Pricing models, not a sales deck

SEO Pricing Guide 2026: Models, What's Included, How to Compare

SEO is sold in six common models: a monthly retainer, hourly consulting, a one-off project, a standalone audit, content-only production, and a separate links or outreach package. A retainer usually buys a mix of those jobs. Content-only buys pages. An audit buys a diagnosis. Hourly work buys advice. Links buy mentions, not articles.

Publisher-quoted ranges we fetched on 2026-10-14: WebFX lists retainers at $1,000-$5,000 per month, hourly work at $75-$200, and projects at $500-$5,000. Shopify lists monthly SEO from about $1,500 to more than $20,000 and a one-time technical audit at $2,500-$15,000. Those are quotes from those pages, not a survey and not a promise of what you will be charged.

FirstSearch is none of the full-agency models. It is content delivery: $1 for a 3-day trial, then $99/month per website for 30 done-for-you SEO articles, published via webhook or CMS integration. No link building. No technical audits. The per-article math lives on SEO content cost.

Last updated October 14, 2026.

SEO Pricing Models

Same word, six different products. Read the "what is included" column before you compare monthly numbers.

Model	Quoted range	What it usually buys	Who it fits
Monthly retainer	$1,000-$5,000 / month (WebFX, fetched 2026-10-14). Shopify quotes a wider monthly band of about $1,500 to $20,000+ for full-scope work.	Ongoing strategy, reporting, and a mix of technical, on-page, content, and sometimes links. Scope is whatever the contract lists, not a standard kit.	A business that wants one vendor to keep SEO moving every month and can fund a multi-month commitment.
Hourly consulting	$75-$200 / hour (WebFX, fetched 2026-10-14). Shopify lists hourly consulting at $150-$300.	Advice, reviews, and coaching. You or your team still do the implementation unless the hours are sold as hands-on work.	Owners who already publish and only need a specialist to check the plan, the site, or a stuck ranking.
Project / one-off	$500-$5,000 per project (WebFX, fetched 2026-10-14) for a bounded task such as a strategy, a set of page fixes, or a defined optimization sprint.	A written deliverable and a stop date. It does not include month-after-month publishing unless you buy that separately.	A site that needs one job done (migration help, a rewrite of key pages, a recovery plan) and will run the rest in-house.
SEO audit	Often sold as a project. Shopify (fetched 2026-10-14) quotes a one-time technical audit at $2,500-$15,000 and a content audit at $2,000-$10,000. WebFX folds audits into its $500-$5,000 project band.	A findings document: crawl issues, thin or duplicate pages, missing metadata, and a recommended order of work. Implementation is usually extra.	A site that already has traffic or a large URL inventory and needs a diagnosis before spending on retainers.
Content-only	FirstSearch is $99/month per website for 30 done-for-you SEO articles. Freelance and agency per-article quotes are commonly listed in the $200-$500 and $300-$800 bands on our per-article page. Those are typical budget ranges, not a survey.	Research, drafts or finished articles, and (if you buy a publisher) delivery to your CMS. Not technical SEO. Not link building.	A site whose bottleneck is publishing useful pages, not an audit or a link campaign.
Links / outreach	Quoted as a monthly package or per placement. We did not verify a single public per-link price in this run, so this page does not invent one.	Outreach, placements, or digital PR. Quality and relevance matter more than a count. This is not content production.	A site that already has pages worth linking to and is stuck on competitive terms where on-page work has stalled.

Sources for the dollar bands: WebFX SEO pricing and Shopify's 2026 SEO cost guide, both fetched 2026-10-14. FirstSearch's $99 figure is our public price, not a third-party quote.

What Drives the Price

The range is wide because the job is wide. These six variables decide whether you are looking at a few hundred dollars or a five-figure retainer.

Variable	What it changes
What is actually in the package	A retainer that includes technical work, content, and links costs more than a content-only subscription. Two quotes at the same monthly number are not comparable until you list the deliverables.
Site size and technical debt	A 30-page brochure site is cheaper to work on than a 3,000-URL catalog with crawl waste, parameter URLs, and a slow template. Audits and technical retainers scale with the inventory.
Competition and geography	Local service queries in a small city cost less to compete for than national or ecommerce head terms. The same agency will price those jobs differently because the hours are different.
Who does the work	A freelancer, a boutique shop, and a full-service agency sell different teams. Senior hours and account management show up in the invoice even when the published articles look similar.
Content volume	If the plan calls for many new URLs, writing and publishing become the largest line item. That is why a $99 content subscription and a $3,000 retainer can both be 'SEO' and buy completely different amounts of pages.
Contract length and reporting	Six-month retainers, weekly calls, and custom dashboards add cost. A fixed article quota with webhook delivery does not.

