How SEO is priced, and what you are paying for
What decides an SEO price
An SEO price is the sum of four disciplines and the rate they ship at. Technical work makes the site readable. On-page work builds and fixes the pages that earn rankings. Off-page work builds the external record. AI search work makes your facts quotable by answer engines. The monthly number tracks how much of each ships and how contested your market is. Our own prices sit on the pricing page.
The four disciplines inside an SEO price
Any quote worth comparing states how much of each of these ships in a month.
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, rendering, redirects, speed and structured data. It is priced by how much debt the site carries, and it comes first because content published into a broken foundation earns nothing.
On-page and content
The pages themselves: one per buying search, written to answer it completely. Priced per page, and page count is the honest unit of a retainer.
Off-page and sources
Directories, reviews, citations, editorial mentions and digital PR. Priced in hours and relationships rather than software, which is why it is the first thing a cheap retainer drops.
Local search
Profiles, categories, service areas and the review flow, plus a page per area you serve. Priced by the number of locations and areas.
AI search and answers
Entity facts, retrievable page structure, crawler access and weekly answer readings. Priced by the number of buying questions tracked and the surfaces measured.
Measurement
Query-level reporting, surface readings and enquiry tracking. Small as a line item, and it is what makes every other line checkable.
We built a roofing company to $1 million a year on search alone
Searchmaxxed grew out of Radiant Roof Repairs, a Gold Coast roofing business Brenden built with search as its only marketing channel. Everything below comes from that company's own records, and it is the only result on this site that is ours rather than a client's.
A new business with no traffic and no reviews reached more than $1 million a year in revenue.
Three high-intent roofing searches held the top organic position within 90 days of the work starting.
No ad budget, no bought leads, no outbound calling, so every enquiry traced back to a page or the profile.
One market with beatable competitors. Yours is sized in the audit before anyone promises a timeline.
Revenue comes from the company's own records and the search figures from Google Search Console for the same property. It records what happened in one market, and your market gets sized in the audit.
Read how it was done →Why two quotes at the same price differ by five times
Most proposals price a bundle of hours and describe deliverables in language that fits any amount of work. Ten pages and two pages both read as content production.
The gap shows up in month two, when one provider ships pages and the other ships a report about pages.
No stated unit of work
If the quote never says how many pages, fixes or source actions ship in a month, there is nothing to compare and nothing to enforce.
Technical work assumed, not scoped
A site with indexation faults needs that work first. A quote that skips it is quoting for content that will not rank.
Off-page silently dropped
Source work is the most labour-heavy line, so it is the first to disappear from a cheap retainer while the invoice stays the same.
Reporting without enquiries
Positions and sessions are inputs. A price is only justifiable against calls, forms and revenue.
How a monthly price gets built
Four inputs decide the number, in this order.
Site condition
Crawl, index coverage, template history, migration history
A fix list with the work sized before anything is quoted
Market difficulty
Competitor page counts, source profiles, search demand
A page and source target per search worth winning
Production rate
Approved plan, your approval capacity
A monthly production commitment you can hold us to
Measurement scope
Search set, surfaces, locations, CRM access
A reporting scope attached to the price
How to check you are paying for work
Four questions, every month, of any provider including us.
WHAT SHIPPED
The change log: pages published, fixes deployed, sources built. Named, dated and checkable against the commitment.
WHAT MOVED
Query-level movement for the pages that shipped, rather than a sitewide average that hides them.
ENQUIRIES
Calls and forms attributed to those pages and searches, with job or deal value where you can share it.
WHAT IS NEXT
Next month's plan, drawn from those readings rather than from a content calendar written in month one.
What each discipline looks like as a service
The service pages state the scope in full.
Technical SEO
Search engine optimisation
Off-Page Source Layer
What we charge
Our two packages, their prices and their monthly production units are published on the pricing page. Terms are agreed on the call.
One search system, two levels of output.
What every package includes
- ✓Audits and diagnostics. AI visibility baseline, technical audit, gap analysis and opportunity sizing, run continuously and read weekly.
- ✓Strategy and plans. A 90-day plan prioritized by commercial impact, broken into weekly shipped releases.
- ✓Fully handled implementation. Pages, technical work, schema, internal links and source-layer actions: built, approved and deployed by us.
- ✓Measurement and reporting. Rank, visibility, AI answer presence and enquiries, benchmarked against competitors, reported in a monthly decision memo.
- ✓Direct access. You talk to the people doing the work. No account managers.
- ✓Approval gates. A person signs off every public change before it ships, with deployment proof after.
- ✓Your data, verified. Search Console and GA4 wired and checked, so every claim traces to a number.
- ✓Experiment memory. Every result feeds the playbook, so nothing gets learned twice.
- ✓The release log. Watch the work ship in real time, every release logged with its deployment proof.
- ✓You own everything. Site, repository, content and data are yours from day one. No lock-in beyond the term.
$6,500
/mo- ✓30 production units a month: pages, rebuilds, technical work
- ✓New commercial pages shipped as the loop finds each win
- ✓Landing page optimization on up to 4 existing pages a month
- ✓Technical, schema and internal-link batches every month
- ✓Source layer basics: citations, profiles, reviews
- ✓One qualified link action every month
- ✓Reddit engagement scaled to 10 mentions per month
- ✓AI visibility tracking plus the monthly decision memo
- ✓Every new page submitted to Google and indexation-verified
$11,000
/mo- ✓50 production units a month, shipped in weekly releases
- ✓Net-new comparison, industry and integration page families
- ✓Site-wide content and technical audits, continuous, read weekly
- ✓A press release written and distributed every month
- ✓Continuous digital PR and qualified link campaigns
- ✓Reddit engagement scaled to 20 mentions per month
- ✓AI answer tracking: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews
- ✓Quarterly competitor teardown and executive review
- ✓A quarterly proof asset built from your own wins, engineered to earn links
More on pricing and scope
Written by the team running this work for clients.
SEO Pricing for Accounting Firms: What to Expect
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SEO Pricing for Financial Advisory Firms: What to Expect
Healthcare Clinic SEO to Lower Acquisition Cost
SEO Pricing for IT Services Firms: What to Expect
AEO Pricing: What Should Answer Engine Optimization Cost?
SEO Pricing Australia: What SEO Costs and What You Get
Questions about SEO pricing
How much does SEO cost in total?
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Why do agencies avoid publishing prices?
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Is cheap SEO ever worth it?
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Should technical work be a separate project?
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How is off-page work priced?
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Does AI search cost extra?
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When does SEO pay for itself?
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What are your prices?
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- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- Google Search Central, Search Console performance report
- Google, Guidelines for representing your business on Google
Written and reviewed by Brenden at Searchmaxxed. Last reviewed 19 August 2026.