Affordable SEO Services: How to Budget for Them (And Which to Use)
What is affordable SEO?
Affordable SEO services are SEO support priced to fit your business’s budget and goals. Affordability is relative — what’s considered affordable for an enterprise-level business can be considered unaffordable to a small business. The goal is identical, though: Optimize costs while supporting SEO performance in Google’s search results and AI answers.
How much does affordable SEO cost?
Hundreds of U.S.-based marketers shared their SEO costs with us, providing benchmarks for how much businesses of varying sizes pay for one-time, monthly, or hourly SEO support:
| Business size | SEO cost (Hourly) | SEO cost (Monthly) | SEO cost (Project) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro-enterprise (1-10 employees) | $75 - $100 | $501 - $1,000 | $500 - $1000 |
| Small business (11-50 employees) | $50 - $75 | $1,000 - $2,500 | $1,000 - $2,500 |
| Mid-sized business (51-250 employees) | $50 - $75 | $2,500 - $5,000 | $2,500 - $5,000 |
| Large business (251-500 employees) | $50 - $75 | $2,500 - $5,000 | $1,000 - $7,500 |
| Enterprise business (501+ employees) | $50-$75 | $2,500 - $5,000 | $2,500 - $5,000 |
These rates provide a baseline for how much affordable SEO services cost.
For an outside comparison, Ahrefs reports that $501 to $1,000 per month is the most popular monthly retainer rate among SEOs, charged by 20.4% of respondents.
Is SEO affordable for businesses today?
Yes, SEO is affordable, whether managed in-house or outsourced. Making SEO affordable, however, requires setting expectations with leadership, creating a strategic budget, and evaluating spend and performance regularly.
What are the most affordable SEO services?
The most affordable SEO services often focus on the most impactful SEO services. These services focus less on full-service solutions and more on add-on solutions like:
SEO audit
Average cost: $650+ / professional audit
Larger organizations will often opt for a professional SEO audit vs. a self-serve audit via an SEO tool. Most professional audits will include the option for implementing the changes, though at an additional cost.
SEO consulting
Average cost: $100+ / hour
SEO consultants can become expensive fast, so it’s critical to set expectations (and limits) at the start. Focus on areas that need the consultant’s skills or resources the most — save everything else for your internal team.
Technical SEO
Average cost: $100+ / hour
Technical SEO is a common skill gap for in-house marketing teams. A consultant or package can help businesses resolve technical SEO issues and deliver sitewide improvements that grow rankings, traffic, and visibility in AI search results.
Local SEO
Average cost: $400+ / location / month
Businesses that operate locally will benefit immensely from local SEO support. While doable in-house, companies with multiple locations will often invest in affordable local SEO services.
Ecommerce SEO
Average cost: $750+ / month
For ecommerce businesses, ecommerce SEO is essential. With professional help, companies can ensure their store and setup aligns with best practices for crawling, indexing, and ranking key product pages.
SEO content
Average cost: $50+ / page
SEO content is critical to gaining real estate in the search results and in AI-generated answers like Google’s AI Overviews. A professional service provider can provide on-brand, SEO-friendly content when your business needs it. They can even refresh existing SEO content to improve search rankings.
What should an affordable SEO package include?
An affordable SEO package should include a written scope, work that improves visibility in both Google’s results and AI answers, and reporting that shows what your budget produced. A low price is easy to find. What separates an affordable SEO package from a cheap one is whether you can see what you’re paying for and what it delivered.
The search results that package works on have also changed. In WebFX’s study of 2.37 million U.S. keywords, 25.8% of queries showed a Google AI Overview. A package judged only on clicks can miss where buyers first see your brand.
Before you sign, check that the package covers these items:
- A fixed scope with listed deliverables. A written list of audits, pages, fixes, and reports lets you compare packages at different price points and confirm what a low monthly rate includes.
- Visibility in AI answers, not only rankings. Ask which queries the provider will track in AI Overviews and AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, and how its content and technical work supports citations there.
- Reporting beyond traffic. Monthly reports should pair GA4 and Search Console data with AI visibility. An AI visibility tracker shows where AI answers cite or mention your brand and competitors, so you can pick the pages to update next.
- No ranking guarantees. Google says it doesn’t cost any money to appear in Google Search results, and third parties can’t promise rankings through any special means. Treat a cheap package that guarantees placement as a red flag.
How to create an affordable SEO budget
Affordable SEO exists, but requires a more strategic approach when budgeting. Below, are our team’s tips — based on decades of experience as an SEO service provider:
1. Meet your stakeholders
Before investing in SEO (or any other digital marketing strategy), it’s critical to understand what leadership expects over the next six to 12 months. Their goals, from brand awareness to sales, will influence:
- How much you invest in SEO
- Where you invest your SEO budget
Consider how SEO aligns with these goals.
Often, businesses make the mistake of excluding SEO because it requires three to six months of work before delivering results. Keep in mind, though, that investing in SEO now will set you up for success when leadership sets higher goals in the following year.
2. Audit your SEO
You don’t have to be an SEO expert to complete this step. Free tools like Screaming Frog and SEO.com will provide free, instant audits that check your site for SEO issues.
This step provides answers to questions like:
- What are the highest priority issues?
- Does our site have issues that require software or services?
- How much internal or outsourced time will be needed to resolve these issues?
- Where are there opportunities, and what resources do those opportunities require?
With these questions, it’s possible to start brainstorming budget allocations.
Alongside these tools, use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console to understand existing site traffic and search visibility. Which URLs are driving traffic, leads, and revenue, for example?
Note: For additional insights, consider a competitor analysis. While unavailable in Screaming Frog, SEO.com includes competitor insights for traffic, rankings, and more.
