We publish ranges for SEO, not a single price, because “SEO” names a category of work rather than a scope. This post sets out the questions we ask before a number exists, as a worksheet you can fill in yourself, and shows how the answers place a site within the ranges on our own rate card.
Why “SEO” cannot carry one honest flat rate
Asking the price of SEO is like asking the price of construction without saying whether it is a fence or a foundation. A flat rate is either set low enough to win the easiest case, and under-delivers on every harder one, or set high enough for the hard cases, and the easy ones pay for headroom they never use.
Agencies that publish one number are usually doing one of two things. Some price a genuinely narrow, standard scope, such as a single-location local package, and call it SEO. Others price to win the call and trim the scope once the work starts. The first is honest and narrow; the second is the one to watch for.
What our rate card publishes instead
Our pricing page shows a range for each shape of SEO work: a one-off audit, a monthly programme, content per article and migration SEO. Each range comes with the driver that moves a site up or down it, written out in words. The table below summarises those published drivers.
| Shape of work | What moves the price within its range |
|---|---|
| Technical and strategy audit | Site size: a 200-page B2B site and a 40,000-SKU catalogue are different audits |
| Monthly SEO programme | How much of the work is content and links against technical fixes; content-heavy programmes sit at the top |
| Link earning | Market difficulty: regulated finance and local home services are very different jobs |
| Local SEO | Listing debt: a clean profile and one with a hijacked duplicate and wrong phone numbers cost different amounts to run |
| eCommerce SEO | Catalogue size sets the band; catalogues of 10,000 or more SKUs sit at the top |
| Enterprise SEO | The top of the range and often beyond it, quoted to scope |
A range with its reasons is the honest middle ground. It tells you before any call whether the work is likely to fit your budget, and the questions below decide where in the range your site sits.
- Fits
- One article at a set depth; each added location
- How it is priced
- Per unit on our rate card
- Fits
- An audit, a monthly programme, link earning, local SEO
- How it is priced
- A range, and the driver that places a site in it
- Fits
- Enterprise SEO
- How it is priced
- The top of the range and often beyond it
The time shapes are published too. In our rate card the audit takes 2 to 3 weeks, migration SEO runs alongside the build, and the monthly programme has a 3-month minimum. A quote that leaves out how long the work runs is only half a quote.
The pre-quote worksheet
These are the questions we work through before naming a number. Most of them you can answer yourself in an afternoon, and doing so makes any agency’s quote, ours included, easier to compare.
| Question | Why we ask it | What it moves |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Which searches must you win, and who ranks for them today? | Competition sets the floor for the effort, whatever your own site’s condition | The whole programme, more than any other answer |
| 2. How many pages, templates or products does the site have? | Size drives crawl, audit and fix work | The audit, and the band for catalogues |
| 3. What state is the site in technically, and how often does it release? | A site that deploys daily breaks more than one that deploys quarterly | The share of technical fixes and whether maintenance is needed |
| 4. Is there content to build from scratch, or a library to fix? | Judging hundreds of existing pages one by one often costs more per page than writing new ones | The content share of the programme |
| 5. How many sites link to yours, and did you earn them? | A newer site needs link earning funded as its own line | Whether a link programme is needed, and its size |
| 6. How many locations, and what state are the listings in? | Each location is its own profile to clean and keep | The local programme, priced per location |
| 7. When do you need the result, and when would you like it? | Some of what search measures, such as accumulated trust, cannot be rushed at any price | Pace, and sometimes whether the target is realistic |
| 8. Who on your side approves content and ships fixes? | Work waiting for approval or a developer stalls the plan | How much we do ourselves and how fast it moves |
Question one carries the most weight. Where the answers are unclear, we recommend starting with the free review: a short focused review, scoped before we start, which shows what ranks for your target searches and where your site stands. Where the budget sits below the floor for those searches, we say that too.
Two sites that both say they need “SEO”
Illustrative, with no figures attached, just the shape of the difference. Business A is a single-location service business with a clean, modern site, competing with two or three similar local firms for a handful of well-defined searches. Most of its work is a focused content and local push against a narrow, winnable target.
Business B is a national retailer on an ageing platform, with thousands of product pages carrying years of technical debt and five funded competitors on the same category terms. Before content can work, the debt needs technical SEO remediation, and the authority gap needs sustained content and link earning over a much longer runway.
Same word, two programmes that differ by several multiples of effort. A flat rate that fitted A would under-deliver badly for B; one that fitted B would overcharge A. The worksheet is how each gets a number that matches its own situation.
When a flat rate is the right answer
Fixed prices are not dishonest in themselves, and some of our own work is priced per unit. A flat rate fits when the scope genuinely does not vary:
- A single piece of work with a defined output, such as one SEO article at a set depth, priced per article on our rate card.
- Each additional location in a local programme, once the first location’s set-up is done.
- A narrow local package for a business whose competition and listings are simple, provided it says that is what it is.
What a flat rate cannot fairly cover is “SEO” as a whole, where the answers to the worksheet change the work by multiples.
Written by
Parvessh Agarwal
Founder and Chief Executive, Vinove
Parvessh founded Vinove in 2004 with one idea: build focused technology companies that earn their place in real markets. His focus is on the long game, on companies that survive and serve real customers long after launch.
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