The most common fee for an SEO agency is between $500 and $1,000 a month. That’s according to an Ahrefs survey of 439 people in the industry. But the same survey includes some who charge less than $100 and others who charge more than $5,000, and both could be charging a fair price.
The difference isn’t the agency itself, but what’s done with that money each month: how many hours, on which tasks and against what competition. Once you have market figures and our own prices in front of you, it’s fairly easy to work out what budget makes sense for your business.
Three ways to pay for SEO, and which suits you
SEO isn’t a fixed product like hosting or a software licence. It’s ongoing work done by people, which is why the price depends mainly on how many hours go into your website and who puts them in. A fee of €150 a month covers a couple of hours at most: checking for errors and not much else. A fee of €1,500 allows for work on content, technical issues and links every week.
There are three payment models on the market, with very different prices depending on who’s offering them:
| Model | Most common price | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | Agencies: $500–1,000/month. Freelancers: $100–500/month | The norm in SEO: the work is ongoing and results build up month after month |
| Hourly | $75–100/hour (agencies average around $99) | One-off consultations or reviewing something specific. Hard to budget for in the long run |
| Per project | $2,500–5,000 | Fixed-scope jobs: site migrations, initial optimisation or a content plan |
Besides the payment model, three factors drive the price. The first is scope: ranking a clinic in its own neighbourhood is not the same as ranking an online shop across the whole of Spain, or a company in five countries. The second is competition: the more contested your searches are, the more work it takes to get ahead. And the third is your starting point: a new website with no links or serious technical problems needs more effort at the beginning than a site with years of history that just needs tidying up.
Be wary of “pay for results”It sounds great, but there’s usually small print: guaranteed rankings for searches nobody makes, such as your company name plus your town, or long lock-in contracts. Nobody controls Google’s algorithm. What an agency can commit to is a clear work plan and measuring whether you’re getting more enquiries.
SEO prices in Spain by type of business
In the Ahrefs survey, 68.8% of professionals charge $2,000 a month or less. In Spain, most small and medium-sized businesses end up investing between €250 and €1,000 a month, depending on their sector and their ambitions. Our fees sit in the lower-middle range, and you can check them with our price calculator:
| Type of SEO | Who it’s for | Monthly fee |
|---|---|---|
| Local SEO | Businesses that win customers in their own city: clinics, law firms, renovation companies, academies | €220 |
| National SEO | Companies and online shops selling across Spain | €400 |
| International SEO | Businesses looking for customers in several countries or languages | €700 |
On top of the monthly fee there’s a one-off set-up charge of €250 (technical review, page structure and tracking set-up). All prices exclude VAT and cover our team’s work. Links on other websites are charged separately, and you’ll see why in the next section.
Whoever you work with, an SEO retainer should include at least the following:
- Technical fixes. Speed, indexing, errors, redirects and anything else that stops Google from reading your site properly.
- Optimising your existing pages. Titles, copy and structure designed for the searches that bring in customers, not just visits.
- New content where it’s missing. Pages for each service or area, and articles that answer your customers’ real questions.
- Your Google Business Profile, if you’re a local business: categories, photos, posts and a reviews strategy.
- Tracking enquiries and sales, not just rankings. What matters is how many customers come to you from Google.
How much would SEO cost for your business?Choose the type of SEO and the level of link building, and see the price instantly.
Links: the part of the price hardly anyone explains
This is why two SEO quotes that look the same can be so different. To compete for difficult searches, Google needs signs that other websites trust yours, and the main one is links. In Ahrefs’ study of 14 billion pages, out of nearly 20 million pages with no external links at all, only one in 6,671 got more than 1,000 visits a month.
Some links can be earned through outreach, but in many sectors you need to publish articles on specialist blogs and online newspapers, and that costs money that goes to the publication, not the agency. These are the going rates in Spain in 2026:
| Where the link is published | Price per link |
|---|---|
| Specialist blogs | €50–300 |
| Local or regional press | €150–800 |
| Demanding niches (finance, health, legal) | €150–400 |
| Authoritative online publications | €400–1,500 |
| Major national newspapers | Over €1,500 |
That’s why we keep our SEO work separate from the investment in links: you know exactly what you’re paying for our work and what goes to third parties. We work with three tiers, in line with the budgets recommended across the market: basic, around €400 a month, with two or three links on specialist blogs; standard, around €900, combining blogs and local press; and advanced, around €1,800, with authoritative online publications for highly competitive sectors.
Links for under €100These usually come from networks of blogs set up purely to sell links, with no real traffic and nothing to do with your sector. Google is getting better and better at spotting them: at best they’re useless, and at worst they trigger a penalty that takes months to recover from. A package of 200 links for €99 is a reason to run a mile.
Does everyone need paid links? No. A local business in a mid-sized city can rank very well with a good website, a page for each service and a well-kept Google Business Profile. On the other hand, an online shop competing with big brands, or an insurer that wants to appear in national searches, will struggle to get there without them.
Signs that cheap SEO will end up costing you
We’ve been doing this since 2011, and every year part of our work involves fixing what others left behind. These are the practices that cost businesses the most money:
- Guaranteeing the top spot. Nobody controls the algorithm or what your competitors do. Whoever promises it is usually talking about searches with no volume, or risky techniques that backfire.
- Bulk packages of cheap links. Quantity without quality. They add nothing and can get your site penalised.
- Accounts in the agency’s name. Your Search Console, your Analytics and your Google Business Profile should be in your name, with access for the agency. We’ve seen companies lose years of data when they switched provider.
- Only measuring rankings. Climbing for twenty keywords that don’t bring in customers is pointless. Ask for enquiries and sales to be tracked from the very first month.
- Not explaining what’s done each month. If you don’t know where the hours go, you can’t tell whether you’re paying a fair price.
How long it takes to pay for itself
SEO is a medium-term investment, and the data makes that clear. According to Ahrefs, only between 1.74% and 6.11% of new pages reach Google’s top 10 in their first year, and the page in first place is five years old on average. That’s why it makes sense to start with specific searches that have less competition and stronger buying intent, and grow from there.
There’s also a new factor. Since Google started showing AI-generated summaries at the top of many searches, the first result gets far fewer clicks on those searches: 58% fewer, according to the latest Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 keywords, published in 2026. A year earlier, the same measurement put the drop at 34.5%. That doesn’t mean SEO has stopped working. It means it matters more to show up for searches with buying intent and to be one of the sources the AI cites in those summaries.
To find out whether it’s worth it for you, run the numbers with your own figures:
| Item | Example |
|---|---|
| Average profit from a new customer | €600 |
| Monthly investment in national SEO | €400 |
| Customers a month from Google to cover the investment | 1 |
| Result with 3 customers a month | €1,400 a month in profit |
And unlike advertising, when you stop paying, it doesn’t all disappear overnight: your rankings hold for a while, and the pages and content are still yours. For a dental clinic in Madrid, appointment requests grew by 180% in six months; for a health insurance office, ongoing SEO took the website past 75,000 visits from Google in 16 months.
If you need customers now, the most sensible approach is usually to combine SEO with Google Ads campaigns at the start: they bring in enquiries from day one and show us which searches convert best. Once SEO starts delivering, you can cut back on ad spend. If you’d like us to look at which SEO plan fits your sector, tell us about your business.