A local plumber and a national ecommerce catalog are not in the same market. The plumber may need a handful of service pages, a Google Business Profile (which FirstSearch does not manage), and a few articles that answer real questions. The catalog may need crawl budget work, faceted navigation fixes, and hundreds of unique page templates. Pricing those as the same "SEO package" is how buyers end up overpaying for the wrong job or underbuying the one they actually have.

Provider type matters in the same way. Hourly consulting is cheap per invoice and expensive if you never implement the notes. A full-service retainer is expensive per month and can still be a bad buy if the contract ships four blog posts and a ranking spreadsheet. Content-only is cheap relative to a retainer because it refuses the other jobs. That is a feature when content is the gap, and a defect when the site cannot be crawled.

How to Compare SEO Packages

Treat two quotes as incomparable until you can fill this checklist for both. The goal is to see what you are actually buying.

List the deliverables, not the slogan

Ask for a monthly count of new pages, optimized existing pages, technical tickets, and link placements. 'Full-service SEO' is not a deliverable. If content is included, ask who writes it, who publishes it, and where it lands.

Separate diagnosis from production

An audit tells you what is broken. It does not add URLs. A content plan adds URLs. A link package tries to earn mentions. Price each job on its own so you are not paying retainer rates for a PDF you could have bought once.

Check who owns the CMS and the publishing step

Drafts in Google Docs still need someone to format, add images, set metadata, and hit publish. If that person is you, the quote is incomplete. FirstSearch publishes through a webhook or CMS integration after you connect the site.

Ask what happens in month two if rankings are flat

SEO is slow. Flat months are normal. What you want in writing is whether the vendor keeps shipping the same deliverables, changes the keyword set, or bills for 'strategy time' with no new pages.

Reject guarantees you cannot verify

No honest vendor can promise page-1 rankings, a traffic number, or a payback month. Compare process and volume. Rankings depend on competition, existing authority, indexing, and whether the page matches the query.

Price your own time

Briefs, revision rounds, and manual uploads are part of the cost even when they do not appear on the invoice. A cheaper hourly rate that consumes your week is not cheaper.

Confirm what is out of scope

Link building, Google Business Profile, paid ads, and developer tickets are often extras. FirstSearch is explicit: content delivery only. If a package is silent on those items, assume they are not included.

A practical way to finish the comparison: write one line for each quote that says "for $X per month I get Y live pages, Z technical tickets, and N placements, and I will spend H hours of my own time." If you cannot fill Y, the quote is a brand, not a package. If Y is zero and the PDF is long, you bought an audit or a strategy, which can be useful, but it is not the same product as publishing.

Where Content Fits in the Budget

Content is often the biggest line item because it is the only part of SEO that creates new URLs at scale. Technical work fixes the site you already have. Links try to earn attention for pages that already exist. Neither replaces a library of pages that match the queries you want to rank for.

That is why a thin retainer can feel expensive and still leave the calendar empty. If the contract includes "content" as four posts a month, you are buying coverage of four queries. If the rest of the fee is meetings, reporting, and light on-page edits, the content line is small and the overhead line is large. Flip the invoice: a content-only service that ships about 30 articles a month spends almost the entire fee on pages.

FirstSearch is built for that second shape. $1 for a 3-day trial, then $99/month per website, for 30 done-for-you SEO articles. Keyword targeting, the article, images, and publishing through a webhook or CMS integration are included. You connect the site once. It is not a writer marketplace and it is not an agency Slack channel.

The per-article comparison (freelance, agency, in-house, DIY AI tools) is the job of the SEO content cost page. This page stays on whole-SEO pricing: when content should be a line inside a retainer, when it should be a separate subscription, and when it is the wrong purchase because the site still needs an audit or links.

