly cancellation. We require the 90 days because nothing meaningful in SEO compounds in less.
Migrations, multi-market rollouts, in-house team embeds, fractional SEO leadership, replatforms (e.g. Shopify → headless), and engagements requiring more than one full-time-equivalent on the Ranko side.
Pricing factors: scope, timeline, language complexity, regulatory environment.
| Feature | Free Audit | USD 1,000/mo Retainer | Custom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO baseline | ✓ once | ✓ ongoing | ✓ ongoing |
| Search Console reconciliation | ✓ | ✓ weekly | ✓ daily where useful |
| Content strategy & briefs | — | 4–6 / month | scoped |
| Editorial outreach | — | 5+ prospects / month | scoped |
| Link acquisition | — | included | scoped |
| Multi-market hreflang | — | English only | ✓ |
| Translation | — | — | ✓ |
| Migration support | — | — | ✓ |
| Fractional SEO lead | — | — | ✓ |
| Weekly written summary | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monthly strategy call | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Direct Slack/email access | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Minimum commitment | None | 90 days | per scope |
| Pricing | USD 0 | USD 1,000/mo | USD 5K–25K/mo |
Owner-operated businesses, local services, sub-1,000-page sites, single market. The retainer goal is foundation: clean technical baseline, 2–4 pieces of content per month, modest link acquisition. Our USD 1,000/mo plan is built for this segment. Expected timeline to meaningful organic movement: 4–9 months.
Multi-product or multi-service businesses, 1,000–10,000-page sites, often two markets. The retainer goal is compound growth: ongoing technical work, 4–10 content pieces per month, structured link acquisition, multi-market hreflang. Custom plans starting around USD 5,000/mo fit this segment. Expected timeline: 3–6 months to first meaningful movement, 12+ months for category dominance.
Multi-market, regulatory complexity, content production at scale, in-house team to coordinate with. The retainer goal is sustained competitive position: dedicated technical SEO bandwidth, content production team support, sophisticated link acquisition, enterprise-grade reporting. Custom plans USD 10,000–25,000+/mo. Expected timeline: 1–3 months to operational baseline, 6–18 months for measurable share-of-voice change.
USD 1,000–8,000/mo. The variable is market count and language complexity. Single English market, USD 1,000–2,500/mo. Two-market programme (e.g. US + UK), USD 2,500–5,000/mo. Three+ markets with full localisation, USD 5,000+/mo. See Google SEO service module.
USD 1,500–6,000/mo. Higher floor than Google because of the operational overhead: ICP filing support, 百度站长 setup, 百家号 matrix maintenance, native Chinese content production, mainland hosting strategy. See Baidu SEO service module.
USD 1,000–5,000/mo, same baseline as Google SEO with a WordPress-specific implementation layer. Stack rationalisation, plugin auditing, Core Web Vitals on the WordPress stack, schema. See WordPress SEO services.
USD 1,500–10,000/mo. Higher than pure content sites because of the technical complexity (faceted nav, product page schema, collection-page architecture, variant URL management) and content production volume needed for category-page coverage. See Cross-border Sites.
USD 800–4,000/mo. Lower floor because much of the work is per-video metadata and thumbnail systems rather than ongoing technical infrastructure. See Video Search.
A 200-page site with no technical issues takes one engineer-week to audit and ship fixes. A 50,000-page site with three years of accumulated redirects, faceted navigation, and CMS-induced duplicate content takes two engineer-months. We quote per the audit, not per the page count alone.
A keyword bracket where the top 10 results are from sites with DR 30–50 takes meaningfully less work than a bracket where top 10 are DR 70+. We can see this in the audit; the link acquisition allocation in the retainer scales with it.
Four pieces per month is standard. Eight or twelve per month requires either a larger writing team or more brief throughput on our side; either costs more.
Editorial outreach scales linearly with the number of qualified placements. Five placements per month is roughly USD 500 of operational cost in our retainer; ten is USD 1,200. Some industries simply require more.
Medical, legal, financial, and cannabis industries have specific compliance considerations on top of regular SEO — content review processes, source verification, disclaimer placement. We've worked in all of them; the operational overhead is real and we quote for it.
Each additional market roughly doubles ongoing work because hreflang, market-specific content, and competitive landscape are all separate problems. Translation costs are additional and usually quoted per word.
The market for "USD 200/mo SEO" exists. It almost always loses money for the buyer, even at that price. Here's why:
A USD 200/mo retainer buys 2–4 hours of someone's attention per month. That's enough to write a status report and run a tool. It's not enough to fix the technical issues, brief content, do outreach, or interpret Search Console data — let alone all four. The work that drives outcomes simply isn't covered.
Worse, low-price retainers tend to deliver low-quality link acquisition (directory submissions, blog comment placements, PBN-adjacent tactics) because that's the only volume model that fits the budget. Those links are at best noise and at worst a future disavow file.
Professional SEO at USD 1,000+/mo retains because the work delivers measurable change. Our internal definition of "delivering" is: each retained client should see indexation cleanup, Core Web Vitals improvement, impression growth on commercial-intent queries, and at least one new revenue-driving organic page within the first 90 days. If we're not on that path by day 60 we restructure the engagement; if we still aren't by day 90, we offer to part ways.
Three questions:
1. What's the business outcome you're funding? Top-of-funnel awareness? Bottom-of-funnel conversion? Market entry? The retainer should match the outcome — generic SEO isn't a goal, it's a means.
2. What's your in-house capacity? If you have writers, our brief-and-QA model is a fit (lower retainer). If you don't, you need either Custom (we produce content) or a content-production partner (we recommend several).
3. Who owns implementation? If you have a dev team, we ship specs and they execute. If not, you need Custom (we bring an implementation partner) or a slower retainer cadence where we ship on your CMS directly.
Everything else (industry, platform, market) affects pricing but not package shape. The Free Audit will tell us which package shape your situation actually fits.
We don't quote without seeing your Search Console first. Send us access (read-only is fine), tell us what business outcome you're funding, and we'll send a written quote within five business days.