Fivenson Studios · Straight Answers

How much should SEO cost per month?

Updated August 18, 2026
The short answer

Real SEO for a small business runs $500 to $5,000+ per month. That spread is wide because the same three letters describe a $600 listings cleanup and a $6,000 content and authority program. Below about $300/month you are almost always buying automated link spam that can get you penalized.

SEO is almost entirely hours. There is no media spend, no ad auction, no platform taking a cut. At $800 a month you are buying roughly a day of someone’s attention; at $3,000, about a week of it plus the tools that show whether it worked. That is why price and scope track each other so closely here, and why the useful question about a cheap quote is not “am I getting a deal” but “whose hours are these, and how many.”

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What each budget buys

  • $500 to $800/mo: Google Business Profile, citations and listings, a few pages tidied, a little content. One location, one main service, a category nobody else is investing in. What it does not reach: a term a competitor is actively spending on, or the content depth that gets you found for anything beyond your own name.
  • $1,000 to $1,500/mo: the above plus content on a consistent schedule and some link work. Enough for one market with modest competition. What it does not reach: several locations, several services, or a category where three other companies publish every month. Spread across those, it thins out to nothing.
  • $2,500 to $4,500/mo: content on a real cadence, site architecture and internal linking, authority and citation building, and reporting detailed enough to tell you which part is working. This is where a competitive category or a multi-location business becomes reachable.
  • $5,000+/mo: several markets at once, or search plus AI answers, or a category where one customer is worth enough to justify it. At this level it is a program with a roadmap, not a monthly task list.

How to tell which one you are. How many places and services do you need to be found for? How many competitors are publishing every month? And what is one new customer worth to you? A $400 customer and a $40,000 customer justify very different budgets for the same work.

Pricing red flags

"$99/month, rank #1 guaranteed" is a scam, nobody can guarantee rankings, and that price only covers a bot spamming links. Also watch for no reporting, no named contact, and contracts that lock you in for a year with no exit.

A note on the automated tools

Suppose five businesses in the same industry and the same city all sign up for the same automated SEO platform, all paying the same monthly fee. The tool builds the same kind of pages from the same templates against the same keyword list for all five of them. So what decides which one ranks first?

Nothing in the tool. It has no opinion about which of the five deserves to win. Ranking is comparative: Google is choosing between you and the other four, so the thing that separates you has to be something the others do not have. That takes a person looking at what your competitors are actually doing, deciding where you can be genuinely better or different, and then doing that specific work.

Automated tools are good at the repetitive parts and we use them ourselves. What they cannot do is decide how you should be different from the business down the street, because every one of their customers is being handed the same answer.

Where Fivenson sits

Our published pricing

Local SEO Foundation from $1,500/month for a single location or service area. Growth SEO at $2,500 to $4,500/month, which is where most of our clients start. Discovery Infrastructure at $5,000 to $10,000+/month for search plus AI answers. A one-time SEO Audit and Roadmap from $1,500, credited toward a program if you continue.

You can pay less than that elsewhere, and for some businesses that is the right call. What you are paying for at this level is a studio that has worked in Ann Arbor since 2012. Expertise.com, Clutch, ThreeBest Rated, Top Design Firms and the Better Business Bureau have all recognized the work, the BBB with an A+, and we have a 5.0 rating from 131 five-star reviews you can read yourself. Everything we build is yours from the first day: your accounts, your data, your content, in your name, whether you stay with us or not.

No long lock-in, no guaranteed-ranking promises, and a monthly report a real person walks you through.

Common questions

Why is SEO monthly instead of one-time?

Rankings are competitive and always shifting, competitors publish, Google updates, and content ages. SEO is maintained, not installed once.

Is a cheaper SEO company a bad sign?

Under ~$300/month, yes, real SEO takes human hours. Cheap providers automate low-quality links that can trigger penalties and set you back months.

What does Fivenson charge for SEO?

Our programs start at $1,500 a month for a single location, run $2,500 to $4,500 for multi-service or multi-location work, and $5,000 to $10,000+ when AI answers are in scope. A one-time audit and roadmap starts at $1,500 and is credited if you continue. No locked-in year, and you see exactly what we do each month.

What if I only have $500 a month?

Then spend it on the narrowest thing that can actually work: your Google Business Profile, your listings, your reviews, and one strong page for your main service. That is a real foundation, and it beats spreading $500 across five ambitions.

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