Buy content-only when the site is crawlable, the niche is clear, and the missing piece is consistent publishing. Buy an audit first when Search Console is full of "crawled, not indexed," the templates are broken, or you have hundreds of near-duplicate URLs. Buy links only after you have pages worth linking to. Mixing those three into one vague monthly number is how packages become hard to compare.

When FirstSearch Fits, and When It Does Not

It fits

You need a steady stream of SEO articles on your own site and you will not write them.
You already have a CMS (WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, or a custom webhook receiver) and can connect it once.
You want a fixed $99/month per website instead of a retainer that hides content inside a larger fee.
You accept that this is content delivery, not a full agency: no links, no technical audit, no Google Business Profile.

It does not

You need YMYL expertise, a named human byline, interviews, or a founder voice that cannot be templated.
The site is blocked, broken, or unindexed. More articles will not fix robots, noindex, or a crawl trap.
Your real gap is link building, local pack rankings, or a technical rebuild. Those are different products.
You want one vendor to run ads, social, and SEO under a single monthly number.

The honest split is: FirstSearch replaces the content-production and publishing slice of an SEO budget. It does not replace an SEO lead, a developer, or an outreach person. If a proposal already includes 30 articles a month plus those other roles, compare the content slice to $99 and decide whether the rest of the proposal is still worth its remaining fee.

If the Missing Piece Is the Articles

FirstSearch delivers 30 SEO articles per month per website to your CMS via webhook. $1 for a 3-day trial, then $99/month. Cancel anytime. It is content delivery, not a full-service agency.

30 articles/month per website

Published via webhook or CMS

$1 3-day trial, then $99/month

No links, no technical audits

Start for $1 See Pricing

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does SEO typically cost?

There is no single typical cost. Publisher-quoted ranges we fetched on 2026-10-14: WebFX lists monthly retainers at $1,000-$5,000, hourly work at $75-$200, and projects at $500-$5,000. Shopify lists monthly SEO from about $1,500 to more than $20,000, and a one-time technical audit at $2,500-$15,000. FirstSearch is not a full SEO retainer. It is $1 for a 3-day trial, then $99/month per website for 30 done-for-you SEO articles published via webhook or CMS.

How much does SEO cost per month?

A commonly quoted small-business monthly band is $1,000-$3,500 (Shopify $1,000-$1,500 for a small starting site; WebFX $1,500-$3,500 for small businesses). Full-scope retainers on those same pages run higher. Content-only is a different number: FirstSearch is $99/month per website for 30 articles. Compare monthly cost against what actually ships, not against the word 'SEO'.

How much should you charge for SEO?

If you sell SEO, charge from the hours and deliverables, not from a copied 'industry rate.' The public ranges on this page (WebFX and Shopify, fetched 2026-10-14) are what buyers already see, so a quote far outside them needs a clear scope (enterprise, ecommerce, multi-location, or heavy technical work). If you sell content only, price the articles and the publishing step. FirstSearch's public price is $99/month for 30 articles per website.

What is the 80/20 rule in SEO?

It is a rule of thumb, not a study result: a minority of pages, queries, or tasks usually produce most of the traffic or leads. In a pricing conversation that means you should spend first on the work that creates useful, indexed pages on the queries you can actually win, not on a little of every SEO service. Content volume is often that 20 percent of the budget that produces most of the new URLs.

Is SEO still worth it in 2026?

It can be, if you can wait and if you ship pages that match real searches. Paid ads stop when the budget stops. A useful page can keep earning visits after you have paid to create it. It is not worth it if you need leads this week, if the site cannot be crawled, or if you buy a retainer that produces reports instead of URLs. FirstSearch is worth it only when the missing piece is consistent SEO articles on your own site.

How do I compare SEO packages?

Write down new pages per month, existing pages touched, technical tickets, link placements, who publishes, contract length, and what is explicitly out of scope. Then divide the monthly cash (plus your time) by the pages that actually go live. Two $2,000 retainers are not equal if one ships four articles and the other ships a slide deck. Use the checklist on this page.

What are the main SEO pricing models?

The models buyers usually see are monthly retainer, hourly consulting, project or one-off work, a standalone audit, content-only production, and a separate links or outreach package. A retainer can include several of those. Content-only (including FirstSearch at $99/month for 30 articles) does not replace an audit or link building.