How much does SEO cost, and what’s actually in the budget

Short answer. Ahrefs polled 439 SEO providers (updated August 2024): agencies charge $3,209 a month on average, freelancers $1,348, and 63% of businesses spend between $500 and $5,000. Quotes differ that much mostly because of what’s inside the number: who implements fixes on the site, whether content is paid for, and how many links you get from which sites.

Links swing the most. We pulled every English-language site from the Collaborator link marketplace on 12 November 2026, 18,047 sites in total. On sites with at least 1,000 organic visits a month and DR 30 or higher, a sponsored article costs $320 at the median, or $342 with the writing included.

Our own plans are $1,000, $2,500 and from $5,000 a month, with what’s included listed on the SEO services page. Below is how to compare any quote, ours included.

The five lines of a monthly SEO budget

Every SEO proposal breaks down into five lines. The agency folds some into the retainer, bills some separately, and quietly leaves some with you.

The second line is the one that goes missing. The audit finds dozens of problems, a report shows up every month, and nothing changes on the site because nobody ships the fixes. If you don’t have your own developer, implementation hours should be a separate line in the quote.

Tools cost less than people expect, but not nothing. The SE Ranking rank tracker, for example, charges $129 a month for its Core plan on monthly billing (price as of 12 November 2026). Search Console and Google Analytics are free.

If the proposal includes GEO, meaning work on how AI systems answer about you, that’s a separate line with its own measurement. We track a brand’s share of presence on a fixed set of prompts in our own tracker, tracker.answerly.agency. What that work involves is on the GEO promotion page.

What links actually cost

Pricing guides usually give links one line and no breakdown by site quality. We wanted to see what the money buys.

How we counted: we exported every English-language site that accepts sponsored articles from the Collaborator catalog via its API, 18,047 sites as of 12 November 2026. Most are listed with a US or UK audience. For each one we took the article placement price and the organic traffic estimate shown in the catalog. Collaborator lists prices in Ukrainian hryvnias, so we converted them at the National Bank of Ukraine rate for that day, 45.32 UAH to the dollar.

What follows from it.

Cheap placements exist, and they sit on sites nobody visits from search. On sites with zero organic traffic the median is $53, and a quarter of offers cost $21 or less.

They’re also the majority. 57% of the sites in the catalog get fewer than 1,000 organic visits a month, and 13% get none.

Sites with at least 1,000 organic visits and DR 30 or higher (Ahrefs domain rating) make up 6,205 of the catalog, or 34%. The median there is $320 per placement and $21 for writing the article. Five such links a month come to about $1,700, ten to about $3,400.

So here’s our view: a budget under roughly $1,000 a month can’t cover specialist time, implementation and links on sites with real traffic at the same time. Five of those placements alone cost more. If a proposal at that price promises 5 to 10 links a month, ask for last month’s list of domains.

The limits of this snapshot. Traffic in the catalog is a third-party estimate, not the sites’ own analytics. Site owners set the prices and change them. Collaborator is one marketplace, and its English-language inventory isn’t the whole market. And a median says nothing about whether a specific link will help your rankings.

A hypothetical: two quotes for the same site

This is a made-up example, not a client. A service business site in the US, about 50 pages, no in-house developer.

A $1,700 gap looks huge. But to get the same scope out of Quote A, you’d have to add developer hours, four pieces of content and the links, and five to ten placements on sites with traffic run about $1,700 to $3,400 by our numbers. The gap shrinks, and part of the work lands on you: finding a developer, approving content, picking sites.

Quote B matches our Growth plan. Site fees for the placements aren’t included in the $2,500: we bill them separately, within a monthly budget agreed with the client.

Seven questions to ask about any quote

1. Who ships the fixes on the site, and how many hours are budgeted for it?
2. How many pages get optimized each month, and which ones?
3. How many pieces of content a month, and who checks the facts?
4. How many links, on which sites, and are the site fees in the price? Ask for last month’s list of domains.
5. Which tools do you pay for, and which does the provider?
6. What’s the minimum term, and what happens if the numbers don’t move in two months? Ours is three months, then month to month.
7. What goes in the report: rankings, traffic, leads? A rankings-only report doesn’t tell you whether SEO makes money.

What you can check for free before paying for an audit

You can do part of the diagnosis yourself in an evening.

• Google Search Console, Pages report: which URLs aren’t indexed and why.
• PageSpeed Insights: load speed and Core Web Vitals for the mobile version.
• Our schema validator: pulls the JSON-LD from a page and shows which required properties are missing.
• Our AI crawler checker: which of 23 AI bots can reach your site. Worth it if visibility in ChatGPT or AI Overviews matters to you.

None of this replaces an audit. But you’ll come to a provider with specific questions and see faster whether they understand your site.

When it’s too early to pay for SEO

The site is still being built. Structure and technical requirements are cheaper to get right before launch than to rework afterwards.

Nobody searches for it. Check the volume of your main queries in Google Ads Keyword Planner. If people don’t search for what you sell, SEO won’t create the demand.

You need leads this month. SEO takes months to show change. For a fast start, Google Ads is the more honest choice.

The budget can’t cover even one line properly. Then fully fund one, say technical fixes, rather than spreading the money thin across all five.

What to have ready for an accurate estimate

• the site URL and CMS;
• the number of pages or products;
• the regions and languages you target;
• who will ship fixes: your developer or the provider;
• read access to Search Console and Google Analytics;
• what counts as a result for you: leads, sales or calls.

With that list, an estimate takes one call. Online stores need more, because filters, product pages and Merchant Center come into play, so see ecommerce SEO separately. Plans for other sites and the request form are on the SEO services page.

Author: Yevhenii Chyzh, founder of Chyzh Agency. Reviewed by Dmytro Popryadukhin, Head of SEO.

Sources: Google US search results for “how much does seo cost”, 12 Nov 2026; Ahrefs, “SEO Pricing: How Much Does SEO Cost? 439 People Polled”, updated 15 Aug 2024; Collaborator catalog export via API, 18,047 English-language sites, 12 Nov 2026; National Bank of Ukraine official rate for 12 Nov 2026, 45.3222 UAH per USD; SE Ranking pricing page, 12 Nov 2026; Chyzh Agency plans on the SEO services page, 12 Nov 2026.