Ask five agencies what SEO costs and you’ll get five different numbers, because “SEO” isn’t one service — it’s four, priced four different ways. SEO for a site that already exists is a one-time fee. SEO for a Shopify or WooCommerce store is a bigger one-time fee. SEO delivered as new content is priced per article. And SEO for a site that doesn’t exist yet comes built into the price of building it. At 3MY, site and store SEO start at $489 and $2,489 as one-time fees, articles start at $89 a week, and a new site with SEO inside is $1,900. For scale, Shopify’s own blog puts general SEO pricing at roughly $1,500 to over $20,000 a month — a monthly retainer, a different way of paying for a different kind of engagement, not a number to hold up against ours.
SEO Isn’t One Product — It’s Four
The word “SEO” covers work on a site that already exists, work on a store’s catalog and structure, new content added on a schedule, and SEO built into a brand-new site — four jobs, four different reasons the price moves. Conflating them is why the question of what SEO costs turns up a range wide enough to be useless, anywhere from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands, with no way to tell which number applies to your situation. The rest of this article breaks down each one, how the market prices SEO by comparison, and how the four options stack when you need more than one at once.
What the Market Charges — And Why the Numbers Don’t Compare Cleanly
Most of what turns up for “seo cost” elsewhere is a different kind of number than the ones on this page. Shopify’s own blog, in a post published in December 2025, puts general SEO pricing at “around $1,500 a month to more than $20,000 a month,” and says that for a small business just starting out, $1,000 to $1,500 a month “may be sufficient,” with enterprise companies considering $5,000 to $10,000 a month. Those headline figures are monthly retainers — ongoing payments for ongoing work, with no fixed end date. The same post also lists one-time ranges for specific kinds of work, but a line in someone else’s table isn’t the same list of work as our packages, so neither kind of number lines up cleanly with ours. Putting “$489” next to “$1,500 a month” as if one simply wins isn’t an honest comparison; which model makes sense depends on whether you want a project completed or a channel maintained indefinitely.
The other figure that circulates often is “$497 a month” cited as an industry average by Forbes Advisor — though on that same page, the number is credited to an outside analysis from Backlinko rather than to Forbes’ own research, and the page carrying it was last updated in May 2024, over two years ago at this point. Treat it the way you’d treat any secondhand statistic: useful for a sense of scale, not as a quote to hold anyone to.
One figure from Shopify’s post is worth keeping regardless of which payment model you’re comparing against: in-house SEO costs “more than $40,000 per person annually,” before that person has produced a single ranking — a real number to weigh if the alternative under consideration is hiring rather than contracting the work out.
SEO Cost for a Small Business With an Existing Site
For a business that already has a website and wants its pages to rank, the job is fixing what’s already live and optimizing it for terms people search for, rather than terms that sound impressive. At 3MY that’s $489 for a one-page site and $1,489 for a site of five pages — both one-time fees, for one language, with a second language (French or English) adding 30%. Each page past five is $300, and sites of 20 or more pages are priced per page after an audit. The full list is on our SEO services and prices. If you’re weighing whether a lean budget covers what you need, our piece on affordable SEO packages goes through what a small package can and can’t cover.
That range is close to what someone searching “seo cost for small business” is usually asking about: a handful of service pages, not a hundred-page catalog. Either way, the first step is a free audit — ours shows which of your pages Google shows at all, what’s broken, which searches you’re missing, and what to fix first. The in-depth keyword work is part of the paid project. This technical SEO checklist is closer to what a thorough audit looks at, if you want the fuller list before asking anyone for one.
If most of your customers find you by searching a city or neighborhood name rather than a general term, that’s a related but different job — see our local SEO services instead.
Ecommerce SEO Cost: What a Store Adds to the Number
A storefront carries a different scope of work than a handful of service pages, even a small one. A Shopify or WooCommerce catalog can carry hundreds of product and collection URLs, and some of them describe the exact same product on two separate addresses — Shopify’s own developer documentation says as much about product pages shown inside a collection. Add variant pages, filtered collection views, and installed apps that were never written with search in mind. If your catalog runs on Shopify specifically, our piece on SEO for a Shopify store goes through which of those limits you can fix, which you can work around, and which you’re stuck with.
At 3MY, SEO for a store is $2,489 for up to 6 categories and 30 products, or $4,489 for up to 15 categories and 150 products — one-time, for one language, with a second language adding 30%. Both are listed on the same pricing page as everything else, and catalogs of 1,000 products or more are quoted as a whole.
In Shopify’s own published price breakdown, ecommerce SEO carries a higher range than local SEO in every billing column it lists — hourly, monthly, and one-time. That’s Shopify comparing store SEO with local SEO specifically, and the gap follows the same logic: a catalog has more pages, and more ways for them to duplicate each other.
SEO Priced by the Article, Not by the Project
Some businesses don’t need a rebuild — they need new pages: posts for a blog or a resource section, added on a schedule rather than all at once. At 3MY that’s priced by how many go out each week, in one language, and billed every four weeks: one article a week is $89, two a week is $160, three a week is $200 — the per-article rate drops as the weekly count goes up. A second language adds 30% to whichever tier you’re on. Every article moves through the same process regardless of volume: a team of people and AI works through a set process, a second team checks the result independently, and a person reads every article before it goes out.
