SEO Service Pricing: What a Monthly Package Should Include

A business owner collecting SEO quotes usually comes back puzzled. One firm's monthly quote can be several times another's. Both call it SEO service, so it is hard to see where the difference comes from. Usually it lies in the work included, the hours spent and how strong the competitors are.

Below we explain how to read an SEO quote, what you should expect in a monthly package, and which promises deserve suspicion.

What drives SEO pricing

The first and biggest factor is competition. Reaching page one for a locksmith in Eskişehir and in a crowded sector in Istanbul are worlds apart. If your competitors have been producing content and earning strong links for years, catching up takes more work and therefore more budget.

Second, site size. A technical audit of a ten-page corporate site and a 5,000-product online store don't take the same time. Category structure, filters, duplicate content risks and product descriptions add a separate workload in e-commerce.

Third, the site's current state. A technically sound, fast, properly structured site costs less to start with than one where every page has the same title and mobile load takes 8 seconds.

Fourth, content. How many pieces of content the package produces each month directly affects price. A researched blog post of 1,000 to 1,500 words is serious work on its own.

Finally, who does the work and how much time goes into it. An experienced specialist and someone still learning don't charge the same hourly rate. If a package looks cheap, ask how many hours a month are spent on your site.

One-off technical SEO vs monthly service

These two often get mixed up.

One-off technical SEO makes the site's foundations right for Google: crawling and indexing issues, sitemap and robots.txt, redirects, broken links, page speed, mobile usability, heading structure, structured data. It ends with an audit report and fixes. The price depends on the size of the site and the number of issues; for large online stores it is noticeably higher than for a small corporate site.

Monthly SEO is ongoing work: keyword tracking, new content, updating existing content, earning links, reporting and technical fixes as needed. As an example, Kodyva's monthly SEO consulting ranges from 5,000 to 12,000 TL depending on scope. In competitive sectors and on large sites you will also see higher quotes on the market.

On a newly built site whose technical SEO was set up correctly from the start, you may not need to pay separately for an audit in the first months. On an old, problematic site, it makes sense to do a technical cleanup before monthly work; otherwise the monthly budget is water poured into a leaking bucket.

What a package should include

A monthly SEO quote should show the following in concrete terms, meaning with numbers and frequency:

• Initial keyword research and a mapping table showing which page targets which search.
• How many new pieces of content are written or how many existing pages are improved each month. For example, 2 blog posts and 2 service page updates a month.
• Technical checks: Search Console errors, speed, broken links, and how often they are done.
• For local businesses, Google Business Profile management: posts, photos, replies to reviews.
• If link building is included, how it is done. Industry directories, local press, partners, or purchased links?
• A monthly report and a meeting.

If the quote only says things like SEO work, optimisation and analysis, you can't know what you are getting. If you ask at the end of the month what was done and can't get a clear list, treat it as a warning sign.

Be especially careful with links. Google's spam policies explicitly prohibit buying links to influence rankings. Some packages acquire links in bulk from low-quality sites. Even if something moves in the short term, it can hurt your site in the long run.

Reporting: what you should see

A good SEO report is more than a rankings table. It should include:

• Organic traffic: visits from Google, compared with last month and the same month last year.
• Search Console data: impressions, clicks, click-through rate.
• Position changes for target keywords.
• Conversions: forms, calls and orders from organic traffic. This is what really matters.
• A list of work done that month and next month's plan.

Without conversion tracking, you can't tell whether SEO is working. If visits rise but the phone doesn't ring, either the wrong keywords are targeted or the site isn't turning visitors into customers.

You should be able to check the report's data from your own account. Search Console and Analytics accounts should be in your name, with the agency added only as a user.

Beware of ranking guarantees

Guaranteed number one on Google in 3 months. When you see that sentence, read the quote carefully.

No agency can control Google rankings. Google's own SEO guidance warns about this and states that nobody can guarantee the top spot. Behind such a guarantee there is often one of two things. Either first place is targeted for a phrase nobody searches and no one competes for (a long combination of city, district and service, for instance) and presented as success. Or risky short-term tactics are used.

Likewise, promises of major results in the first month aren't realistic. We explained how long SEO takes in a separate article; on a new site, meaningful movement usually takes a few months.

An honest quote doesn't give guarantees, it gives a plan: what work will be done, which metrics will be tracked and after how many months you will review together. Kodyva's SEO consulting doesn't offer ranking guarantees either; a technical audit, keyword strategy, content recommendations and a monthly performance report are part of the scope.

If you can't set aside any SEO budget, you can at least lay the groundwork yourself. Our article on what SEO means for small businesses and the first steps is a good place to start.