What genuinely costs nothing
Start with the honest good news. A serious amount of SEO requires no money at all — only attention. If you run a small local business, this list is most of what you need and you should do it before you speak to anyone about a retainer.
- Google Business Profile. Free. Complete every field, pick the right primary category, post real photos, answer reviews. For a clinic, salon, gym or restaurant this is not part of the SEO — it largely is the SEO.
- Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Free, and the only unmediated view of how search engines see your site. Verify both today.
- An XML sitemap and a sane `robots.txt`. Free, generated by every CMS worth using, and quietly broken on a surprising number of sites.
- Title tags, meta descriptions and H1s. Free. Writing a clear, specific title for every page is the highest-value unpaid hour in SEO.
- Internal linking. Free, and consistently underrated. Linking your related pages together tells Google which of them matters. We'd argue internal linking beats link building for most small sites.
- Deleting or merging thin pages. Free, and often the single fastest fix on an older site.
- Fixing broken links and redirect chains. Free with the Screaming Frog free tier if your site is under 500 URLs.
- GA4 and Microsoft Clarity. Free. Clarity's session recordings will teach you more about your landing pages than any keyword tool.
The bill you never invoice yourself
Now price the labour. This is a realistic month of DIY SEO for a small business trying to actually compete, not just tick a checklist.
The rate below is ₹1,500 an hour. That's deliberately conservative for a founder — if an hour of your time is worth less than that, you have a bigger problem than your rankings.
| Task | Hours / month | Cost of your time |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword research and mapping | 6–8 | ₹9,000–₹12,000 |
| Writing and editing 3–4 pages | 20–24 | ₹30,000–₹36,000 |
| Technical checks and fixes | 6–8 | ₹9,000–₹12,000 |
| On-page cleanup and internal linking | 4 | ₹6,000 |
| Outreach, partnerships, digital PR | 8–12 | ₹12,000–₹18,000 |
| Search Console review and deciding next month | 3–4 | ₹4,500–₹6,000 |
| Total | 47–60 | ₹70,500–₹90,000 |
The tool floor, and the free version of each
You can run SEO on ₹0 of software. You'll be doing it partially blind, which is fine for a five-page local site and hopeless for anything competitive.
Approximate list prices at the time of writing, converted at roughly ₹88 to the dollar. Vendors change them, so treat these as order of magnitude.
- Buy the crawler first. It's the cheapest and it finds the problems that are actively costing you traffic today.
- The backlink suite is the expensive one, and the last one you need. Until you have pages worth linking to, competitor link data is entertainment.
- Free tools have one real limitation: they show you your own site. They can't show you why a competitor outranks you, and that's usually the question you actually have. Ahrefs versus Semrush covers the paid choice if you get there.
| What you need it for | Paid option | Monthly INR | Free alternative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword volumes and ideas | Entry-tier keyword tool | ₹2,000–₹4,000 | Google Keyword Planner + Search Console query data |
| Crawling your own site | Screaming Frog (~£199/yr) | ~₹1,800 | Screaming Frog free tier, up to 500 URLs |
| Rank tracking | Entry-tier tracker | ₹2,000–₹3,000 | Search Console average position, with a lag |
| Competitor and backlink data | Ahrefs or Semrush entry tier | ₹11,000–₹12,000 | Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for your own domain only |
| Analytics and behaviour | — | ₹0 | GA4, Microsoft Clarity, Bing Webmaster Tools |
| Practical minimum | Skip the backlink suite | ~₹9,000 | ₹0 if you accept no competitor visibility |
Where DIY stops working
For a lot of businesses, DIY genuinely wins. A physiotherapy clinic in Indiranagar with a complete Google Business Profile, honest service pages and thirty real reviews will beat an agency-run competitor that has none of those. Nobody should sell that clinic a ₹75,000 retainer.
There are three points where it reliably breaks, and they're worth recognising early rather than after eight wasted months.
- Competitive commercial keywords. The moment the first page is occupied by companies with dedicated SEO teams and funded link programmes, DIY effort stops being a differentiator. You can't out-write four people with four hours a month.
- Sites past roughly 100 pages. Below that you can hold the whole structure in your head. Above it, you get cannibalisation, orphan pages, template-level errors and crawl waste — problems that need a crawler, log data and someone who's seen them before. See keyword cannibalisation.
- Any migration or replatform. Changing CMS, domain, or URL structure is the highest-risk thing you'll ever do to organic traffic, and the damage is usually invisible for six weeks. This is the one case where we'd tell almost anyone to buy help even if they never buy it again.
- A fourth, quieter one: consistency. DIY SEO doesn't fail because founders are bad at it. It fails because month four is busy, then month five is busy, and the compounding stops. If you can't defend 50 hours a month for a year, don't start on that plan.
If you do decide to pay, spend the first ₹40,000 like this
Not on a retainer. On the four things that make every later rupee provable.
- ₹15,000 — a paid technical audit, scoped small. Paid, not free. A free audit is automated crawl output with a sales call attached; we've written about why free SEO audits are sales pitches. Ask for a prioritised fix list, not a 60-page PDF.
- ₹12,000 — two properly researched pages on your single highest-intent query. Not blog posts. The page someone lands on when they're ready to buy.
- ₹8,000 — developer time to ship the top five fixes from the audit. Findings nobody implements are just expensive reading.
- ₹5,000 — conversion tracking that actually works. GA4 events, call tracking, form attribution. Without it you'll spend next year arguing about whether any of this worked.
And if you'd rather someone else did it
That's ₹40,000 spent once, and it leaves you with a diagnosis, two assets, a faster site and the ability to measure. If you then want a monthly programme, our SEO service starts at ₹75,000/mo with smaller sites from ₹40,000/mo, ex-GST.
The part that matters more than the price: we freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search on day one, in writing. If we haven't beaten it in 90 days, we keep working free until we do. We never promise a specific ranking position — nobody controls Google's index, and any agency that guarantees a position is guaranteeing something it doesn't own. Month-to-month after the first quarter, 30 days' notice, and you keep every asset.
And if the arithmetic on this page says DIY is right for you, do that instead. We only take three clients a month; talking someone into a retainer they don't need is a bad use of one of the slots.