Agency rate guides for Canada and the US put a single SEO article at about $150 to $600, and what that price covers varies from one provider to the next. Whatever the price, an article isn’t a promise of traffic on its own: it ranks or doesn’t depending on the topic, the site’s existing standing, and whatever else is already competing for that search, the same as any other page on the internet. For a realistic timeline of when that shows up, and what to watch while you wait, see our piece on how long SEO takes.
SEO Built Into a New Website: A One-Time Cost
Every price above assumes a site that already exists and needs work done to it. If you’re still building, that assumption doesn’t hold. At 3MY, a new website of up to 8 pages is $1,900, and SEO is inside that number rather than a line item added afterward: keyword research, page copy written to match what people search for, meta titles and descriptions, and internal linking, applied to the landing pages and the homepage. Legal pages, thank-you pages, and other back-of-house pages sit outside that pass. See how much a website costs for the rest of what that $1,900 covers.
One number, paid once, for a site that launches already built for the terms it needs to rank for — instead of launching first and paying separately, later, to fix what shipped without it. It’s also why we write SEO into every new website we build, rather than leaving it for a separate job after launch: the copy is already our job, and writing it for search is part of the same work, not an extra charge.
What Actually Inflates an SEO Bill
SEO quotes don’t move because of some vague “difficulty” score attached to your industry. They move for reasons you can point to before you sign anything. On our own price list, four of them change the number — page count, catalog size, articles per week, and language; the other two are worth asking any provider about:
- Number of pages that each need their own keyword target and their own written copy. One page is a different job than twenty, regardless of the platform it’s built on — on our list, each page past five adds $300.
- Whether copy is written new or an existing page just needs restructuring. A full rewrite takes longer than tightening what’s already there.
- Catalog size, for a store. Above our larger store package, each extra category is $150 and each extra product $6, because every extra page in a catalog is one more page to optimize and one more chance for a duplicate URL.
- How often new content ships. Three articles a week is a bigger commitment than one, although the per-article rate drops as the weekly count rises.
- Whether the site has decent bones or needs to be rebuilt underneath the content. A site with a workable structure costs less to fix than one where the structure itself is the problem.
- Language. Every SEO package and article rate above is for one language. A second language — French or English — adds 30% to whichever of those applies.
It’s worth asking any SEO provider to walk through that list, specifically, before you agree to a number.
SEO Pricing Models, Side by Side
| Payment model | What you’re paying for | When it fits | Our price |
| One-time project fee | Fixing and optimizing pages on a site you already have | You have a working site that isn’t ranking and don’t want an open-ended contract | $489 one-page site · $1,489 five pages · $2,489 or $4,489 store — one-time, one language |
| Per-article fee | New content, priced by how many articles go out each week | You want the site to keep growing at a set pace | $89 one a week · $160 two a week · $200 three a week — one language, billed every four weeks |
| Built into a new site | SEO work bundled into the build — research, copy, meta tags, internal links on the landing pages and homepage | You’re building a new site anyway and don’t want SEO priced separately | $1,900 for a site of up to 8 pages, build included |
| Monthly retainer (the model behind Shopify’s headline range) | Ongoing audits, content, and reporting for as long as the contract runs | You want continuous output hired out as a subscription | Not how our packages are priced — see the market ranges above |
A second language — French or English — adds 30% to the SEO packages and article rates in the first two rows.
How the Prices Combine Once You Stop Reading and Start Spending
Most businesses don’t pick one row from that table and stop there. The rows stack, and the order you stack them in decides whether you pay for the same work twice.
If the site exists and works, size the job to the site you have. A one-page site is the $489 job. A site of five pages is the $1,489 job.
If the pages are fine but thin, add content rather than more fixing. Regular articles extend a site that’s already built right. A page that hasn’t been optimized yet is a weaker base for new content to link back to, so fixing it first tends to make the new pages work harder too.
If a store is on the way, don’t optimize the brochure site first. A storefront has its own structure and its own price, and work done on pages that are about to be replaced is work you pay for twice.
If the whole site is due for a rebuild, skip the add-ons entirely. That’s the case the $1,900 build covers — the SEO arrives with the pages instead of chasing them afterward.
What Changed for One Client
One of our clients runs a home-services business. For years, the site carried no SEO at all. Last year we built the client a CRM. This year we extended that CRM and shipped a new site with SEO built in. This season, the CRM shows more inquiries logged than the same stretch last year, and it now separates the ones that came from paid ads from the ones that came from the site itself. Both the CRM and the site changed in the same window, ads were running throughout, and demand in that line of work is seasonal — so crediting the whole increase to SEO would be dishonest.
What did change is what the client can now check: a number in their own system, by source, instead of a guess. That’s the standard worth holding anyone’s SEO cost to, including ours — not where a page sits in search results, but whether the count in your own CRM moves, and from where.
What to Ask Before You Sign Anything
Google publishes its own list of questions for any SEO provider in Do you need an SEO?. Two matter most when comparing prices: “What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?” and “Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site…?” A provider who answers both in writing is quoting a real scope.
If SEO is competing against paid search for the same budget, our piece on choosing between SEO and Google Ads walks through the trade-off, alongside what Google Ads costs.
