Ask five agencies what SEO costs and you’ll get five different answers, ranging from a few hundred dollars a month to several thousand. That spread isn’t agencies being cagey — it reflects genuinely different services being sold under the same name. Here’s what actually drives the number.
The rough ranges
For a small local business — a tradie, a café, a retailer — ongoing SEO support in New Zealand typically runs somewhere between $300 and $1,500 a month, depending on how much active work is included. A one-off audit and fix-up, rather than ongoing management, is usually a few hundred to around $1,000, depending on how much needs fixing. National or competitive-industry SEO (law firms, real estate, anything with serious competition) can run well beyond that — sometimes $2,000+ a month — because the competition for those rankings is genuinely harder to win.
If a number seems too low to be realistic, it usually is. Real SEO work — writing content, fixing technical issues, building genuine local signals — takes real hours. A $99/month “SEO package” is either automated with minimal human input, or spread across so many clients that yours gets very little actual attention.
What you’re actually paying for
SEO pricing usually covers some mix of:
- Technical fixes — the crawlable, on-page basics (titles, meta descriptions, site speed, broken links). Mostly a one-off job, not ongoing.
- Content — new pages or blog posts targeting what people actually search for. This is usually the bulk of an ongoing retainer, because it’s the part that never really finishes.
- Local SEO — Google Business Profile management, reviews, local citations. Cheap to do, disproportionately effective for a business that only serves its own region.
- Reporting and strategy — tracking rankings, adjusting the plan. Worth something, but shouldn’t be the majority of what you’re paying for.
Ask an agency to break their quote down across these categories. If they can’t, that’s worth noting.
Why “cheap SEO” often costs more in the end
A low-cost SEO package that focuses purely on technical tweaks and ignores content will plateau quickly — there’s only so much a title tag can do for a page that doesn’t actually answer anyone’s question. Businesses often end up paying twice: once for the cheap package that didn’t move the needle, then again for someone to redo it properly.
Do you actually need to pay an agency at all?
For a genuinely small, local business, a lot of the highest-value SEO work is things you can do yourself for free: making sure your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate, asking happy customers for reviews, and making sure your website clearly states what you do and where you do it. Paying an agency starts to make more sense once you’ve done the free, obvious things and want to compete for search terms with real competition behind them.
What to actually ask before paying for SEO
Before signing up for a retainer, ask what specifically will be delivered each month, how progress will be measured, and how long before you’d expect to see any movement — a straight answer here is a better filter than the price itself. Anyone promising a page-one ranking by a fixed date, for a genuinely competitive term, isn’t being straight with you; nobody controls Google’s algorithm, including the agency selling you the promise.
The honest answer
SEO cost scales with how competitive your market is and how much genuine work is involved — there’s no fixed “right” number, only a right number for your specific situation. Start with the free fundamentals, get a clear breakdown of what any paid work actually includes, and be skeptical of both suspiciously cheap packages and guaranteed rankings. Both are selling something other than real results.