If your business has a physical, customer-facing location, chances are that you can benefit from local SEO. When consumers search for a product or service in their area, guess which businesses they’re likely to visit first? If you guessed, “the ones that show up in Google first,” you’re correct! Local SEO helps you bridge the gap between your business and your target market by putting your business where people can see you: right at the top of the search engine results page.

We’re long past the era of when phone books, flyers, mailed coupons, radio ads, and billboards made a good enough strategy for growing your business. It’s 2020, for crying out loud! According to Forbes, if your business isn’t on the web via multiple channels, then you’re losing your edge against your competitors who are utilizing this resource. And according to Google, 46% of online searches are looking for local businesses.

It’s obvious that local SEO is critical to surviving as a modern business. So how much does local SEO cost? Well, it’s a little complicated.

What Are You Paying For? 

Local SEO is like making a complex recipe — there are a lot of ingredients and processes that need to be used in order to achieve the desired result. So when you pay for professional local SEO, there are a lot of different factors that go into that charge:

• Industry: Different industries have more or less competition than others, affecting how difficult it will be for you to rank well.
• Geographic location(s) being targeted: Different locations have more or less competition than others, which affects how difficult it will be for you to rank well. You will also likely have to pay more for each additional location.
• The contractor’s expertise in local SEO: Contractors with less experience in local SEO are likely to charge less than those who have more experience.
• Your current rankings: If your site already ranks well, then it will take more work to get it to rank better than if your site currently ranks poorly. 
• Previous SEO: If your site has had SEO done in the past and it’s currently hurting your rankings, it will take a lot of work to undo. On the other hand, if that SEO simply needs to be built upon, then you will likely end up paying less.
• Keywords: Targeting more keywords will be more expensive than targeting fewer. Furthermore, the more competitive your market and specific the keywords, the more work it will take for your site to rank. 

SEO packages often have a variety of inclusions as part of the charge and play a role in “sweetening the deal.” Some of these inclusions are very helpful, while others are just fluff with no real benefit. Beware of choosing an SEO package just because it seems to offer the most “bang” for your buck.

How Much Does Local SEO Cost?

Every source you read on the cost of local SEO is likely to give you a different answer just because SEO itself is so variable. No two businesses have exactly the same needs, and SEO thrives on catering to those differences. 

For example, according to an Ahrefs survey of 348 respondents: 

• The average monthly retainer for local SEO is $1566/month.
• The average rate per project for local SEO is $2756.
• The average hourly rate for local SEO is $96/hr.

We took a walk around the internet to see what we could find in terms of average local SEO costs, and what you can expect for your own campaign:

Monthly Retainer

Monthly retainers are the most common type of charge for SEO campaigns because it’s highly compatible with the fact that SEO takes a while to get results. In fact, according to the same Ahrefs study mentioned above, 74.71% of respondents charged clients a monthly retainer fee.

When you’re on a monthly plan, you pay a flat fee every month to your SEO agency, and in return you receive services related to getting your site optimized and ranking more favorably. Many SEO agencies prefer to sign clients up for 6- or 12-month agreements because it can take that much time to get on the first page for some competitive keywords. However, some agencies also offer true month-to-month plans.

The cost of a monthly retainer for SEO in general varies widely, from about $500 all the way up to $20,000/month. But small businesses interested in local SEO are looking at a range from about $250-$5,000/month.

Pay Per Project

If you aren’t ready to jump into local SEO with both feet, or your current budget doesn’t quite permit paying a monthly retainer, then the Pay Per Project method can be a great way to get started and target your business’ most urgent needs.

Instead of offering the full suite of local SEO services, Pay Per Project is the a la carte alternative that enables you to pick and choose which exact products you need. These local SEO products can include:

• Google My Business creation
• Bing Local creation
• Yellow Pages creation
• Yelp listing creation
• Content writing
• Competitor analysis
• Keyword research
• Landing page design
• Link building
• On-site optimization
• Schema implementation
• Social media posting
• Video marketing

The cost of a Pay Per Project approach is extremely variable compared to other options, because it all comes down to the project in question and the size of your business. For example, creating a Google My Business profile is likely to be a much less time-intensive project than producing a marketing video, so the former is likely to be less expensive than the latter. 

