There is no list price for SEO consulting, because the effort depends on the starting point. Three models are common: a project at a fixed price, a monthly retainer for ongoing support, or billing by effort. What drives the price is less the size of your website than the distance between where you rank today and where you want to be.
The three common billing models
Project at a fixed price
The scope is described up front and the price is fixed. This suits bounded tasks: an audit, guiding a relaunch, building a site structure. The advantage is predictability. The drawback is that anything discovered along the way has to be renegotiated.
Monthly retainer
You book a fixed monthly allocation for ongoing work. It pays off when content is produced regularly, several people need coordinating, or the website keeps changing. Watch the notice period and whether unused hours expire.
Billing by effort
You pay for the hours actually worked. That is honest when the scope is genuinely open, but it requires trust and clean reporting. It is rarely the best model to start with, because nobody knows in advance where the invoice will land.
What drives the price
- The starting point. Technical debt costs time. A site reachable over several addresses, or one whose pages compete with each other, has to be tidied up before content can have any effect.
- Competition for your terms. A niche term with few serious providers is reachable within months. A term that established players have fought over for years takes considerably more effort, or is simply the wrong target.
- Who does the work. Consulting that only analyses and leaves implementation to your team costs less than consulting that writes and builds. Both are legitimate, it just has to be clear beforehand.
- Languages and locations. Every additional language version and every additional location multiplies the work on content and local signals.
How to recognise a fair proposal
A usable proposal comes after an analysis, not before it. It names what will be done, who does it and how you will measure success. It separates one-off effort from ongoing work. And it states openly what is not included, so there is no surprise later. What belongs in such an analysis is covered in the SEO audit checklist.
Warning signs
- A guarantee of position 1. Nobody controls Google's ranking, and anyone promising it is selling either luck or risk.
- A packaged offer that was fixed before anyone looked at your website.
- Monthly reports as the main deliverable. A report does not change a ranking.
- Long minimum terms with no way out. SEO needs patience, but not a two-year lock-in.
How to frame the budget
The more useful question is not what consulting costs per month, but what one additional enquiry is worth to you. Once you know how many enquiries turn into a deal and what a customer contributes over time, you can work out how many extra enquiries it takes to cover the effort. That calculation is more honest than any industry benchmark. How to measure enquiries from existing traffic properly is covered in the article on conversion rates.
If you want to know where your website stands before committing a budget, the free short analysis shows the biggest blockers. For ongoing support, see the page on SEO consulting in Zurich.
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