Honest answer: most US businesses pay $1,500–$5,000/month, but the number matters far less than what's actually being delivered. The reason pricing looks chaotic is that "SEO" covers wildly different work — and plenty of agencies bill retainer rates for deliverables that take a few hours a month.
@DjSec is right that page speed gets ignored constantly.
A few things worth adding to this thread:
- Ask what the deliverables are, in writing. If a proposal says "ongoing optimization" with no specifics, that's the ignorance tax @Alex Snyder mentioned. Real proposals list pages touched, links targeted, technical fixes scheduled.
- Page speed is the cheapest ROI on this list. DjSec's numbers hold up. Fixing LCP on a dealer site is usually a one-time technical project, not a monthly retainer item — and if your agency has been billing you monthly while your site loads in 15 seconds, that's your answer on whether they're doing work.
- Off-page is where budgets genuinely differ. On-page and technical work has a ceiling — you fix it, then maintain it. Link building doesn't, because you're paying for outreach time and editorial placements that can't be automated. That's why $1,000/month and $5,000/month packages can look identical on paper but produce very different results.
- Watch for the volume trap. Agencies quoting cheap often deliver bulk directory links or PBN placements. Those are worthless at best and a liability at worst. Ten relevant editorial links beat 500 directory submissions every single time.
- Competitive niches genuinely cost more, and that's not a markup. Ranking a dealership in a metro with 40 competitors takes more link acquisition than ranking a rural service business. If an agency quotes the same price regardless of your market, they're not researching your market.
- Demand attribution, not vanity reports. Rankings screenshots are not results. Ask for organic traffic to money pages, form fills, and calls tracked to organic. If they can't produce that, you can't evaluate whether you're getting value.
On the outsourced-agency question a few people raised — we run link building at Trust Link Building Services By Ravi Gupta SEO, and the pattern we see constantly is exactly what's described in this thread: businesses paying $3K/month where maybe $400 of actual work happens. The fix isn't finding a cheaper agency, it's knowing which line items are one-time technical work versus genuinely ongoing labor, and refusing to pay retainer rates for the former.
The dealership-specific point DjSec made deserves more attention than it's getting. If your platform provider controls your site and won't let you fix Core Web Vitals, no SEO retainer is going to save you. That's a platform problem, not an SEO problem.
