Average SEO Cost by Industry: What 136 Providers Publish (2026 Study)

The average SEO cost is $1,175 a month for an entry-level plan. That is the median across 136 providers who publish SEO prices for a specific industry on their own websites, which we read on October 17, 2026. The middle half of those providers start between $500 and $2,500 a month.

The industry you are in moves that number more than anything else. Home services, construction and automotive plans start around $750. Legal starts at $1,500. SaaS starts at $4,300.

This page is the full study: the numbers by industry, what the plans include, how a month of SEO compares with a month of Google Ads, and exactly how we collected the data. The anonymized dataset is free to download at the end.

Key findings

These are the numbers most worth quoting. Each one comes from 179 SEO-only plans published by US-facing providers, checked on one day.

• $1,175 a month is the median entry-level SEO plan across 136 providers, each counted once.
• $750 to $4,300 is the range of industry medians, from home services, construction and automotive at the low end to SaaS at the top.
• 32.1% of all 436 published price tiers are under $1,000 a month. 13.8% are $5,000 or more.
• $800 vs $1,500: plans sold as local SEO start at a median of $800, while national plans start at $1,500.
• 3.15x: in plans with more than one tier, the top tier costs 3.15 times the entry tier (median).
• 11 of 18 providers that publish prices for more than one industry charge the exact same prices in every industry they target.
• 40 of 179 pricing pages say anything about a setup fee. Of those, 25 say there is none and 15 charge one, with a median of $999.

Average SEO cost by industry

Entry-level SEO costs a median of $750 a month in home services, construction and automotive, $1,200 in healthcare, $1,500 in legal and $4,300 in SaaS.

The table shows each industry's median entry price, the middle 50% of entry prices, and the median price of the most expensive tier each provider publishes.

Horizontal bar chart of the median entry-level monthly SEO price by industry in 2026: SaaS $4,300, legal $1,500, healthcare $1,200, real estate $1,192, ecommerce $849, finance and insurance $799, home services $750, construction $750 and automotive $750, from 179 SEO-only plans by 136 providers.

One caution on ecommerce. Ten of its 18 plans come from providers based outside the US who price in dollars for US stores. Counting US-based providers only, the ecommerce median entry price is $2,350, from 8 plans. No other industry moves that much when you drop non-US providers: healthcare goes from $1,200 to $1,325 and the rest barely change.

The general row is the baseline: SEO price pages that name no industry. Their median entry price, $999, is almost exactly the median of all 168 industry-specific plans ($1,000). On average, putting an industry name on a pricing page does not raise the price.

Why legal and SaaS cost more than a plumber

The price gap tracks two things: how many competitors want the same searches, and how far the plan has to reach.

A personal injury firm competes with every other firm in its metro for some of the most expensive searches in local advertising, so rankings take more content and more links to move. A SaaS company usually competes nationally, against other software companies with full-time content teams. A plumber competes with a few dozen local shops for the map results in one service area.

Scope shows up directly in the data. Of the 179 plans, 103 are sold as local SEO and 37 as national or both. Local plans start at a median of $800 a month. National plans start at $1,500, close to double.

So the cheapest plans cluster in trades where most work is local: home services, construction, automotive.

The most expensive cluster where the competition is national or the clicks cost the most.

How the prices spread out

About a third of published SEO tiers cost under $1,000 a month, another third cost $1,000 to $2,499, and the rest cost $2,500 or more.

Across all 436 tiers on the 179 pricing pages, cheapest to most expensive, the median is $1,608. The full split:

Stacked bar and four cards showing the share of 436 published monthly SEO price tiers by band in October 2026: 32.1% under $1,000, 30.0% from $1,000 to $2,499, 24.0% from $2,500 to $4,999 and 13.8% at $5,000 or more, with a median tier price of $1,608.

Most providers publish more than one tier. Of the 179 plans, 123 have two or more price points, 81 of them exactly three. The median top tier is $2,900 a month, and in multi-tier plans the top tier runs 3.15 times the entry price.

The entry tier is where most small businesses start, so it is the number we lead with.

If you expect to need more than one location, more content, or national reach, budget against the middle or top tier instead.

What the entry tier buys, and what it doesn't

Most published SEO plans name content and reporting as deliverables, and just over half mention link building. Fewer mention Google Business Profile work or citations.

