Ask five people for an SEO price and you'll get five very different numbers. Before comparing them, compare what's actually included.
What drives the price
How competitive your keywords are. How big your site is. Whether content and links are part of the job. How much senior time you're getting.
Common pricing models
Monthly retainers are most common because SEO is ongoing work. One-time audits or projects suit sites that have a team to carry out the fixes. Some vendors offer pay-per-keyword or results-based deals. Read those carefully, because cheap, useless keywords are easy to rank.
What's in a good SEO proposal
You should see what happens in the first 90 days, who does the work, what you'll get each month and how success is measured. If a proposal only lists "50 backlinks and 4 blogs", you're buying activity. You're not buying results.
The cheap SEO trap
Very low monthly packages have to cut something. Usually it's real work. I've cleaned up sites hurt by spam links from these packages, and the clean-up cost more than doing it properly in the first place.
Written by Aman Potlia.