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.
That's actually one of the biggest problems I have with the way SEO is sold to dealerships. A dealer can pay an agency $2,000–$5,000 a month for years and still have a bloated website, terrible Core Web Vitals, weak page structure, bad image optimization, and the same technical problems they had when they started.
Fixing technical problems isn't something you should keep charging a monthly retainer for forever. You fix them, verify them, monitor them, and then move on to the things that actually require ongoing work.
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.
I agree but I'd expand on it.
I wouldn't limit it to pages touched, links targeted and technical fixes.
A significant part of SEO happens off-site as well. Depending on the market, that can include link acquisition, digital PR, relevant citations, brand/entity building, content promotion, competitor backlink analysis, local signals, etc.
And I think there's an important distinction between "links targeted" and actually doing good off-site SEO. I would much rather have an agency explain
why they're pursuing certain links and what those links are expected to accomplish than promise me 20 or 50 links every month.
Some SEO work is one-time or project-based. Some is ongoing. The proposal should make that distinction clear so the dealer knows exactly what they're paying for.
- 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.
I 100% agree with the idea that page speed is "the cheapest ROI." The bigger issue is that speed is part of a much larger system. A fast website with poor architecture, weak content, bad internal linking, terrible CTAs and a lousy user experience isn't going to magically rank or convert.
That's why I've always looked at SEO less as a monthly checklist and more as building the website correctly in the first place.
The thing that upsets me is dealerships believe they're buying "SEO" when they're really buying a monthly report and a handful of tasks.
- 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.
I agree with this, especially the distinction between one-time technical work and ongoing off-page work.
I'd only add that I don't think technical/on-page SEO ever completely reaches "done," especially with dealerships. You fix the existing problems, but inventory is constantly changing, new pages are being created, old pages disappear, model years change, platforms get updated, and Google changes what it considers important.
So I think the real distinction is between
maintenance and ongoing growth.
You shouldn't be paying an SEO company month after month to fix technical problems that should have fixed months ago.
But there is legitimate ongoing technical and on-page work if you're trying to grow a site.
And I completely agree on the off-page side. That's where the monthly investment can vary because you're paying for actual human outreach, relationships, content promotion and quality placements rather than simply checking boxes on an SEO checklist.
- 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.
I agree with the volume trap, although I wouldn't say directory links are automatically worthless.
There are legitimate directories and citations that make sense, especially for local businesses and dealerships. An industry-specific directory, local organization, chamber, association, manufacturer-related listing, etc. is very different from submitting a dealership to 500 generic directories just to manufacture backlinks.
I'd take 10 links that actually make sense for the business over 500 links that exist because the SEO company needed to hit a monthly link quota.
As a matter of fact, I'd rather build links that can send real, qualified traffic to the dealership than build links simply because I think Google will like them. If the link is relevant enough that people actually click it, that's a much better link in my book.
- 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.
I agree that competitive markets can require more investment, but I wouldn't make it all about "more links."
Two dealerships in the same metro can have completely different levels of authority, content, technical issues, local presence and existing backlinks, so they can require very different strategies.
I'd want to research the market first and figure out what is actually keeping the dealership from ranking. Sometimes the answer is links. Sometimes it's the website itself. Sometimes it's content, architecture, local authority, or a combination of all of them.
And I agree with the bigger point: if an agency charges every dealership the exact same amount regardless of market, competition and the condition of the existing site, they're probably selling a package rather than doing SEO.
- 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.
I agree with this, although I'd add one complication with attribution.
Rankings are definitely a vanity metric if you can't connect them to business results. But dealership attribution can get pretty messy.
A customer might find a dealership through organic search, look at a few vehicles, leave, come back directly a few days later, call from their phone, visit the dealership and buy a car. Which channel gets credit for that sale?
I'd want to look at money-page traffic, calls, leads and eventually sales, but I'd also want to look at the entire customer journey rather than trying to assign 100% of the credit to one channel.
The bigger point I completely agree with is that an SEO report showing "you're #1 for 37 keywords" doesn't tell a dealer whether they're making money from SEO.
If we're spending $3,000 a month, I want to know what changed on the website, what changed in search visibility, what happened to qualified traffic, what happened to leads and calls, and ultimately whether it contributed to more business.
That would be better than sending someone a monthly screenshot of keyword rankings.
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.
This is exactly where I think dealerships have been getting screwed for years.
A dealer can spend thousands of dollars a month on SEO, but if the company controlling the website won't let the SEO provider make the necessary technical changes, you're essentially paying someone to optimize around a problem they aren't allowed to fix.
And I completely agree about separating one-time work from ongoing work. If a site has major technical problems, those should be identified, fixed and verified. I don't think "we're still optimizing your Core Web Vitals" should appear on a monthly invoice for the next three years.
The real problem is dealers don't actually own or control their websites, they rent the platform, the data, the inventory presentation and the ability to make changes.
That's F***** Up!
