How much does SEO cost? What sellers' surveys report, and what moves the price on a WordPress site

SEO has no single price, because it is sold three ways and each buys a different amount of work: a one-time job at a fixed price, hours or deliverables by the month, or time by the hour. In two published surveys of people who sell it, the most common monthly fee is $500 to $1,000 and the most common hourly rate lies between $50 and $100. A third survey puts the hourly rate at $100 to $200. The most common fee for a one-time project is $500 to $2,000 in one survey and $2,501 to $5,000 in another. Averages run well above the common bands: one survey puts the average monthly fee at $2,917, while 68.8% of its sellers charge $2,000 or less.

Read every figure here for what it is. In most of these surveys sellers reported their own prices; in two, buyers reported their spending. Each was answered by whoever chose to answer, each is published by a company in the same trade, and they are years apart. Each figure is given as its page prints it, with its date and the number who answered. None is a quote for your site.

The three ways SEO is sold

• A one-time job at a fixed price. An audit, the setup of a new site, the search side of a redesign. It has an end.
• By the month. Either a list of deliverables or a number of hours. In BrightLocal's 2023 survey of 534 local marketers, a monthly fee based on deliverables was the most common way to bill, for agencies and freelancers alike.
• By the hour. Time, billed as it is used.

Most sellers offer more than one. Of the 439 SEO service providers Ahrefs polled, 78.2% charged a monthly retainer, 48.9% charged per project and 34.8% charged by the hour.

What the surveys found

Four things to know before using the table.

• Ahrefs' page prints two sets of figures. The summary at its top gives 23% for $500-$1,000 a month, and $100-$150 as the most common hourly rate. Its detailed sections give 20.4%, and $75–$100. The table uses the detailed sections.
• An average is not a typical price. Ahrefs works out its averages for agencies ($3,209 a month) and freelancers ($1,348.63) by assuming each seller charges the top of the band they chose.
• The samples lean. SE Ranking says 78% of its respondents were agencies of under 10 people, and that the sample may be too small for statistical significance. Credo says its survey skews toward more experienced, higher-priced firms.
• Country matters. In SE Ranking's survey, 40% of agencies in the US and Canada charged over $125 an hour, against 6% in Europe.

Owners of small businesses report less than sellers do. Backlinko's report, last updated April 30, 2026, rests on a survey of 1,200 business owners and says its 2019 research found small businesses spending $497.16 a month, with half of respondents spending less than $1,000 a year. The two kinds of survey measure different things: what sellers charge the clients they have, and what owners spend, including those who spend little.

What moves the price

What the work is, by kind of site

Any WordPress site

The work that can be checked is technical: whether your pages can be crawled, whether any asks to be left out, whether the sitemap answers, whether old addresses still lead somewhere. Google's page on hiring an SEO says an audit should give realistic estimates of improvement and an estimate of the work involved. None of the surveys above prices an audit separately from other one-time projects.

What the job covers is on the WordPress SEO audit page. If the site cannot be found at all, start with WordPress site not showing up on Google.

A new or rebuilt site

Google's page says a great time to hire is when you are considering a redesign, the earlier the better, or planning to launch a new site. This is one-time work: indexing switched on at launch, the sitemap submitted, the search engines' own accounts set up in your name, and on a rebuilt site the old addresses redirected. See SEO for a new website, and what one ticked box in WordPress does to a site that launches with it still ticked.

A WooCommerce store

A store adds its own work: what each product page tells a search engine, the extra addresses, and the product feed. See WooCommerce SEO and WooCommerce coming soon mode, the first thing to check on a new store.

A local business

The Business Profile itself costs nothing. Google's help page on working with third parties says it can be used at no charge, and that third parties often charge a fee to manage it. It also says a third party cannot promise or directly influence your place on Search or Maps, and tells owners to get a copy of the agreement that details the services and their costs.

Sellers who serve local markets report lower fees: $1,557.08 a month on average in Ahrefs' poll, against $3,473.74 for those who serve clients worldwide. BrightLocal's survey published March 4, 2020 had 475 local marketers, with pricing answers limited to the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Consultants working alone charged clients an average of $766 a month, and agencies billed an average of $127 an hour. In its 2023 survey, US respondents' average monthly revenue per client ran from $799 to $1,569, depending on how long the client had stayed.

The work is on the local SEO page, and the local SEO checklist for a WordPress site is the part you can do yourself.

"AI SEO"

What is sold under this name, or as GEO or AEO, is work meant to get a site quoted in AI answers. Google documents its view: its guide to generative AI search says that, from Google Search's perspective, optimizing for it is "still SEO", and its page on hiring an SEO tells buyers to check such advice against that guide. So for Google Search this is not a second job to pay for twice.

What agencies charge is known from one survey. In SE Ranking's, 43% of agencies planned to fold this work into what they already sell and 18% to sell it as an extra. Those that had settled a price set, or meant to set, an average of about $937 a month. What can be checked for a fixed price is on the AI search optimization page. Generative engine optimization sorts what is documented from what is guesswork.

What a low price leaves out, and what a high one should include

A fee divided by an hourly rate is a number of hours. At $75 to $100 an hour, the most common rate in Ahrefs' poll, $500 a month is between five and seven hours. That can be honest work. It cannot hold fixes, writing and a person reading the reports all at once, so something is left out. Ask what.

A high price should buy a longer list. Hold any offer, at any price, to these lines.

• A written list of what will be done, agreed first.
• Fixes done and tested again, with a note of each change. Google's page suggests asking whether the seller will share every change made to your site and the reasoning behind it.
• Reports from the search engines' own accounts, such as Search Console, in your name. The same page says Google does not evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and that those tools have no access to its internal ranking data. A tool's score is not a result.
• The setup fee and the minimum term. In Credo's survey 47.52% of SEO providers charged no onboarding fee, 30.29% had no minimum length, and 29.77% had a minimum of 6 to 12 months.

Questions to ask an SEO company has the full list.

What nobody can sell at any price

Google's page on hiring an SEO says: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." The same page says Google never accepts money to include or rank a site in its search results. A price buys work, and no price buys a position.

One-time or monthly

A one-time job fits faults that have an end: a new site, a rebuild, a report full of errors, a site nobody has looked at in years. Pay once, and keep the written list of what is left.

A monthly plan fits a list that keeps growing: a store whose catalog changes every week, several locations, pages being written, or an audit that left more than a few hours of work. Buy hours against a written list and read the report each month. How long SEO takes covers what Google says about waiting once the work is done.

WP Ministry's offers follow these shapes: a one-time audit with up to 2 hours of fixes, a one-time setup for a new or rebuilt site, a one-time AI search check, and plans of 4 or 8 hours a month.

What doing it yourself costs

It costs time, and no fee to Google. Search Console is, in Google's words, a free service, and Google's page on hiring says the owner of a small local business can probably do much of the work themselves, starting with its SEO Starter Guide. No published figure can tell you the hours, because they depend on the site. Time one pass through the WordPress SEO audit checklist and you will have your own.

Three free tools on this site do the first checks from outside:

• The page indexing check shows what could keep one page out of a search engine.
• The sitemap checker shows which sitemap a site has and how many addresses it lists.
• The robots.txt tester shows whether a rule blocks an address, and which line decides.