SEO cost per month for a small business

The published range

Among agencies in the trades that publish a starting price, reported monthly figures run from about $650 to $3,000, with Townsquare Interactive lower at $300 to $1,000 and specialist retainers higher. The rest of the cost and pricing guides break the same question down by service line. Mindflow starts at $3,500.

All third-party prices on this page are the figures those agencies or third-party lists published as at 26 July 2026. They are reported rather than confirmed by us, and only our own numbers were verified.

What changes it for a small business specifically

One location or several. The single biggest multiplier.

Market competition. The same work costs more in a metro where three competitors run real programmes.

Starting condition. Entity cleanup is front-loaded work. A business with clean listings starts cheaper.

How many services you push. Two service lines is roughly twice the content surface of one.

Working out whether you are at the right level

Apply the revenue benchmark. Business Development Resources puts under-$1M home-service businesses at 10 to 15% of revenue across all marketing. Your SEO retainer is one part of that, not the whole of it.

A $600,000 business at 12% has about $72,000 a year across every channel. A $3,000 monthly retainer is half of that, which may be right or may be too concentrated in one channel.

The trap at the small end

Buying the cheapest retainer and adding channels later usually costs more than buying one properly scoped thing and doing it well. Spread thin across five channels, nothing reaches the threshold where it works.

Pick the channel your buyers actually use and fund it properly.

What we would say on a call

Under roughly $1M in revenue, our floor is a disproportionate share of a sensible marketing budget, and we will usually tell you so rather than take the engagement.

“Spread thin across five channels, nothing reaches the threshold where it starts working.”