Local SEO pricing usually stays within the range of $500 to over $2,000 per month. The reason for such a significant difference is the variety of factors. Further, it’s essential to consider the expertise of a local SEO provider and their approach to each client.
Ideally, your agency should offer several search engine optimization packages, allowing you to select the optimal option for your marketing budget. Additionally, there must be clear descriptions of the services you’ll get after choosing a given SEO plan. Continue reading our guide to search engine optimization pricing for local businesses to gain a better understanding of market prices.
- Small businesses can find local SEO services at $500, but efficient solutions delivered by experts start from $1,600.
- Local SEO cost directly depends on your business size, market competition, number of locations, agency’s reputation, and the software involved.
- Monthly retainers are the most widespread local SEO pricing model used by all popular agencies.
- It’s better not to opt for performance-based services to avoid getting scammed or ruining your website’s performance with black-hat tactics.
How Much Does Local SEO Cost in 2025?
The average cost of local SEO varies, as every agency has its own pricing system, which it uses to estimate the resources required to help your company win the local competition. For example, on Google, you can discover companies offering local SEO services to small businesses for $500 or even less. The table provided below demonstrates the differences in prices between various SEO companies:
As you can see, a low price often doesn’t include essential services. For example, it may involve simply analyzing your Google Business Profile (GBP) or website, without providing practical recommendations for further improvement.
Moreover, services at such a suspiciously low price often don’t consider your specific needs, and the cost may significantly increase in the future. Therefore, to avoid potential misunderstandings or hidden fees, it’s advisable to choose SEO agencies like SeoProfy. With our transparent pricing system and data-driven approach, you can be sure about what to expect from our custom solutions.
Factors That Influence Local SEO Pricing
When choosing SEO agencies, it’s best to avoid those offering templated solutions. While some techniques and strategies may be useful for one business, they may not yield the desired results for another. To ensure your SEO success and the highest ROI, during the development of your strategy, it’s essential to consider the following factors:
Business Size
The local SEO cost for small businesses starts at $500, as they typically have only one GBP. Additionally, their websites usually have a smaller number of pages, which significantly simplifies their analysis and facilitates further technical improvements. At the same time, consider that local SEO for small businesses still requires a lot of effort, and if you want to get results that will exceed your expectations, the costs for professional services start from $1,600.
Market Competition
Operating a business in a competitive landscape can significantly increase the local SEO cost. Outranking your opponents may involve many resource-intensive processes, including the improvement and expansion of your backlink profile, website redesign, and creation of new pages. Consider that local SEO pricing for highly competitive businesses can often reach $9,500 per month or more to ensure stable revenue growth and improved search rankings.
Number of Locations
When you run a business providing services in several regions, it’s a good idea to opt for SEO for multiple locations. In this case, it’ll be necessary to take a personal approach to each area, which includes optimizing several GBPs, creating relevant content, and gaining backlinks from various local listings.
Quality of Services
Unfortunately, there is always a chance you’ll start working with a company that uses black-hat SEO tactics. In this case, you can forget about attracting local customers and growing your ranks. Moreover, such an agency may completely ruin all your previous efforts, resulting in penalties from Google. Of course, as a rule, SEO pricing for these low-quality services is way lower than for professional ones.
Software
Good SEO companies use a variety of tools and platforms, such as Ahrefs and Semrush, to improve their clients’ rankings. At the same time, top agencies like SeoProfy also develop their own software to reveal insights that will surely help your website overcome local competition. Of course, the implementation of such powerful tools requires more resources, but the outcomes are undoubtedly worth it.
Local SEO Agency vs. Freelancer Costs
You can also notice that there is a significant difference in local SEO services pricing between freelancers and agencies. If you’re wondering which one to choose, here is a brief review of the pros and cons of these two options.
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Consider that one person is unlikely to have enough knowledge and expertise to ensure improvements in all your website elements and GBP to help you win the local competition. On the other hand, despite a higher price, a professional agency will provide you with solid support from experts, each of whom knows how to deal with specific tasks.
What Pricing Models Do Local SEO Providers Use?
Agencies often offer various local SEO pricing models, allowing you to select the one that best suits your needs and budget. Let’s review the most popular of them, highlighting the advantages and drawbacks of each.