One-time SEO audits are a popular form of Pay Per Project SEO that act as a “checkup” for your marketing strategy. Instead of picking just one thing to look at, SEO audits look at your local SEO strategy as a whole and identify as many issues as possible. 

SEO audits are a great way to get a birds-eye view on the current status of your business and determine your strategy’s most pressing needs. From there, you can springboard into tackling the most important projects one at a time, whether you hire professional help or DIY.

Cost depending on the size of your online presence, how detailed the audit is, and whether they make recommendations for addressing found issues. Some SEOs offer free SEO audits as a sales tactic (these are generally automated with no actionable value), but generally it is likely to cost a small business between $500 to $5,000, depending on the size and complexity of the website.

Choosing an SEO

Aside from the three main types of local SEO pricing strategies, there are also two main types of search engine optimizer:

1. SEO Agencies: SEO agencies tend to have more collective experience, which means that in hiring an SEO agency, you benefit from the expertise of many. Agencies traditionally manage the entire campaign including the strategy, fulfillment, reporting, and communication. 
2. SEO Consultants: SEO consultants are specialists. They’re often very experienced with SEO or a segment of SEO, and when you hire one, their job is to get to know your business inside and out to create the perfect strategy for your needs. They are traditionally advising more than fulfilling and usually act independent from an agency. However, there are some agencies that exclusively advise like a consultant would.

Price is not the only factor you should consider when choosing someone to help with your local SEO. SEO is an investment, not just an expense, and you generally get what you pay for, so relying on price as your sole indicator could cause problems for you down the road.

Make sure that your SEO candidates offer the services that you need most. These are some of the most important service that should be included in a local SEO campaign:

• Keyword research
• On-page optimization
• Citation and link building
• Google My Business (GMB) management
• Customer review management
• Q&A management
• Detailed reporting and analytics based on:
• Work performed
• Website traffic
• Phone calls and form leads
• Keyword positioning

While evaluating potential SEOs, look at their portfolio. Do they specialize in local SEO, or are they more generic? Are they familiar with businesses like yours? What were they able to do for that business? Keep these same questions in mind as you read through the candidate’s reviews and testimonials. 

It doesn’t cost anything to get a quote (or at least it shouldn’t for most local SEO campaigns). Get to know a few agencies and collect quotes so you know what your options are for exactly the services that you need. After shopping around, make a decision.

Red Flags to Watch Out For

If you find any of the following on an SEO’s website, they’re not the one for you:

• Guarantees: If the candidate guarantees “instant results,” that probably means that they found a way to shortcut the search engine’s algorithm. This can seem like a sweet deal at first, but their methods are likely to get you penalized in the long run. Reputable SEO will usually take 3-6 months to start showing results.
• Shady Link Building Practices: If the candidate advertises link building, ask them about their strategy. Many low budget campaigns will use link building strategies that Google deems unnatural, like link farms, private blog networks (PBNs), or blog comment spamming.
• Super Low Prices: As the saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If you find an SEO agency that is offering prices significantly lower than $500/month, it’s likely either automated or outsourced. An agency is service-based, meaning it requires humans to research, make decisions, and perform work.

Ask yourself what your company would do for $500/month. How many hours could you work and still meet margins? Similarly, an agency needs to be profitable and if they are charging the normal hourly rate of ~$100/hour, your campaign is only getting 5 hours/month of attention. That’s simply not enough time to make a meaningful impact for most businesses marketing needs.

An SEO that hides their pricing info isn’t necessarily a red flag — in fact, it’s probably a good thing. There are just too many moving parts in SEO for cookie-cutter pricing to work well. SEO agencies that don’t have a one-size-fits-all pricing strategy are likely to put a higher priority on customizing their work to your business’ exact needs. This is also likely to give you better return on investment.

Conclusion

We get it — doing something new and unfamiliar is scary. As a small business owner, local SEO is just adding one more thing to the pile of bills that you’re trying to cut down on. Remember, there is a reason your competition is growing, stable, and succeeding in your space. It’s because they are investing in marketing and most likely have excellent rankings for their local keywords in Google. 

It may be expensive in the beginning, but a good local SEO strategy will pay for itself several times over.