Kodakod Team
Two SEO proposals can differ fivefold in price and both still say "SEO". The difference is in the work done each month. Here's how to read an SEO proposal and which phrases should make you stop.
In short: The price of an SEO proposal is set by how much work gets done each month: technical fixes, new content, improvements to existing pages and measurement. For your monthly fee, you should see in writing how much work will go into each of those four items. A proposal that guarantees rankings, sells backlinks in bulk or doesn't show its work with Search Console data is expensive, whatever the figure.
Imagine you get two SEO proposals in the same week. One costs a few hundred a month, the other five times as much. Both list "keyword research", "on-page optimization" and "monthly reporting". You can't tell from those lines which one is expensive and which one is cheap, because the proposal lists the names of the work, not the work itself.
We're not giving market figures in this article. Prices change every year, and you can't say whether a fee is reasonable without looking at what it pays for. Instead, we'll show you how to read an SEO proposal.
Three types of proposal: which one do you need?
Before you start comparing, make sure you're putting proposals of the same type side by side. Comparing a one-off audit with a monthly engagement on price alone is misleading.
| Proposal type | What you get | Who it suits | What to watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-off audit | An analysis of the site's technical and content state, with a prioritized task list | Teams with their own developer who want to know what needs doing | Whoever implements the findings is outside the proposal |
| Monthly engagement | Recurring technical upkeep, content, page improvements and reporting every month | Businesses that want to grow organic traffic as a steady channel | If the monthly volume of work isn't written down, you can't compare |
| Project-based work | Managing the SEO side of a single change, such as a site migration, a redesign or adding a language | Sites whose URL structure is about to change | Redirects from the old addresses to the new ones must be part of the same job |
What does the monthly fee actually buy?
SEO isn't one task but several that repeat every month. A proposal should state clearly which of the following it includes, and how much of each:
| Work item | What you should see each month | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Concrete fixes for crawl errors, unindexed pages and speed issues | The same automated crawl report sent every month |
| Content | New articles or pages, each written for a known query | Content with no stated volume and topics never discussed with you |
| Existing pages | Updates to titles, descriptions and copy, with a note of what changed where | A report that never goes beyond "on-page optimization done" |
| Measurement | Search Console and Analytics data, and movement in tracked queries | Only a rankings list pulled from the agency's own tool |
Most of the price gap comes from the second and third rows of this table. Writing content and reworking existing pages takes time. It's no surprise that a cheap package leaves those rows out or keeps them very small.
What pushes the price up?
Competition comes first. "Divorce lawyer London" and "industrial cooling tower maintenance" don't rank with the same effort. Competitive queries need more content, stronger pages and more time.
Site size matters too. Maintaining a fifty-page corporate site and a five-thousand-product online store are different jobs. In e-commerce, filter pages, out-of-stock products and duplicate content are a project on their own.
An often overlooked factor is the site's technical state. On a site with a shaky foundation, the first months go into fixes. That raises an important question: who will make them? If the agency only delivers reports, your developer will do the work and that cost won't show up in the proposal. When we audited our own site, nearly every issue we found was at the code level; we shared the details in our technical SEO checklist. Speed issues fall into the same category; we explained why they matter in our article on Core Web Vitals.
Finally, the number of languages. A bilingual site needs two versions of every page, two separate rounds of keyword research and a correctly built hreflang setup.
Stop if you see these in a proposal
- "Guaranteed first page." Google decides the rankings. Google's guide to hiring an SEO says it plainly: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, and if someone guarantees it, find someone else.
- "300 backlinks a month." Buying or creating links to manipulate rankings is defined as link spam in Google's spam policies. Nothing may happen in the short term, but if Google treats those links as spam, rankings can drop and recovery is not easy.
- An agency that doesn't ask for Search Console access. It's the only official source on how your site performs in Google. SEO done without it is guesswork. Google's advice is sensible too: grant read access only at the start.
- Work that isn't shared with you. Google recommends asking an SEO whether they'll share every change they make to your site, along with the reasoning behind their recommendations.
- No word on what happens when the contract ends. Do the content, accounts and changes stay with you? Ask before you sign.
- Unsolicited email offers. Google also advises being wary of SEO firms and agencies that email you out of the blue.
Seven questions to ask before you sign
- What exactly will you do this month? How many pieces of content, which pages, which technical fixes?
- Will you implement the technical fixes yourselves, or hand a task list to our developer?
- How will you measure success, and what kind of results do you expect in what timeframe?
- Will the report include Search Console and Analytics data, or only a rankings list from your own tool?
- Do you have experience in our industry and in the city or country we're targeting? Can you show examples of previous work?
- What do you do to earn links? Do you buy links?
- When the contract ends, who keeps the content, the accounts and the access?
Several of these questions come straight from the recommendations in Google's own guide. Get the answers in writing, and compare the two proposals on those answers rather than on the figure.
Does GEO need a separate budget?
Over the past year a new line has appeared in proposals: "GEO", or "AI search optimization". This work aims to get your brand cited when ChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Overviews answer a question, and it isn't independent of SEO. According to Google's own documentation, there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews; other AI tools also draw on sources that are crawlable, clearly written and trustworthy. Good SEO already covers most of GEO.
The part that takes extra work is measurement: regularly testing which assistant recommends whom for questions about your industry, and seeing where competitors pull ahead. If a proposal includes GEO, ask how those tests are run and how they'll appear in the report. We explained the concept and the practical steps in our article on what GEO is.
How should the first three months go?
In a healthy SEO engagement, the first month goes into the audit and the most urgent technical fixes. Content production and improvements to existing pages start in months two and three. The first thing to move in Search Console is usually impressions; clicks and conversions follow. It's normal not to see a big jump in rankings by the end of month three. What you should see is a work log explaining what was done each month and why, and an impressions curve heading up, even slowly.
That's why the most useful question when comparing proposals is a simple one: "What exactly will you do this month?" A proposal with a concrete answer is easier to judge, whatever the price.
At Kodakod, our software team runs SEO engagements. We don't stop at reporting technical issues; we fix them in your site's code ourselves. We publish our own package prices and exactly what each package includes on our SEO and GEO services page, so you can hold us to the same criteria set out in this article.
Frequently asked questions
There's no single right figure; the price is set by competition, site size, technical state and the number of languages. The right question isn't "how much" but "what gets done each month for this fee". A proposal that states the volume of technical fixes, content, page improvements and measurement can be judged, whatever the figure.
It can work on a small scale if it covers content and technical fixes. The problem is that cheap packages often consist of nothing but an automated report and a rankings list. Ask how many pieces of content are written each month and which pages get reworked; if the answer is vague, what you're paying for is a report.
The effect of technical fixes starts to show in Search Console as Google recrawls the pages. Ranking gains that depend on content take longer, and longer still for competitive queries. Google recommends asking an SEO what kind of results they expect and in what timeframe; it's reasonable to want that answer written into the proposal.
A one-off audit has no term. For monthly work, we recommend at least three months, so the cycle of technical fixes, content and measurement has time to deliver. If you're asked for a long commitment, make sure the exit terms and who keeps the content are written into the contract.
GEO rests on the same foundation as SEO, so good SEO work largely covers it already. The extra work is measuring visibility in AI assistants on a regular basis. If a separate fee is charged for that, ask in writing how the tests are run and how they'll be shown in the report.