Hourly Rates
This pricing model is usually popular with small agencies and freelancers, as charging by the hour isn’t a traditional billing practice in the SEO industry. Usually, the hourly rate ranges from $15 to $250, depending on whether you work with a freelancer or a company. The only advantage of this model is that it can indeed meet limited budgets. However, some unfair specialists may simply nickel and dime your money by delaying the work.
Thus, professional SEO agencies don’t offer hourly rates to avoid value miscalculations. Consider that often these experts need an hour to do what a freelancer might take days, due to advanced tools and years of experience.
Monthly Retainers
SeoProfy, like most companies, charges a monthly fee, also known as local SEO packages. These bundles offer various services designed to enhance your business performance. Depending on your budget, business goals, and the factors mentioned above, you can select the most appropriate option.
As a rule, the local SEO cost in this pricing model ranges from $500 to $200,000 per month. However, if you see a suspiciously low price, it’s better to clarify what services are included to ensure you won’t need to pay more once you start the cooperation. If you’re looking for a package that delivers significant results and ensures high ROI, you should be prepared to pay from $1,600.
Project-Based Pricing
Opting for a project-based local SEO pricing may be a wise decision if you’ve just started your project, so you don’t need maintenance services but an execution of specific tasks. For example, this may include analyzing your competitors and audience, developing an SEO strategy, conducting keyword research, and preparing a content plan.
However, consider that this type isn’t a popular model with professional agencies, as it may be difficult to calculate the entire project’s costs beforehand. Even after a thorough analysis, unexpected problems may occur, requiring new solutions and affecting the local SEO cost.
Performance-Based Models
Does a local SEO plan that requires payments only when you achieve the desired results sound interesting? However, the harsh truth is that it’s the worst pricing model, as its benefits, such as high ROI and measurable results, are illusory.
Usually, a performance-based model is used by unfair SEO companies that use black-hat tactics. Indeed, they may lead to impressive results first, but as soon as you pay money for the delivered services, you’ll face problems like significant traffic drops and Google penalties. Thus, we strongly recommend opting for this type of cooperation.
What’s Included in a Local SEO Package?
We at SeoProfy provide a variety of local SEO services to help your business not only rank high but also boost your revenue and brand’s reputation. Our experts will consider your specific situation to offer cost-effective solutions you really need to achieve your goals. At the same time, we’d like to highlight the services included in all our local SEO packages as they play an integral role in the implementation of a digital marketing strategy.
Google Business Profile Optimization
Do you know that a complete Google Business Profile can significantly strengthen the trust of potential customers, increasing the chance of making a purchase by 50%? Moreover, it plays a significant role in ranking your business on Google Maps and search engine results pages. Thus, currently optimizing Google Business Profiles is one of the most important parts of successful local SEO strategies.
This process starts with the creation of your GBP (if it’s absent) or its comprehensive analysis. After it, the specialists from our expert SEO company will make it more attractive for potential clients and search engine algorithms. They’ll create engaging descriptions for your products and services, select the right business categories, and assist you in choosing suitable photos.
Local Link Building
Most professional marketers agree that a high-quality backlink profile is among the most significant factors that influence organic rankings. First of all, we’ll conduct a comprehensive analysis to discover relevant, location-specific business listings. These websites will provide your site with valuable links, driving more traffic and increasing its authority.
Additionally, as a part of our local link building process, we’ll ensure that your brand is mentioned in popular local listings and directories. Appearing on sites like Yelp, Bing Places, and their regional alternatives allows you to reach a broader audience, promote your services or products, and increase your online presence.
Reputation Management
The SEO cost you pay for our local optimization also covers enhancing your brand’s and GBP’s reputation through effective customer review management. Consider that it’s important to respond to the audience’s feedback — whether positive or negative — as it increases your chances of acquiring a client by 89%.
Moreover, answering clients’ reviews also makes your business more reputable in the eyes of search engines. When the algorithms see you interacting with the audience and taking care of your customers’ opinions, they’ll start ranking your business higher.
Our experts will help you build an efficient review management system to ensure you won’t miss any comments, even if you have GBPs in several locations. Furthermore, our local SEO pricing model also includes methods that will help you inspire your clients to share their positive reviews online.
