What local SEO costs, and what actually moves the price
Three agencies quote the same business and the numbers are nowhere near each other. That is not because one of them is greedy. It is because nobody said what the work was.
Why the quotes are so far apart
"Local SEO" is not one thing. One quote is a profile tidied up once. Another is a profile, listings, reviews, pages and links, worked on every month, for four towns.
Both are honestly described as local SEO. They are not the same job, and they should not be the same price.
So the useful question is never "what does it cost". It is "what is in it, and for how many places".
The five things that move the price
Ask any agency which of these apply to you, and the quote stops being mysterious.
| What changes it | Why |
|---|---|
| How many towns you want calls from | One town is one profile and one set of pages. Five towns is five of everything, and five times the checking. |
| The state of your listings | A clean set needs maintaining. Old addresses, duplicates and dead numbers need finding and fixing first, which is the slowest part of the job. |
| How many reviews you have | A profile with a handful of reviews needs a habit built around asking. One with hundreds needs replies and monitoring. |
| Whether the website can rank at all | A fast site with real pages needs work on the pages. A slow one built on a template needs fixing before anything else pays off. |
| How competitive the market is | A quiet market moves on the basics. A busy city needs links and depth, which take longer and cost more. |
Tell us what you do and where. The check and the quote are both free.
Setup and monthly are two different bills
A lot of confusion lives here. Setup is the one-off work: claiming and fixing the profile, cleaning the listings, correcting what is wrong on the site. Monthly is the work that never finishes: reviews, posts, new listings, pages, links, reporting.
Some agencies bundle setup into the first month and some bill it separately. Neither is wrong. Not being told which is.
Ask two questions: what is the one-off, and what happens in month two.
What a cheap monthly fee usually leaves out
Cheap is not automatically bad. But something has to give, and it is usually the same things:
- The listings clean-up. It is slow, unglamorous work, and it is where the wrong phone numbers live.
- Reviews. Asking every customer takes a system and a habit, not a report.
- Real pages. A town name swapped into the same paragraph is the thing Google refuses to index.
- Anyone answering the phone. The cheapest plans are cheap because nobody is on them.
And one thing price cannot buy, at any level. Google states it plainly: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." Anybody selling a guaranteed position is making a claim they cannot back, and the FTC's standard for advertising is that "Before a company runs an ad, it has to have a 'reasonable basis' for the claims."
What we charge, since we are asking you to compare
It would be a strange article about pricing that hid its own. Our plans start at $199 a month for one location that needs to hold its ground rather than expand, and $499 for one location that wants more calls than it gets now. Billing is per month, and the contract is: Month to month. No long-term contract.
The consultation is free, it ends in a written list, and you keep it either way. What is in each plan is set out on the plans page.
Questions owners ask us
The ones that come up before the quote, every time.
How long before it pays for itself?
Depends on what a job is worth to you and how far behind the profile is. What we will not do is give you a date. Google says nobody can guarantee a ranking, and a payback date is a ranking promise wearing a different hat.
Is a monthly plan better than paying per job?
If the work is finite, pay for it once. Profile fixed, listings cleaned, done. A monthly plan is for the parts that are never finished: reviews, new pages, links, and watching what competitors do.
Why do some agencies charge thousands?
Usually multiple locations, a bigger market, content and digital PR, or a team size you are paying for. In a town like Casper, most single-location businesses do not need that.
What should I never pay for?
Guaranteed rankings, bought reviews, links from a network, or a profile set up in the agency's own account. The last one looks harmless until you leave.
Do I own everything if we part ways?
You should, everywhere. Profile, site, listings, accounts. Ask before you sign, not after.
Before you compare two quotes
Write down the towns you want calls from, whether your listings have ever been cleaned, and how many reviews you have. Send that to both agencies. The quotes will suddenly be comparable.
Read next
Tell us the towns and what you do. You get a written list of what needs fixing and a price for each part.