3. Determine your priorities
Your audit should provide a baseline for your SEO needs, like:
- Fixing technical SEO issues
- Building a backlink profile
- Improving existing rankings
- And more
Score the potential impact of these areas to determine your priorities. If you have limited SEO knowledge, consider investing in a professional audit. These audits should include recommended actions based on impact.
4. Budget your action items
Finally, assign spends for the selected action items. While some affordable SEO services will require a six-month investment, others will operate on a month-to-month or as-needed basis, like purchasing SEO content.
Just keep in mind that spending too heavily on SEO can harm young companies, especially if you spend so much that you don’t have time for the campaign to fully mature.
You can always add more money to your budget as you grow, but you can’t take what you’ve spent back.
If you splurge on services outside your budget, you take a massive risk. Company decision-makers, for example, may withdraw support for SEO or take disciplinary action against your team.
5. Track your ROI
ROI is critical when using affordable SEO services.
With SEO, your business can get measurable results. You can see how your optimization efforts, for instance, resulted in a sale, lead, site traffic, or a citation in an AI answer. Your company, however, needs to have the tools to track your performance.
GA4 is one (free) way to monitor your SEO results.
If you have the budget, though, your team can invest in additional tools for greater insight into the performance of your SEO strategy. You can even partner with an affordable SEO agency that offers marketing technology for this purpose.
WebFX’s RevenueCloudFX, for example, integrates with your CRM to connect SEO activity to revenue, so you can see which pages and keywords bring in leads worth keeping in the budget.
Affordable SEO FAQs
What is SEO?
It’s critical to have an understanding of what SEO is and what SEO isn’t before exploring affordable search engine optimization. That’s why this section covers the top three facts to know about SEO.
1. SEO is different marketing strategies
SEO is an umbrella term that covers a range of strategies that a company uses to improve its visibility online so they can attract more potential customers to their website. Copywriting, web design, blogging, link building, site coding, and more all fall under SEO.
Because SEO is multi-faceted, it can be broken down to fit any organization’s budget. Even a brand-new startup can afford to write occasional blog posts or add keyword-rich title tags. This is SEO in practice, and it’s cost-effective if you’re on a strict budget.
2. SEO is simple
A lot of sources talk about SEO like it’s some kind of legend — it’s a story of success that happens to other people, but it never touches you. Without a magic key, you’ll never get to it! Again, this simply isn’t true.
SEO is easy to implement, and it can work for anyone.
The more you learn about SEO, whether by yourself or when researching a web marketing firm, the more you’ll realize that the processes involved are straightforward. The advantage of SEO services, versus in-house management, is that you receive expert-level expertise without the time investment.
Adding keywords, enhancing title tags, and providing an excellent user experience are almost common sense, and they only cost a little bit of your time. Even if your business doesn’t have the budget for an aggressive SEO plan, you can still optimize your site and benefit from those optimizations.
3. SEO is not keyword stuffing
Adding tons of keywords to a page might have worked for SEO at one point, but not anymore. Today, SEO is all about user experience, and that means search engines want to see that people enjoy what they’re reading on your site — and nobody enjoys reading keyword after keyword.
Today’s SEO involves researching, analyzing, and understanding the keywords that people use to find your business so you can offer them an experience that’s better than your competitors. The more your visitors like your site, the more Google will like you.
What is the difference between cheap and affordable SEO services?
In the online marketing sector, there are thousands of agencies that offer SEO services. Research a few of these companies, however, and your team will quickly discover a distinct difference between agencies: those that provide affordable SEO services and those that promote cheap SEO services.
Affordable SEO services
Affordable SEO services provide your business with trusted service and measurable results, as well as a reasonable price for your organization. The affordability of an SEO service depends on your company, as well as your marketing budget.
If you’re an enterprise, for example, affordable SEO services may range from $5000 to $8000 per month. In comparison, a small-to-midsize business (SMB) may view an agency that offers monthly service rates of $800 to $1500 as affordable.
No matter what the SEO agency charges, though, they offer trusted, performance-driven services.
Cheap SEO services
Cheap SEO services offer your business low-cost, poor-performing SEO services. While your company can easily purchase these services, you rarely receive a return on your investment. That’s because cheap SEO agencies skimp on the critical components to a successful SEO strategy.
For example, you don’t receive a custom strategy with low-cost SEO services. Instead, these agencies provide your business with a copy-and-paste approach based on a template. For your company, this cost- and time-saving move results in a lackluster strategy that doesn’t deliver results.
In most cases, cheap SEO services cost only a few hundred dollars a month. Many low-cost SEO companies promote a monthly rate of $100 or less. While this amount may seem like a deal, it doesn’t matter when you’re not getting results from your SEO strategy.
Protect your business by investing in affordable SEO services, not low-cost ones.
Why invest in affordable SEO services?
There are several reasons to invest in affordable SEO services, including:
- Growing your visibility in search results relevant to your market
- Improving your revenue by reaching qualified users at the right time
- Reducing your paid advertising costs by improving your organic visibility
- Scaling your SEO efforts with the assistance of SEO experts
- Optimizing your time to focus on other marketing initiatives
Today, almost 50% of marketers credit organic search as their best channel for delivering a return on investment (ROI), which makes sense since 80% of users start their research online.
Drive business growth with affordable SEO services
With a client retention rate of 91%, WebFX is a trusted choice for SMBs looking for affordable SEO services. Our team of more than 750 digital marketing specialists delivers competitive, results-driven campaigns that can help your business increase its revenue.
In the past five years alone, we’ve helped our clients earn more than $10 billion in revenue.
Set your company on the path to growth by contacting us online today to learn more about our SEO services. Or, call 888-601-5359 to chat with an experienced strategist about your business, budget, and goals!
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