The fourteen line items, priced
Almost every digital marketing proposal in India is built from the same fourteen components. The names get rearranged, the pricing gets bundled, but underneath it's this list.
The bands below are typical Indian market rates for the work done competently — not the cheapest quote you can find, and not agency-of-record rates in Bandra. All exclude GST and exclude media spend.
| Service | What you're buying | Typical Indian price band |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Crawling, indexing, site speed, schema, redirects, migrations. The plumbing that caps every other channel. | ₹25,000–₹80,000 / mo, or ₹40,000–₹2,00,000 as an audit-and-fix project |
| On-page SEO | Titles, headings, internal links, page structure, rewriting pages that never ranked. | ₹20,000–₹60,000 / mo |
| Content production | Research, writing, editing, publishing. Usually priced per piece, sometimes per month. | ₹3,000–₹15,000 per article; ₹25,000–₹1,00,000 / mo at volume |
| Link building and digital PR | Earning links from real publications. Outreach, data stories, expert commentary. | ₹40,000–₹2,00,000 / mo; ₹5,000–₹50,000 per placement |
| Local SEO | Google Business Profile, citations, review generation, location pages, map-pack work. | ₹15,000–₹50,000 / mo per location |
| Google Ads management | Search, Shopping and Performance Max — build, bids, negatives, landing-page feedback. | ₹25,000–₹75,000 / mo, or 10–20% of media spend |
| Paid social management | Meta, Instagram and LinkedIn campaigns: structure, audiences, testing, scaling. | ₹25,000–₹75,000 / mo, or 10–20% of media spend |
| Organic social management | Calendar, posting, community replies, platform-native content. | ₹25,000–₹1,00,000 / mo depending on platforms and volume |
| Influencer and creator | Sourcing, negotiating, briefing, tracking. Creator fees are extra and usually the larger number. | ₹30,000–₹1,00,000 / mo management, plus creator fees |
| Email and lifecycle | Flows, campaigns, segmentation, deliverability. The channel with the best return and the least glamour. | ₹20,000–₹60,000 / mo |
| Conversion rate optimisation | Testing pages and funnels to make the traffic you already have worth more. | ₹40,000–₹1,50,000 / mo, or per-test pricing |
| Analytics and tracking setup | GA4, Tag Manager, server-side events, CRM plumbing, dashboards that report leads not sessions. | ₹30,000–₹1,50,000 one-off, then ₹10,000–₹25,000 / mo upkeep |
| Creative and video production | Static ads, reels, product video, photography. Priced per asset almost everywhere. | ₹10,000–₹2,00,000 per asset |
| Website design and build | Design, build, CMS, and the ongoing dev time everything else depends on. | ₹75,000–₹10,00,000 one-off; ₹15,000–₹50,000 / mo retained dev |
Which line items get bundled to hide margin
Bundling isn't automatically dishonest. Some services genuinely belong together — on-page SEO without technical SEO is redecorating a building with a cracked foundation.
But bundling is also the standard way to hide a thin line item behind a fat one. Four patterns come up repeatedly in the proposals founders forward to us:
- "Content and SEO" as one number. Content is the expensive part. If the split isn't stated, you often find the SEO is four hours a month of keyword tracking and the rest is articles you could have commissioned for a third of the price.
- "Social media management" covering organic and paid. Two different jobs, two different skill sets, and the paid half usually carries a percentage-of-spend fee buried in the same line.
- "Reporting and strategy" as a headline deliverable. Reporting is a by-product of the work, not a service. When it appears as a priced line item at ₹20,000 a month, you are paying for a dashboard.
- Media spend folded into the retainer. The worst one. A ₹1,50,000 "performance marketing" fee that includes ₹90,000 of ad budget is a ₹60,000 service, and you cannot tell whether the media is being marked up.
The minimum viable scope for a small brand
You do not need fourteen services. Most brands under ₹5 crore in revenue need four, and adding the other ten early is the most common way to spend a year's budget on activity instead of customers.
Here's a defensible starting scope, and roughly what it should cost:
| Line item | Why it's in the minimum | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Analytics and tracking setup | First, always. Without it every other rupee is unaudited. Mostly a one-off with light upkeep. | ₹30,000–₹80,000 one-off, then ~₹10,000 |
| One acquisition channel, funded properly | Search or paid social — whichever matches where your buyers already are. Not both. | ₹40,000–₹75,000 |
| Content or creative to feed it | Every acquisition channel burns assets. Starving this line is why campaigns plateau in month two. | ₹20,000–₹40,000 |
| Email and lifecycle | The cheapest line on the list and the one with the shortest payback, because the audience is already yours. | ₹0–₹20,000 |
The four that need a specialist, not a generalist
Ten of the fourteen can be done well by a good generalist team. Four cannot, and they're the four most often thrown into a package as a bullet point.
If these matter to your business, buy them from someone who does only them:
- Technical SEO on a large or JavaScript-heavy site. Rendering, crawl budget, faceted navigation, migrations. Getting this wrong doesn't underperform, it removes you from the index. A generalist who "also does technical" is a real risk on a site above a few thousand URLs.
- Digital PR and link building. This is a media relations job wearing an SEO badge. Done by a generalist it becomes guest posts on sites that exist only to sell guest posts, which is a penalty with a delay on it.
- Analytics and server-side tracking. Event design, consent handling, CRM stitching. Half the reporting disputes we see between clients and agencies are actually a tracking bug nobody owned.
- Conversion rate optimisation. Requires enough traffic for a valid test and someone who understands what a valid test is. Below roughly a thousand conversions a month, most "CRO" is redesigning pages and calling random variation a win.
How to turn a bundle quote into something comparable
Three proposals with three different bundles cannot be compared. Force them into the same shape first — it takes an hour and it's the highest-return hour in the whole buying process.
- Rewrite every quote onto the fourteen-line list above. Anything the agency includes goes on a row; anything they don't, leave blank. The blanks are the negotiation.
- Pull media spend out of every fee. Compare service fees to service fees. Ask explicitly whether media is marked up — some agencies take a percentage of your ad budget on top of management.
- Ask for deliverables with numbers. Four articles or twelve? Two links or ten? "Ongoing optimisation" is not a deliverable, it's a word.
- Ask who does each line, by name and seniority. The people who win the pitch are frequently not the people who do the work. This is the single most common complaint founders bring us about a previous agency.
- Ask what happens if it doesn't work. Most contracts have no answer. That's the question that separates the field, and it's covered further in how to compare SEO proposals.
What we sell, and what's inside the number
We sell three of the fourteen properly rather than all fourteen thinly, and we publish the prices so you can do the comparison above without a call.
SEO runs from ₹75,000/mo, with smaller sites from ₹40,000/mo — that covers technical, on-page, content and link work with reporting as a by-product rather than a line item. Organic social and content is ₹30,000 / ₹50,000 / ₹70,000 a month. Performance marketing is ₹40,000 / ₹75,000 / ₹1,50,000 a month, with ad spend billed separately at zero markup. Bundled, that's ₹99,000 for SEO plus social, ₹75,000 for social plus performance, or ₹1,75,000 for all three. Everything is ex-GST, month-to-month after the first quarter, 30 days' notice, and you keep every asset.
The part that isn't a line item: we freeze your trailing-90-day qualified organic lead count on day one, and if we haven't beaten it in 90 days we keep working free until we do. Not a ranking position — nobody controls Google's index — a number from your own business, agreed before anyone starts. It's also why we take three clients a month. See what's in the SEO retainer or the full pricing.