How Much Does SEO Cost for a Small Business? What $600 a Month Covers

SEO is the service small business owners are most often sold and least often able to evaluate. The pitch is always the same: page one of Google. The price is anywhere from $99 a month to $5,000, and the owner has no way to tell what separates the two except that one feels too cheap and the other feels too expensive.

This article puts real numbers on it. Lackey Designs has done SEO for small businesses since 2006, our plans are published on our pricing page, and we are often called in to repair the results of cheaper plans. So we can tell you what the money buys at each price, how long it takes to work and how to spot a plan that is not working while there is still time to stop paying for it.

The short answer

For a small business competing in a local market, a real SEO plan costs $500 to $1,500 a month in 2026. Our plans start at $600 a month. One time projects such as an audit and fix of an existing site run $1,000 to $5,000. Anything under $300 a month is almost always automated reports and directory submissions, which is not nothing, but it is not SEO.

Why SEO is priced by the month

Owners sometimes ask why SEO cannot be bought once, like a website. The answer is that search results are a competition, not a product. Your position depends on what competitors do, what Google changes and what you publish, and all three keep moving. A site that was tuned once and left alone slides as the pages around it improve. So SEO is sold as a retainer, with a set number of hours a month spent moving your site forward, and the price reflects the hours.

That is also the key to understanding the price bands. At $600 a month you are buying a certain number of hours of skilled work. At $2,500 you are buying four times as many. Whether you need four times as many depends entirely on your market.

What you get at each price

Under $300 a month: listings and reports

At this price the provider cannot afford to spend real hours on your site. What you typically get is submission to directories, an automated monthly ranking report and perhaps a few generic blog posts. For a business in a small town with little competition, this can be enough to appear on the map. For anyone else, it is a monthly fee that produces a PDF.

$500 to $1,500 a month: a local campaign

This is where most small businesses belong, and where our plans start. The money covers:

• Keyword research to find the words your customers actually use, and the local versions of them.
• A technical and on page audit of the site with tools such as SEMrush and Screaming Frog: titles, headings, sitemaps, speed, mobile, broken links and the dozens of small things that stop a good site from ranking.
• Google Business Profile work: claiming, completing and tuning the profile, keeping your name, address and phone consistent across the directories that list you, and getting reviews onto it.
• Content: a page for each service and each area you serve, and regular posts that answer the questions customers search for. Pages with substantial, useful content tend to rank better than thin ones, and most small business sites have thin ones.
• Links from relevant local and industry sites, earned by being worth linking to.
• Tracking through Google Analytics and Search Console, so results are measured in calls and form fills and not just rankings.

$1,500 to $5,000 a month: competitive markets

A personal injury firm in a large city, an e-commerce site competing nationally or a business in a niche where every competitor already has an SEO team needs more hours a month: more content, more links, more technical work. The tasks are the same as the local campaign. There are just more of them, and the competition for each ranking is harder.

What results look like, and when

Honest SEO providers do not promise page one by a date, because nobody controls Google. What we can tell you is the usual shape of a campaign.

Weeks 1 to 4: the audit and the fixes. The site gets faster, cleaner and more complete. The Google Business Profile gets finished. Nothing much moves in rankings yet.

Months 2 to 4: local results start to show. The profile appears on the map for searches it did not before, and pages that were close to ranking move onto page one.

Months 4 to 12: the competitive terms move as content and links accumulate. This is where most of the leads come from and where owners who quit at month three never arrive.

Merriment ABA, an in-home therapy practice serving Hamilton County and the north side of Indianapolis, came to us after struggling with search visibility for years. Within a few months of the audit and the fixes, their site climbed the rankings and organic traffic rose with it. That timeline is typical when the site is sound and the market is local.

Warning signs of an SEO plan that is not working

You do not need to understand SEO to tell whether yours is working. Watch for these:

• The report is all rankings and traffic, and never mentions leads. Ranking for a term nobody searches is easy. Phone calls are the measure.
• You cannot name one thing that was done this month. A real plan produces visible work: new pages, rewritten titles, a finished profile, fixed errors.
• A guarantee of page one. Nobody can guarantee this. Anyone who does is either guessing or planning to rank you for your own business name.
• Links from sites you have never heard of in languages you do not speak. Bought links in bulk are the fastest way to a Google penalty, and the cleanup costs more than the plan.
• You do not own your Google Analytics, Search Console or Business Profile. If the provider owns them, you lose your data and your map listing when you leave.
• Blog posts that read like they were written by nobody, for nobody. Google has gotten good at ignoring filler. So have your customers.

SEO, Google Ads or both?

Owners often ask whether they should spend on SEO or on Google Ads, which also start at $600 a month with us. The honest answer is that they do different jobs. Ads produce leads this week and stop the day you stop paying. SEO takes months to build and keeps producing after the work is done. A new business that needs the phone to ring now usually starts with ads and adds SEO as it can. An established business with some rankings already usually gets more from SEO. We explain how the two fit together in Web Marketing 101.

Before you spend anything

Run your site through our free website grader. It scores any site from 0 to 100 on speed, SEO, accessibility, security and whether AI search tools such as ChatGPT can find you, with no email required. If the technical score is low, that is the first money to spend, because no amount of content or links will lift a site that Google struggles to read.

When you are ready to talk, tell us about your business and what you want the phone to ring about. Jason replies in under 24 hours with what we would do first and what it would cost, in writing. Our SEO service page has the full list of what a plan includes.