What local SEO should cost, by scope

Every published average for this is a survey of agencies who chose to answer a survey. The range they produce spans more than an order of magnitude, which makes it useless for deciding anything.

So here is a different approach: what the work actually consists of at four levels, and the arithmetic that tells you which level your business can support. Substitute your own numbers as you go.

The four levels of scope

One: fix the listing

A one-off. Categories set correctly, the address arrangement sorted, services and attributes filled in, duplicates found and merged, the obvious contradictions in your details corrected. Perhaps a fortnight of someone's attention, spread over a month.

This is the highest return work available to most businesses, and it is finite. It has an end. Anyone who tells you listing optimisation is an ongoing monthly service has misunderstood it or is hoping you will.

Two: the listing plus the website's foundations

Everything above, plus a page for each service you sell, the details consistent across the site, the technical faults that stop pages appearing at all, and a way of asking every customer for a review.

Two to three months of work. Also finite. This is where most local businesses should stop, and a fair number of them would then be finished.

Three: ongoing, competitive

This is the first genuinely monthly tier. Content published on a schedule, links earned rather than bought, reviews accumulating, rankings tracked across a real geography rather than from your own office, and something changed every month based on what the numbers did.

It only makes sense when there is a competitor above you who is also doing it. If nobody in your market is, tier two plus patience gets you the same result for less.

Four: multi-location

Everything above, times the number of locations, plus the problems that only exist at scale: locations competing with each other, listings managed centrally, and a site structure that does not collapse when you open the sixth branch.

The arithmetic that decides it

Forget the price for a moment and work out your ceiling. You need four of your own numbers.

Those are illustrative figures for a hypothetical home services business, chosen so the arithmetic is visible. One enquiry is worth $504 to it. If a month of work produces four extra enquiries, that month generated about $2,000 in eventual revenue.

That is the number a monthly fee has to be measured against, not against what it feels like to spend. And it is why the same fee is obviously sensible for a business with a $6,000 average job and obviously reckless for one with a $60 average job.

When the answer is to spend nothing

There are businesses we turn away, and the pattern is consistent enough to describe. How long any of it takes to show is a separate question, answered in how long local SEO takes.

• Your average job is small and does not repeat. If a customer is worth $40 once, no amount of ranking fixes the underlying arithmetic.
• You are already at capacity. More enquiries you cannot service is a cost, not a benefit. Raise your prices first, and if you still have a queue, then talk about marketing.
• Your problem is conversion, not visibility. If people are finding you and not calling, ranking higher just shows the same page to more people.
• Nobody searches for what you sell. Some businesses genuinely run on referral and relationship. Search cannot create demand that does not exist.
• You have three months of runway. Local SEO's cheapest wins take weeks and its real ones take months. If the business needs revenue in six weeks, buy ads and do this later.

That last one is worth saying plainly, because it is the honest answer more often than the industry admits.

What a fee should buy, at any level

1. 01A named person who does the work, not an account manager who relays it.
2. 02A list of what will be done this month, agreed in advance.
3. 03Rankings measured across the area you actually serve, not from one point.
4. 04Enquiries counted, with their source, so the arithmetic above can be checked against reality.
5. 05A month's notice, not a twelve month lock-in.

If you are weighing this against paid advertising instead, we compared the two here. And if you would rather see what the work involves before deciding what it is worth, the local SEO overview lays out the whole of it in three pictures.