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What it costs

What does SEO actually cost?

The discipline with the longest payback period, which is why its pricing hides the most. The model tells you what you are actually buying.

Before anything else

Why the range is so wide

Because "SEO" covers a technical audit, a content operation and a reputation-building exercise, and a quote depends on which of the three your site actually needs. A one-page brochure site competing locally and a 10,000-page shop competing nationally are different jobs by an order of magnitude. Anyone pricing before they have crawled your site is pricing the word, not the work.

Side by side

The models, and what each one rewards

Pricing models compared
ModelWhat it isWhat it rewards
Monthly retainerOngoing technical care, content production and authority building on a fixed sum.Rewards continuity — which is right for SEO, but only with deliverables named per month. An undefined retainer drifts into reporting on rankings nobody chose.
One-off projectAn audit, a technical fix round or a content batch with a defined end.Rewards clean scoping. The risk is stopping there: a fixed site with no ongoing content rarely keeps the ground it gained.
Hourly consultingSenior eyes on strategy, migrations or a diagnosis, billed by time.Rewards expertise density. Suits decisions and audits, not execution — content by the hour gets expensive fast.
Performance-basedPayment tied to rankings or traffic targets.Rewards hitting the metric by any means. The tactics that guarantee a ranking on a deadline are the ones that get sites penalised.

Cheap SEO is the expensive kind

The offers at the bottom of the market — a few hundred euros a month, everything included — can only exist by automating what should not be automated: templated content, directory links, reports that restate what an analytics account already shows.

The costs arrive later, as content that has to be removed, links that have to be disavowed, and in the worst case a penalty that takes months to recover from. Paying twice is the standard outcome; the second time includes the cleanup.

  • Ask who writes the content, and read something they wrote
  • Ask where links come from — a good answer names the method, not a number
  • Ask what happens in month one before anything is published
  • Walk away from guaranteed rankings; nobody honest guarantees a third party’s algorithm

What a serious engagement scopes first

Before any content is planned, the technical floor has to hold: crawlability, indexation, site speed, and analytics that can actually attribute organic revenue. Skipping the floor to get to the visible work is the most common way an SEO budget evaporates.

  • Technical audit with fixes ranked by impact, not listed by tool
  • Search intent mapped against what your site can credibly answer
  • A content plan with owners and dates, not themes
  • A baseline recorded, so every later claim has a before

How this works here

SEO on AdSTARS Connect is scoped in milestones — the audit, the fix round, each content batch — funded into escrow before work starts and released when you approve the deliverable. The long feedback loop stays honest because each stage produces something you can inspect now, not a promise about six months away.

The free AI marketing audit scores your current organic setup first, which usually settles whether you need the technical project, the content operation, or both.

Have questions?

The things people ask next

What is a realistic budget for meaningful SEO?
For competitive commercial terms, sustained work below roughly €500 a month rarely moves anything — the audit alone consumes it. Many businesses do better spending the same total in fewer, larger steps: a proper technical project first, then content in funded batches.
How long until it pays back?
Technical fixes can show inside weeks; content and authority compound over months. Anyone promising a number of positions by a date is guessing or gaming. What a good specialist will commit to is the milestone in front of you and the measurement behind it.
Retainer or project — which should I start with?
Almost always the project: audit, fixes, baseline. It is cheaper than discovering mid-retainer that the site’s foundation was the problem, and it tells you exactly what an ongoing engagement should contain — or whether you need one at all.
Full FAQ

Find out where you actually stand

The free AI marketing audit scores your website, conversion, SEO, analytics, advertising and social presence and tells you what to fix first — usually before you need to hire anyone at all.

  • Free, and available before you write a brief
  • No card, no account, no obligation to hire
  • Escrow on every milestone if you do

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You will get the launch email either way — that is what this list is. Ticking the box adds occasional product news and nothing else. We never sell or share your address.

Keep comparing

What does Google Ads management actually cost?Four pricing models, each of which quietly rewards a different behaviour. The model matters more than the number.What does social media management cost?The discipline most often priced by activity — posts per week — and most usefully priced by what the activity is for.What does a website actually cost?The discipline where the cost of an unclear brief is a rebuild, not a revision. The budget is decided before anyone opens a design tool.AdSTARS Connect vs Upwork, for marketing workTwo marketplaces with the same shape and different priorities. This is where each one wins, written by the smaller of the two.AdSTARS Connect vs Fiverr, for marketing workThese two are solving different problems. One sells a deliverable; the other contracts an outcome.Marketing agency or freelance specialist?We run both an agency and a marketplace, which makes this the one comparison we have no incentive to rig in either direction.

AdSTARS Connect introduces businesses to independent marketing specialists and is not a party to the resulting contract. Comparisons describe the other platforms' publicly documented terms at the date of writing and are not endorsed by them.

  1. 1Third-party product names and marks belong to their respective owners. Nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by them.
  2. 2Fees, escrow terms and the verification policy apply. The platform commission is deducted from the specialist as a milestone releases; clients pay the agreed milestone amount with no additional platform fee.
  3. 3Cost ranges quoted are indicative market figures for orientation, not quotes, and not professional advice.
See our full pricing