Local SEO Pricing: What It Costs and How It's Calculated

Count the distinct services or products you want found in search. A septic company selling pumping, inspections, repairs, and installs has four.

Services scale more gently than footprint. Your twentieth service line shares the same profile, the same website, and the same reporting as your fourth. It mostly adds pages and keywords.

All prices are monthly. Statewide, multi-state, and nationwide footprints are quoted individually, because at that size the work stops being local SEO and becomes a different discipline. Month 1 bills at 125% of the monthly rate and covers all onboarding. There is no separate setup fee.

Your exact monthly deliverables are written into your agreement before work begins, so you always know what you are receiving. Levels IV and V reach past the published rate card because they apply to statewide and multi-state footprints, which are quoted individually.

• Anyone who wants a guaranteed number one ranking. Nobody can promise that, and anyone who does is telling you something untrue.
• Anyone shopping for the cheapest option available. I am not the cheapest, on purpose.
• Restaurants, cafes, and retail storefronts. Different work, different economics.
• Businesses that need results inside 30 days. It's rare you see great results this quickly. That said, I'm able to provide guidance on supporting marketing tactics that can help you expedite your overall marketing results while you wait for your local SEO to take off.
• Anyone who requires gray hat or black hat tactics. Any SEO strategies that try to "game" Google's system sacrifice long-term success for short-term growth. I use white hat SEO tactics only.

If your website is not ready to support this work, start with a custom WordPress build instead. I will tell you honestly which one you need first.

Discounts apply to your monthly rate only and may be stacked together (if applicable). They do not apply to Month 1, to website builds, or to additional content purchased outside your plan. The service and anniversary discounts can be combined, up to a maximum of 15%.

1. Free Google assessment. I look at your Business Profile, your listings, and your website, and tell you what I find. No cost, no obligation.
2. Scope call. We count your counties and your marketable services together and land on the right row and column.
3. Proposal and agreement. Your monthly rate, your exact monthly deliverables, and your terms in writing before anything begins.
4. Month one. Profile overhaul, listing cleanup, keyword and entity mapping, tracking installed, and a baseline recorded so we can both see what changes.
5. Ongoing. Production and publishing every month, with reporting you can actually read.

How is my price determined?

Two inputs: how many counties you serve, and how many distinct services you want found in search. Find your row and your column on the rate card above and you have your number.

Why do you measure service area by county instead of by city?

Because no service business serves only one city. Counties match how dispatch, licensing, and service areas actually work, which makes the price honest instead of arbitrary.

Is there a setup fee?

No. Month 1 bills at 125% of your monthly rate and that covers all onboarding. Most agencies charge a separate setup fee worth one to two months. I do not.

Why is there a six month minimum?

Because that is roughly how long it takes to work. The published break-even data across trades puts the payback point around five to six months for construction and HVAC, and shows no substantial return before month four in any industry measured.

Most of the heavy work also happens in your first sixty days. A shorter term would mean charging you a large setup fee instead, which I would rather not do.

What do I get at every price level?

Google Business Profile management, directory listings and consistency work, a blog post every month, structured data on everything published, AI search tracking, replies to your positive reviews, and monthly reporting. Higher levels add more production on top of that.

Can you be flexible on pricing?

Less scope for less money is an honest trade, and I'll help you find it. If the rate card lands higher than you want to spend, we can tighten the service area, start with fewer services, or begin a level lower and move up once the work pays for itself.

What I won't do is quote you the same work for less. That would mean I was either overcharging you a minute ago or planning to quietly do less than we agreed, and you'd have no way to tell which.

And sadly, even if I like you more than all my other clients, I don't pick favorites when it comes to pricing. A published rate card isn't worth much if the prices are just opening bids.

The discounts above are the only standing ones I have. That said, I do run the occasional promotion for current clients when it helps us both, so it's worth asking about once we're working together.

Someone quoted me $299 a month. Why are you more?

Because at $299, most of what you're buying is a report telling you what didn't happen.

Local SEO has a floor. Below roughly $400 a month there isn't room in the budget to produce anything — no content, no citation cleanup, no real profile management. The price is real. The work usually isn't.

I'll also say this plainly: my $500 level is maintenance and presence, not a growth engine. It keeps your profile healthy, your listings consistent, and something new on your site every month. If you need to move aggressively in a competitive county, that's a higher level, and I'd rather tell you now than six months in.

Why not just run Google Ads instead?

You can run both. Just don't mistake which one is the foundation.

On home services searches, the local pack — the map with three businesses in it — appears on about 98% of queries. Standard Google Ads appear on about 8%, and when they do, they average position 11. Meanwhile paid keeps getting more expensive: across home services, cost per lead rose about 10% last year while conversion rates fell about 15%.

The relationship also runs in one direction only. Running ads does nothing for your organic rankings, and Google has been clear about that for years. But the work that gets you ranking — stronger pages, a healthier profile, content that answers what people are actually asking — feeds straight into your Quality Score and lowers what you pay per click.

So run ads if they're working. They're just rented, and the rent goes up every year. Search is the thing underneath that makes the rent cheaper.

Do you guarantee first page rankings?

No, and neither can anyone else. Google does not sell placement in organic results, and no agency controls the algorithm. What I can show you is the work, the measurements, and the direction things are moving.

Do you use AI to create content?

I do, but probably not in the way you'd expect.

I don't flip an AI switch that does my thinking and content production on autopilot. Yikes. It helps me plan — sorting what's worth writing from what everyone in your trade has already written. Then it helps me verify what's actually true for your industry and your customers, because inaccurate content is worse than no content. Then it helps me build out the angle you and I land on during onboarding, which is the part no tool could have come up with on its own.

Google and the AI search tools don't care whether AI was involved. They care about bad, boring, and inaccurate. Those get you penalized. A well-researched page with a real point of view does not, no matter what helped produce it.

Honestly, I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't use it — for your content, your pages, your site security, all of it. Refusing to use good tools isn't craftsmanship. It's just slower.

What does market exclusivity mean?

I take one client per industry per market. If I am working with a septic company in your counties, I will not take another one. Exclusivity is included at $1,000 per month and above. That ensures that I am not profiting off you and your competitors being in heavy competition.

Can I get more content than my plan includes?

Yes. You can add blocks of content to your plan, or buy a package outright — a blog series, a set of service pages, a batch of case studies — with no ongoing commitment.

Plan clients get the better rate, and there's a reason for it. Your keyword map, your brand voice, and the research into what your customers actually search for in your counties are already done. A standalone package has to include that groundwork before the first word gets written.