Business
Pricing local SEO work
Nobody can tell you what to charge, and everyone who claims to is quoting a number they made up. What they can give you is a way to work it out.
10 min read · Updated 17 September 2026
Search for local SEO pricing and you will find dozens of confident ranges. Nearly all of them are published by agencies, which means they are quoting the number they charge, positioned as the number the market charges. That is not research, and building your pricing on it is how agencies end up underpricing for years.
This article gives you a method instead. It has three inputs you can actually measure: what delivery costs you, what a customer is worth to the client, and how much risk each side is carrying.
Start with what delivery costs you
Not what you think it should cost. What it does cost, measured on a real client for a real month. Most agencies have never done this and are startled by the answer.
- 1
Log hours on one client for one month
Everything: the work, the reporting, the email, the call where nothing was decided, the invoice chasing. Especially the last three.
- 2
Apply a real hourly cost
Salary plus employment costs plus a share of overhead, divided by realistically billable hours — which is far fewer than contracted hours.
- 3
Add the hard costs
Tools, data, scans, anything you buy per client. These are small individually and not small in aggregate.
- 4
Multiply by the number of clients
Then compare to revenue. This is the moment most people discover their cheapest tier is losing money.
Then find out what a customer is worth to them
This is one question, asked early, that changes everything: what is a new customer worth to you, roughly, over the time they stay? Most owners know within a wide range, and a wide range is enough.
A trade business where one job is worth a few thousand and a customer returns for years can justify a retainer that would be absurd for a business whose average transaction is twenty dollars. Same work, same effort on your side, completely different sensible price. Pricing without knowing this means pricing the work instead of the outcome, and the work is the less valuable of the two.
It also tells you when to say no. If the arithmetic means your fee needs six new customers a month to break even and their market realistically produces two, you have learned that before taking the money rather than after.
Choose a model that matches the risk
| Model | Works when | Fails when |
|---|---|---|
| Flat retainer | Work is ongoing and roughly steady; both sides want predictability | Scope drifts and nobody renegotiates — the most common way agencies quietly go broke |
| Packaged tiers | You have standardised delivery and want to sell without quoting every time | Your tiers were priced by guesswork rather than measured cost |
| Project plus retainer | There is real setup work — listing cleanup, citations, a site fix — before the ongoing phase | The project is priced to win the retainer and loses money on its own |
| Per location | Multi-location clients where effort genuinely scales with count | Locations differ wildly in difficulty and you priced them identically |
| Performance-based | You control enough of the outcome and trust the client's tracking | Attribution is disputed — which, without shared reporting, it always eventually is |
On discounting
A discount given to win a client is a permanent reduction in your margin on that client, because you will not raise it later. You will intend to. You will not, because raising a price on an existing client requires a conversation you would rather not have, and the discount will outlive the reason for it by years.
If you must move on price, move on scope instead. Remove something. A client on a smaller package at full rate is a healthy account; a client on the full package at a discount is a permanent drag that also teaches you the wrong lesson about what your work is worth.
Raising prices on existing clients
Everyone puts this off. The practical approach is to raise new-client pricing first, live with the gap for a quarter, and then bring existing clients up with notice and a reason — ideally alongside something they can see they are getting.
The clients who leave over a modest increase are usually the ones consuming the most support for the least revenue. That is uncomfortable and it is also true, and the agencies that never raise prices are not the ones with the happiest clients. They are the ones with the thinnest margins.
The costs you can actually put in the model
For the tooling side of the equation, here are this product's real numbers rather than an estimate, so you can put them straight into the calculation above.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Freelancer plan | $49/month — 5 clients, up to 2 users, 1,500 credits |
| Agency plan | From $149/month — 10 clients, unlimited users, 3,000 credits; +$70/month and +3,000 credits per 10 more clients, up to 40 |
| Powerhouse plan | $397/month — up to 150 clients, unlimited users, 25,000 credits that roll over |
| 61-point Google Maps scan | 25 credits (49 with fast delivery) |
| Progress Report | 150 credits |
| A typical client month | 5 keywords × 61-point Maps scan + a Progress Report = 275 credits |
One last thing
Price reviews should be on a calendar, not triggered by a cash-flow scare. Once a year, run the cost exercise again on your two largest and two smallest accounts. It takes an afternoon and it is the highest-return afternoon in the agency's year.