Content Creation and Optimization
Unique, valuable, and exciting content is just what you need to stand out from other businesses in your region. First, it’s essential to start with a thorough analysis of your target clients, paying attention to the following aspects:
- Their interests and pain points.
- Ways in which your products or services can help them overcome their problems.
- Behavioral patterns (how they make purchases and consume content).
Additionally, conducting local keyword research with tools like Ahrefs or Semrush will be necessary. The subscription to these powerful platforms will cost you at least $117 per month. On the other hand, when you work with professional agencies like SeoProfy, the local SEO cost already covers these expenses.
Further, using the data received from the mentioned tools and our in-house software, we’ll develop a solid content strategy to overcome other local businesses in your area. Our experts will optimize the existing content and write new blog posts to improve rankings, increase organic traffic flow, and reduce bounce rates of the clients from your region.
Finally, our team will optimize other on-page elements of your web pages, such as metadata. By skillfully including the target keyword in the headings, meta descriptions, and title tags, we’ll significantly improve your site rankings in local search results.
Technical SEO & Mobile Optimization
Even if your GBP meets all standards and the quality of your content can make Stephen King himself jealous, your sales still won’t grow if you run a poorly optimized site. And that’s where you indeed need to rely on expert SEO services if you don’t want to waste time and numerous resources playing the guessing game.
Even the tiniest issue can prevent your website from being properly indexed, resulting in the loss of hundreds of clients every month. Your local SEO cost will cover a comprehensive analysis of your brand’s site, identification of key problems, and their further solution, including:
- Site speed improvement: As a rule, users leave a site if loading its pages takes longer than 3 seconds. Thus, even if you manage to rank high enough to catch the audience’s attention, these significant technical issues will still prevent you from converting your target customers.
- Mobile optimization: 4 out of 5 searches made on mobile devices lead to a purchase within hours. Also, Google is known for its mobile-first indexing. It means that it prioritizes crawling the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. Thus, if you want your local brand to grow online, taking care of its version for portable devices must be among your top priorities.
- Better crawlability: It’s essential to ensure that Google’s algorithms can find and understand the content on your web pages to ensure it appears in proper search results. Without a well-structured site architecture, an adjusted robots.txt file, and strategically placed on-page links, there is a significant risk that you’ll face poor crawlability, resulting in low organic traffic and decreased rankings.
Is Local SEO Worth the Cost?
Local SEO cost undoubtedly justifies itself, as it usually takes from 6 to 12 months for your custom plan to achieve a positive return on investment (ROI). Of course, the numbers depend on your niche, region, target audience, and competition. For example, an SEO strategy for a local financial company may reach an impressive 1,031%. By the way, you can calculate the ROI on yourself by following a simple method:
- Subtract the local SEO pricing from the revenue generated by organic traffic sales.
- Divide the sum by the costs you’ve paid for your search engine optimization.
- Multiply the received numbers by 100 to identify your ROI.
Consider that a properly implemented SEO campaign will provide you with long-term organic results. Once you improve your GBP, website content, backlink profile, and technical background, you’ll only need to maintain your site, reaping the benefits of your SEO efforts.
Grow your local business together with SeoProfy and our outstanding services:
- Personalized approach
- Comprehensive analysis
- Advanced in-house SEO tools
- Live reports
Your Next Step: Making Local SEO Work for Your Business
Local SEO prices vary significantly from agency to agency, sometimes offering you indeed lucrative options. However, it’s crucial to carefully choose a provider to avoid disappointment and potential problems caused by an unprofessional approach. It’s better to choose expert solutions once than to keep wasting more and more money on inefficient strategies or illusory results.
SeoProfy offers a variety of local SEO packages for any business. Moreover, after analyzing your specific situation and business goals, we’ll provide you with the custom services that you really need without exceeding the budget limits.
Andrew Shum is the Head of SEO at SeoProfy, with over 8 years of experience driving organic growth for startups, e-commerce brands, and Fortune 500 companies. He has led SEO strategies for 150+ websites across 20+ industries, delivering consistent results through data-driven optimization, technical audits, and scalable content frameworks. Andrew wrote this article to share proven tactics that align with Google’s latest updates and performance trends.
