If you ask the internet what SEO costs, you get a range: a few hundred dollars a month at one end, tens of thousands at the other. That range is technically accurate and practically useless, because it does not tell you where in the range you should expect to land, or what moves a quote from one end to the other.
We have a directory of 2,117 agency profiles, and 1,143 of them publish an hourly-rate band. So rather than quote a range, here is the distribution.
The short answer
Three quarters of agencies that publish a rate at all sit between $100 and $199 an hour.
| Hourly band | Agencies | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under $25 | 57 | 5.0% |
| $25 – $49 | 64 | 5.6% |
| $50 – $99 | 166 | 14.5% |
| $100 – $149 | 533 | 46.6% |
| $150 – $199 | 303 | 26.5% |
| $200 – $300 | 19 | 1.7% |
| $300+ | 1 | 0.1% |
The modal agency publishes $100–$149/hr. One in four publishes something under $100. Just 20 of the 1,143 publish anything above $200 — worth remembering the next time a proposal frames a $250/hr senior rate as the market norm. In this dataset, that is the ninety-eighth percentile.
What that means per month
Agencies sell retainers, not hours, so the hourly band only becomes a budget once you attach a number of hours to it. That arithmetic is simple and worth doing out loud, because it is the calculation the agency is doing on their side of the table:
| Hours per month | At $100/hr | At $125/hr | At $175/hr |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | $1,000 | $1,250 | $1,750 |
| 20 | $2,000 | $2,500 | $3,500 |
| 40 | $4,000 | $5,000 | $7,000 |
Those are not survey results — they are the directory’s rate bands multiplied by a monthly hour count. But they are the reason two agencies can quote wildly different retainers and both be honest. A $2,500 retainer at $125/hr buys twenty hours. The same $2,500 at $60/hr buys forty. Neither is better until you know what is being done with the time.
This is the single most useful question to bring to a pricing conversation: how many hours a month does this retainer represent, and how are they split between strategy, production and reporting? An agency that cannot answer it is not pricing your work; it is pricing your budget.
The finding that surprised us: bigger agencies are not more expensive
The intuition is that a 300-person agency costs more per hour than a five-person shop — more overhead, more seniority, more process. In our data it runs the other way.
| Team size | Publish under $100/hr |
|---|---|
| 2 – 9 people | 23.4% |
| 10 – 49 people | 19.8% |
| 50 – 249 people | 36.4% |
| 250 – 999 people | 45.5% |
Nearly half of the largest agencies publish a rate under $100 an hour — roughly double the rate of a two-to-nine person shop. Among the 44 largest firms with a published rate, 20 sit under $100/hr and 16 sit under $50.
The likely explanation is that headcount is a delivery-model signal, not a seniority signal. Past a certain size, an agency is not a bigger version of a small agency; it is an organisation with a production floor, often in a lower-cost market, and the published rate reflects the blended cost of that floor. That is not a criticism — it is how the economics of scaled delivery work — but it does mean you cannot read headcount as a proxy for either price or expertise.
The practical version: stop treating agency size as a quality tier. Ask who is actually assigned to your account, how senior they are, and how many other accounts they carry. Those three answers explain more about what you will receive than the size band on anyone’s website.
Nearly half won’t tell you at all
974 of the 2,117 profiles — 46% — publish no rate band whatsoever. That is not necessarily evasion. Plenty of good agencies genuinely scope every engagement and would rather not anchor you to a number that turns out to be wrong in either direction.
But it does mean that for roughly half the market, price discovery only starts once you are in a sales process. If you are shortlisting, that is an argument for asking about pricing model in your first email rather than your third call — not to negotiate, but to find out quickly whether you are in the same universe. The SEO company rankings list team size and published rate on each profile where the agency discloses them, which is a faster filter than a round of discovery calls.
What a rate does and does not tell you
An hourly band is a genuinely useful signal about one thing: the cost base of the people doing the work. A firm publishing $150–$199 is telling you it staffs engagements with people whose time is expensive. A firm publishing under $50 is telling you the opposite. Both statements are usually true.
What the rate does not tell you:
- Whether the hours are well spent. Twenty hours of considered work beats forty hours of reporting theatre at any price.
- Who is on your account. Blended rates hide the split between the strategist who won the pitch and the coordinator who runs the account.
- What is included. Content production, technical development and link acquisition are frequently quoted separately, and a low retainer with everything billed as an extra is not a low retainer.
- Whether it is right for your market. Competitive commercial categories need more hours to move at all, and a small retainer in a hard vertical mostly buys evidence that the retainer was too small.
Turning this into a budget
A workable sequence, in order:
- Decide the outcome, then the hours. “We want to be findable for these fifteen commercial terms” is scopeable. “We want more traffic” is not.
- Ask every shortlisted agency for hours, not just price. Then compare the hour counts, which is where the real difference usually lives.
- Sanity-check the rate against the delivery model. If the implied rate is under $50/hr, ask directly where the work is done and by whom. There is often a good answer. You want to have heard it.
- Budget for a minimum viable engagement, not a trial. Retainers below roughly ten hours a month tend to be consumed by account management and reporting before any work happens.
- Compare like with like. Pull three or four agencies from the same tier — the SEO rankings, or local SEO and ecommerce SEO if your work is specialised — rather than one boutique against one enterprise shop.
If you want the other half of this question — what you can realistically buy at a given monthly number — that is what different SEO budgets actually get you. And if you are still building a shortlist, how to choose an SEO company covers what to verify before the first call.