How Much Does SEO Cost for a Small Business, and How Long Does It Take?

With MCDNS, local SEO starts from $600 a month and broader SEO starts from $1,200 a month. The fee pays for steady work on your site, your content and your listings, with regular reporting. SEO builds over months rather than days, and no honest provider can guarantee a position on Google.

The short answer

These are our current starting prices for search work. Each one is a "from" price.

• Local SEO: from $600 a month

• SEO: from $1,200 a month

• Google Ads management: from $500 a month

The final price depends on the size of your site, how many areas you serve and how much content needs to be written. We confirm the scope and the price before work starts. The full list is on our packages page.

What the monthly fee pays for

SEO is ongoing work, which is why it is priced by the month. A typical plan has five parts.

• An audit that finds the technical and content problems holding the site back.

• Keyword research that shows what your customers actually search for.

• On-page work: titles, headings and content tuned to those searches.

• New pages and links, added over time.

• Regular reports on rankings, traffic and leads.

The mix changes with what your site needs most. A new site needs pages. An older site often needs fixing first.

Local SEO or full SEO

The two plans answer different questions. Pick by where your customers are.

Local SEO is for a business that serves a city or a region. The work centers on your Google Business Profile, reviews, local listings and location pages.

Full SEO is for a business that competes beyond its own area, or that sells through its website. The work centers on the site itself: its structure, its content and the links pointing to it.

Many small businesses should start local. It is the smaller plan, and it reaches the people most likely to buy.

How long SEO takes

There is no fixed timeline, and no one can promise one. It depends on where your site starts, how strong your competitors are and how much content has to be created.

Google's own guidance sets the range. Its SEO Starter Guide says: "Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months." You can read it in Google's SEO Starter Guide.

In practice, plan for SEO as a long-term channel. Fixes to a broken page can show quickly. Growth from new content and links builds slowly, and regular reports show what is moving.

SEO or ads first

SEO and ads do different jobs. Ads can bring visitors as soon as a campaign is live, and they stop when you stop paying. SEO takes longer to build, and the pages you create keep working.

If you need calls this month, start with ads and build SEO alongside. Our Google Ads management starts from $500 a month, and the ad budget itself is paid to the ad platform.

If you can wait, or your budget only covers one, SEO on a sound website is usually the steadier investment. Either way, the page a visitor lands on has to be clear, or both channels waste money.

Offers to walk away from

Some offers are easy to spot. Walk away from any provider who does one of these.

• Guarantees a first-place ranking.

• Claims a special relationship with Google.

• Will not say what work is done each month.

• Sells links in bulk for a flat price.

• Locks you into a long contract with no reporting.

Google gives the same warning in its advice on hiring an SEO. It says no one can guarantee a first-place ranking on Google.

Questions to ask before you hire

Ask every provider the same questions, including us.

• What will you do in the first month?

• What will the report show, and how often will I get it?

• Who writes the content, and do I approve it?

• Who owns the content and the accounts if we stop?

• How will we know if it is working?

Clear answers are a good sign. Vague ones are your answer too.

What you can do yourself

Some of this work costs nothing but time. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, keep your hours and phone number correct everywhere, and ask real customers for reviews.

Write a clear title for every page on your site, and make sure the site loads quickly on a phone. These steps will not replace a full plan, but they make any plan work better. If you do them first, a paid plan can start on the work you cannot do yourself.

Next step

Tell us about your business and where your customers are, and we will say plainly which plan fits, or whether you need one yet. See what is included on our SEO page.