We counted how many of the 179 pricing pages mention each common deliverable for at least one tier:

• Content or blog posts: 114 plans
• Reporting: 98 plans
• Link building: 96 plans
• Google Business Profile work: 67 plans
• Citations and directory listings: 43 plans

Four stacked price cards for published SEO plans, median entry plan $1,175, median of every tier $1,608, median top tier $2,900, and top tier at 3.15 times the entry tier, beside a bar chart of how many of 179 pricing pages mention each deliverable: content 114, reporting 98, link building 96, Google Business Profile 67 and citations 43.

A mention tells you a deliverable exists in some tier, not how much of it you get. "Link building" on a $400 plan and on a $4,000 plan are rarely the same thing. When you compare quotes, ask for quantities in writing: how many pages, how many posts, how many links a month, from what kind of sites.

The low tiers also tend to cap the number of tracked keywords. That is fine for a one-location business with a short list of services. It is a problem if you serve ten cities and fifteen service types, because the plan will quietly ignore most of them.

An agency team meeting around a conference table with laptops, coffee and notes, the kind of review where an SEO plan's scope and deliverables get set.

One month of SEO, priced in Google Ads clicks and leads

At WordStream's 2026 median costs, a month of entry-level SEO costs the same as about 152 paid clicks for a law firm, 90 for a home services company and 370 for a real estate business.

We divided each industry's median entry SEO price by the median cost per click and cost per lead in WordStream's 2026 benchmarks, which cover 13,474 US Google and Microsoft Ads campaigns from April 2025 to March 2026. We used the closest matching category for each industry.

Eight cards converting one month of median entry-level SEO into Google Ads equivalents: legal $1,500 equals 152 paid clicks or 11.4 paid leads, home services and construction $750 equal 90 clicks or 8.2 leads, healthcare $1,200 equals 150 clicks or 16.4 leads, real estate $1,192 equals 370 clicks or 11.6 leads, automotive $750 equals 172 clicks or 25 leads, finance and insurance $799 equals 236 clicks or 10.7 leads, and SaaS $4,300 equals 733 clicks or 45.9 leads, using WordStream 2026 medians.

This is not a verdict on which channel wins.

Paid clicks arrive this week and stop the day the budget stops. SEO takes months to start producing, then keeps producing after the work is done. Our strongest organic result, for a doctor's practice in Dubai, took 12 months to reach 1,519% traffic growth.

What the comparison does give you is a sanity check. If a month of SEO costs the same as 11 paid leads for a law firm, the plan has to bring in more than 11 leads a month once it matures to beat the alternative. That is a reasonable bar to put in front of any agency. Our guide to whether hiring an SEO company is worth it walks through the full payback math.

Same price, different industry label

Many "industry specialist" SEO prices are generic. Of the 18 providers in our data that publish prices for more than one industry, 11 charge exactly the same tiers in every industry they target.

A provider with a page for dentists, a page for roofers and a page for law firms often has one price list with three headlines. That is not dishonest in itself: the underlying work, technical fixes, content and local listings, is similar across many local businesses.

It does mean an industry name on a pricing page tells you little.

The real test of a specialist is whether they can tell you what a lead is worth in your business, which searches actually bring customers, and what your competitors already rank for. A provider that charges a law firm and a pest control company the same price for the same keyword count has not priced the difference in competition, and one of those clients is probably getting less than it needs.

Setup fees and contract terms

Few providers publish their terms. Only 40 of 179 pricing pages mention a setup fee, and just 17 state a minimum contract length.

Of the 40 that mention setup, 25 say there is none and 15 charge one, at a median of $999. Of the 17 that state a minimum term, 6 months is the most common (9 plans), followed by 12 months (4), 3 months (3) and 24 months (1). On the other side, 70 pages advertise month-to-month billing or no long-term contract.

Two people reviewing and signing an agreement at a desk, the point where setup fees and minimum contract terms for an SEO plan get agreed.

Our view: a long lock-in contract is a confession.

If an agency needs a year-long contract to keep you, the results are not doing it. We run every client month-to-month for that reason, and the 70 providers above clearly agree. Ask any provider whose page is silent on terms to put the minimum term and the exit terms in writing before you sign.

A setup fee is not a red flag on its own. Initial audits, tracking setup and fixing technical problems are real work. What matters is that the fee is named up front and tied to specific deliverables.

