Nobody publishes a number, so here is how the number is built.
Written for somebody who has asked two agencies and received two figures with nothing in between to compare.
Why nobody publishes a price
Because the work is not one thing. Fixing a shop that already ranks and starting a business that has never been indexed share a name and almost nothing else.
A published number would be wrong for most readers in one direction or the other, so the industry publishes nothing and everybody assumes the worst.
The three shapes a quote comes in
A one off project, a monthly retainer, or an hourly rate. The same job can honestly be sold as any of the three, which is exactly why two quotes for it can look unrelated.
A project suits a site that needs repairing once. A retainer suits work that only compounds if somebody keeps doing it. An hourly rate suits neither of you, because it pays for time rather than for anything you can point at.
What a monthly fee is actually paying for
Roughly: things written, things fixed, and things watched. New pages answering questions people type. Technical faults corrected as they appear. Rankings, the profile and the enquiries checked so somebody notices when a number turns.
If a proposal does not separate those three, ask which one the money is buying this month. A vague retainer becomes a report nobody reads by the fourth invoice.
The cheap end, and what it really is
Very low monthly fees exist here and they buy automated reports, a handful of directory submissions and links from sites built for the purpose. It is not a smaller version of the work.
The directories cost you nothing but an hour of typing. The links are the part that can hurt, and undoing them takes longer than earning good ones would have.
The question that sorts serious from not
Ask what happens if it does not work. A serious answer names what would be reviewed, when, and what would change as a result.
An answer promising a position, a timeline or a number of keywords is selling certainty that nobody selling it owns, because the ranking is decided by a system neither of you controls.
What we would say about your case
Whether the money is better spent on search at all. For some businesses the honest answer is a better offer, or ads while search catches up, and we would rather write that down than invoice around it.
Questions worth asking
Is a cheap monthly fee always bad?
Not always, but ask what arrives for it. A small fee that buys genuine attention, however little of it, is honest work at a small scale. The same fee buying automated reports and bought links is a different product wearing the same word.
Should we pay per keyword?
No. It sounds measurable and is the opposite: it pays for a word climbing rather than for a customer arriving, and the words that are easiest to move are usually the ones nobody searches.
How long before we should judge it?
Long enough that the answer is uncomfortable. A map listing can shift in weeks, but ordinary results move on a scale of months, and judging at week 6 mostly measures how patient you were.
Can we do some of it ourselves?
Yes, and the parts you can do are the parts that pay first. Hours, photos, answering questions in writing, asking customers for reviews. None of that needs an agency and all of it needs somebody who cares.
What if we already pay somebody?
Then the useful spend is a second opinion rather than a second agency. You end up with either proof the money is working or a list the current one can act on, and both are cheaper than switching.
Send us the address and we will tell you which of the three shapes fits, and roughly what the work would involve. Get a free audit.
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