How much does SEO cost for a local business?
Short answer
It depends on how competitive your trade and area are, how many services and cities you want to rank for, the state of your site and Google Business Profile, and how much of the work is ongoing. I won't quote a number without measuring first, because any figure given before that is a package price.
The cost of SEO (search engine optimization) for a local business depends on how much work it takes to move your rankings in your trade and your area, and I won’t quote a number until I have measured that. A figure given before anyone has looked at your site and Google Business Profile, or at your competitors, is a package price. A package price reflects what the seller has decided to sell, and it may or may not match what your business needs.
What drives the cost
You’re paying for work, and the table shows what sets the amount.
| Driver | Why it changes the amount of work |
|---|---|
| How competitive your trade and area are | A roofer competing across the city of San Diego is up against more established companies than an electrician working mainly around Ramona. More competition means more has to be done before anything moves. |
| How many services and cities you want | Each service in each city is its own set of searches. Wanting water heater calls in Chula Vista is a smaller job than wanting ten services across the whole county. |
| The state of your site and profile today | A sound site with a complete, verified profile needs adjusting. A slow site with thin pages, or a profile with the wrong category, needs repair before anything else. |
| How much of the work is ongoing | Some work is done once, such as fixing technical faults. Some continues, such as testing changes, earning reviews and links, and keeping pages current. |
One-time work and ongoing work
A quote usually blends work that ends with work that doesn’t, and it helps to see them apart. Finding and fixing what is wrong has an end: the audit, technical repairs, rewriting the main service pages, setting the profile up properly. The monthly cycle of measuring, changing one thing and measuring again goes on for as long as there’s ground worth gaining.
Ask any provider which parts of the quote are which. If the fee is the same flat amount from the first month onward, ask what the first month’s work is and what the sixth month’s work is. The two answers should be different.
How to judge a quote
The number alone tells you very little. Look at what you get for it.
- What is delivered each month, as named tasks you could check for yourself.
- What is measured: rankings across your service area, calls and form submissions, and how each one is counted.
- What the terms are: how long you’re committed, how much notice it takes to leave, and who owns the site, the content and the accounts.
- Who does the work, and whether you can talk to that person.
Two quotes can be compared only once both are described this way, however much SEO prices vary between providers.
What to measure the cost against
You already know roughly what a booked job is worth and how many more your crews could take on. Set the cost against the value of those jobs. SEO makes sense when the extra jobs are worth more than the work costs, once you allow for how long local SEO takes to have an effect.
It doesn’t always make sense. If your schedule is already full, or you need calls this week, the money may be better spent elsewhere for now.
How I arrive at a number
I measure first. A Scientific SEO Audit shows where you rank across your service area and what condition the site and profile are in. It also shows what the companies above you have that you don’t. From that I can say what work is needed and what it would cost for your business in particular.
If the measurements show the work wouldn’t pay for itself, I’ll tell you that. There’s no long contract, and since I do the work myself, I’m the person you talk to and the one measuring before and after each change.