How this compares with other SEO pricing surveys

Our medians sit below the most-cited survey averages, mostly because of method: we read published US prices instead of asking providers to pick a price band.

Ahrefs' survey of 439 SEO providers worldwide put the average agency retainer at $3,209 a month and local SEO at $1,557. It calculated those averages by assuming every provider charges the top of its price band, which pushes the numbers up, and the survey date is not stated. Backlinko's survey of more than 300 SEO professionals reports a typical range of $1,000 to $2,500 a month without a median. SE Ranking's agency survey of 260 agencies, most of them small agencies serving local businesses, found 64% charge under $1,000 a month.

Our figure, $1,175, falls inside Backlinko's range. In our data 47.1% of providers have an entry plan under $1,000, lower than SE Ranking's 64%, likely because its sample leans toward very small agencies. Two other differences matter. None of those surveys splits prices by client industry, and all of them mix providers from many countries. Ours reports nine industries and flags every non-US provider.

How we built this study

We collected prices that SEO providers publish on their own websites for a named industry, recorded every tier with the exact price text as evidence, and kept only SEO-only plans in the headline numbers.

Flow diagram of the 2026 SEO price study method: 365 provider pages logged, 126 with no monthly price set aside, 239 priced records, 60 excluded as website bundles (32), marketing packages (11), self-serve software (7), link-building packages (4) or rule failures on review (6), leaving 179 SEO-only plans from 136 providers plus 11 generic baseline plans.

Collection. On October 17, 2026, we searched for industry SEO pricing pages ("dental SEO pricing", "law firm SEO packages", "roofing SEO plans" and similar) across nine industries, and read each provider's own page. Directories, review sites and articles quoting other agencies' prices were not used.

What counted. A record is one provider's published monthly price for one industry, with every tier. It needed an explicit dollar figure for ongoing monthly SEO and an industry named on the page. Prices in other currencies, prices with no stated period, and one-time projects were left out. We logged 365 provider pages; 126 had no monthly price and 239 became priced records.

What we excluded from the headline numbers. 60 records: 32 website-plus-SEO bundles (their median entry price is $448, because the website cost is spread across the term), 11 full marketing packages that mix SEO with ads or social, 7 self-serve software subscriptions, 4 link-building packages, and 6 that failed a rule on review.

How medians are calculated. Industry medians count each provider once per industry. The overall $1,175 counts each provider once in total, using its lowest entry price, and it treats sites that appear to share one operator as a single provider. The middle 50% is the 25th to 75th percentile.

Checks. A script confirmed that every recorded price appears in the evidence text copied from the page. 30 of the 179 plans come from providers based outside the US who price in dollars for US clients; they are flagged in the data, and the US-only medians are reported above where they differ.

Limits. This is a study of published prices. Many agencies, often larger ones, do not publish prices at all, so the sample leans toward smaller providers who do. Niche-level cells, such as dentists or plumbers on their own, have too few plans to report separately. Prices change, and these were read on a single day.

Download the data and cite this study

The full anonymized dataset is free to use: download the SEO price data (CSV). It has one row per SEO-only plan with industry, niche, scope, every tier price, setup fee, minimum term and a non-US flag. Provider names and URLs are removed.

If you cite these numbers, please link to this page. Suggested citation: KeyGrow, "Average SEO Cost by Industry: 2026 Price Study," October 2026, keygrow.co/blog/average-seo-cost-by-industry.

When you shouldn't pay for SEO yet

A single-location business with a small service area and more time than budget can often skip a retainer for the first few months.

Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, ask every happy customer for a review, make sure your site loads fast on a phone and has one clear page per service. That covers much of what a $500 entry tier delivers. Our local SEO pricing guide breaks down which of those tasks are worth paying for and which are not.

Hire help when your time is worth more than the fee, when you are competing in a metro where the map results are crowded, or when you have tried the basics and stalled.

FAQs

What to do with these numbers

Use your industry's median as a reference point, not a target. A quote far below it usually means a smaller scope, and a quote far above it should come with a clear reason, such as several locations, national reach or a crowded market.

Then ask every provider the same three questions: what exactly do I get each month, what is the minimum term, and how will we know it is working. If you want a second opinion on a quote or a plan built around your market, our SEO services team is happy to look, or you can tell us about your business.