How Much Does SEO Cost Per Month for a Small Business?

How much does SEO cost per month for a small business? On my own price list the answer is $1,000, $2,000 or $3,200 a month, and which of the three you need depends on the state of your site and how much of the work you want done for you. Those are the monthly SEO retainers. Around them sit the other prices small businesses usually see from me: a $950 AI visibility audit, a $750 on-page tune-up, link building at $240 to $495 per link, and AI automation projects that start at $3,000.

If you want a number for your site rather than a range, book a call. The strategy session is free and takes 30 minutes. I want to know what the business does, what the site is supposed to do, and what has already been tried. The price comes at the end of that conversation, not before it.

Why is SEO sold per month?

Search is not a one-off job. Pages that rank in March can be on page three by September, because competitors publish, because the shape of the results changes, and because the questions your customers type change with them. The work that holds a position is rarely the work that won it.

A retainer is how that gets paid for. You are buying a slice of attention each month rather than a finished object, and the size of that slice is what the price reflects.

The alternative is a burst of work and then nothing, and that shows up in the traffic graph months later. That is the plain reason the price is monthly rather than a single invoice.

What are the prices?

Which of the three retainers is right for a small business?

The three prices exist because sites are at different stages. The $1,000 month is the entry level, $2,000 is the middle, and $3,200 is the top. What separates them is how much work each month can carry, and that is set by what your site already has and what it is being asked to do.

I cannot honestly tell you which one is yours from outside your site. Size is not the test. A two-person business can need the top level while a company of thirty needs the bottom one. A site with the basics in place and a steady habit of publishing needs less attention than one being rebuilt from the ground up.

Part of the free session is working out which of those you are. I would rather move you to the level that fits than quote the top number and have you leave in three months, so expect that question to come up early.

How does a monthly retainer compare with the rest of my price list?

SEO is one line of a longer list, and owners usually see the numbers together. AI automation projects start at $3,000 and are priced with a fixed quote after a free strategy session. Care plans for that automation run from $750 a month. Link building is priced per link at $240 to $495, which matters when you want to buy a batch of them. The AI visibility audit is $950 and the on-page tune-up is $750.

If you are weighing a $1,000 SEO month against an AI automation project from $3,000, you are comparing two different things. A retainer buys ongoing SEO work. A project buys a piece of automation that the business then owns, and on the automation side the client owns every automation.

I have written about that side separately, in what AI automation costs a small business and in AI automation agency for small business. Both assume you already know the SEO number, which is what this page is for. The full list, including content and links, is on the services page.

Does AI search change what you pay for?

Partly, and it is worth being clear about how. AI answers now sit above the ordinary results for a lot of the questions a small business cares about, and being mentioned in those answers is a separate problem from ranking. It is also a separate price.

The AI visibility audit is $950. It is a one-off rather than part of the monthly retainer, and it shows you how AI answers currently see your business. The on-page tune-up at $750 is work on the pages you already have.

The link side has changed less than the noise suggests. Links still matter, they are priced at $240 to $495 each, and the ones worth buying take time to build. I wrote about that in link building that still works, and about the answer side in getting cited in AI answers. Read those two before you spend anything on cheap links.

What happens before you pay anything?

The strategy session is free and takes 30 minutes. In that time we look at what the site is doing now, what the business actually sells, and what you have already tried. If the honest answer is that SEO is not your next move, you will hear that inside the same 30 minutes.

For a lean team the real question is often not only what SEO costs, but what else the same money could do. That is why the automation numbers sit on the same page as the SEO numbers. Some businesses get more from a $3,000 automation project than from three months of retainer, and some get more from the retainer. I will tell you which I think it is, and the session is where that gets worked out.

How do you keep the cost down without cutting the work?

Keep the scope small and specific. A tune-up on pages you already have costs less than a rebuild, and per-link pricing lets you buy a few links instead of a package. Cheap is not the same as small: a $750 on-page tune-up done properly is better value than a retainer doing a fraction of the work.

The other discipline is not paying twice for the same thing. Say what you already have before you buy anything, and it is usually obvious which item on the list is the missing one.

What this looked like in my own business

Devian OS is the system I run my own business on. Between 12 and 25 September 2026 it ran 14 agents with 70 tools behind permissions. That period produced 811 traced runs, of which 241 failed and stay in the log. The failures are kept, not tidied away. Behind it sit more than 1,300 automated tests. The approval gate stopped 10 actions: 4 were approved, 2 were rejected, and 3 failed after approval.

Those numbers belong on a page about SEO cost because they show what doing the work properly costs in attention. A retainer is the same idea in a different shape: work that runs continuously, gets checked, and leaves a record you can look at. The Devian OS case study sets out the full picture, and the approach behind it is in The Agentic OS, a free 178-page book on running a business with a team of AI agents and staying in charge.

The short version

A monthly SEO retainer from me is $1,000, $2,000 or $3,200, depending on how much work the site needs. Link building is $240 to $495 per link. The AI visibility audit is $950 and the on-page tune-up is $750. AI automation projects start at $3,000 with a fixed quote after a free strategy session, and care plans run from $750 a month.

The free strategy session is 30 minutes, and it is where the number for your own site comes from. Book a call and bring the site.

Frequently asked questions

How much does SEO cost per month for a small business?

On my price list a monthly SEO retainer is $1,000, $2,000 or $3,200, depending on how much work your site needs. Link building is $240 to $495 per link, the AI visibility audit is $950, and the on-page tune-up is $750.

Can I buy SEO work without a monthly retainer?

Yes. Some work is priced as a one-off: the AI visibility audit is $950 and the on-page tune-up is $750. Link building is priced per link at $240 to $495. The $1,000, $2,000 and $3,200 prices are monthly retainers.

What happens before I pay for SEO?

The strategy session. It is free and takes 30 minutes. We look at what the site does now and what the business sells, and you leave with a price for your site rather than a range.

Does AI search cost extra?

The AI visibility audit is $950 and sits separately from the monthly SEO retainer. It shows how AI answers see your business. The on-page tune-up is $750. AI automation, if you want it, starts at $3,000.