The only arithmetic that matters: fee divided by hour
Every SEO quote you receive is a number of working hours wearing a nicer outfit. So the fastest way to judge one is to undress it.
In India, an agency's real cost per delivered hour sits between ₹1,000 and ₹1,500. That's not the salary rate — it's the salary loaded with PF, gratuity, a laptop, a seat, health cover, and the awkward fact that nobody bills 100% of their working day. Take ₹1,200 as the blended midpoint of a team that mixes a senior strategist with a content executive.
Then subtract the part of your fee that never reaches your account: software, admin, sales, the bench between clients, and margin. On a healthy Indian agency that's roughly 28% of the invoice. What's left, divided by ₹1,200, is how many hours anyone will actually spend on your site this month.
It's a blunt sum. It's also usually within 20% of the truth, and it will tell you more in thirty seconds than a forty-slide deck will in an hour.
Five price bands, and the hours each one funds
Here are the five bands Indian agency quotes actually cluster around, converted into delivered hours. Ex-GST throughout, because almost every quote you'll see is quoted ex-GST and then arrives 18% heavier.
- Under ₹25,000 a month, no version of this funds four disciplines. Nine to eighteen hours buys a report and some on-page edits. That's not fraud, it's arithmetic — the problem is the pitch deck rarely says so out loud. We took that apart in the lowest price of SEO.
- ₹40,000 to ₹75,000 buys more than 1.9x the hours — it buys different people. Below ₹40,000, one generalist eventually does something badly. Above it you can afford someone who has personally recovered a site from a botched migration, which is a very specific and very expensive kind of experience.
- Past ₹1,50,000, coordination starts eating the increase. More people means more handoffs. The marginal rupee at ₹3,00,000 does less work than the marginal rupee at ₹75,000, and any agency that tells you otherwise has a sales target.
| Monthly fee | Hours at ₹1,200 | Hours after tools, overhead, margin | What that realistically staffs |
|---|---|---|---|
| ₹15,000 | 12 | ~9 | One junior, part-time. Reporting, a few title tags, a status call. Nothing structural gets fixed. |
| ₹40,000 | 33 | ~24 | One competent generalist for about a day a week. Viable for a local site under 30 pages. |
| ₹75,000 | 62 | ~45 | A strategist, a technical specialist, a writer and an outreach exec sharing your account. First band where four disciplines coexist. |
| ₹1,50,000 | 125 | ~90 | Same team, real content cadence, a funded link programme. National keyword sets, ecommerce, SaaS. |
| ₹5,00,000 | 417 | ~300 | A dedicated pod. Multiple markets or languages, migrations, in-house coordination, a developer you can call. |
What actually changes as the number goes up
The bands aren't just more of the same thing. Each one changes what's possible, and the change isn't linear.
₹15,000–₹40,000 — pick exactly one problem
At this level, spreading the budget across technical, content and links guarantees all three stay stuck. Pick the one binding constraint and spend everything there. Usually it's either the site being unindexable or there being no pages worth indexing.
A good freelancer often beats a cheap agency here, because you're paying for one person's attention either way and the freelancer doesn't have an office to fund.
₹40,000–₹75,000 — a small site's whole programme
Around 24 to 45 delivered hours. Enough for two to four researched articles a month, ongoing technical hygiene, and someone actually reading Search Console. Enough for a 20-to-60-page services site in a competitive city.
Not enough for meaningful link acquisition. Earned links cost hours, not fees, and hours are exactly what's scarce here.
₹75,000–₹1,50,000 — four disciplines, on cadence
This is where the work stops being sequential. Technical fixes ship while content is being written while outreach is running. The compounding starts because nothing is waiting for anything else.
It's also where the agency can afford to be wrong occasionally — to test a content format, kill it, and try another — which is how anything good gets found.
₹1,50,000 and above — scale, and the cost of coordinating it
Multiple languages, tens of thousands of SKUs, replatforming, or three markets at once. Real work, genuinely expensive.
Ask what proportion of the fee goes to project management. If it's over 20%, you're buying a process, not an outcome.
What we charge, and who carries the risk
Our numbers, in full, so you can hold them against the table above.
SEO runs from ₹75,000/mo, with smaller sites from ₹40,000/mo. Organic Social & Content is ₹30,000, ₹50,000 or ₹70,000 a month. Performance Marketing is ₹40,000, ₹75,000 or ₹1,50,000 a month. Bundled: SEO plus social is ₹99,000/mo, social plus performance is ₹75,000/mo, all three is ₹1,75,000/mo. All ex-GST. Ad spend is billed separately with zero media markup.
The part that changes the arithmetic isn't the price, though. It's what happens if the price doesn't work.
On day one we freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search. That number goes in writing before anyone touches the site. If we haven't beaten it in 90 days, we keep working free until we do. We never promise a specific ranking position for a specific keyword — nobody controls Google's index, and anyone who says otherwise is selling you a coin flip. We promise movement against your own baseline, which is the only number that pays your salaries.
That's also why we only take three new clients a month. You cannot carry that risk at volume, and agencies that pretend they can are quietly relying on you not measuring.
Five questions to ask a quote before you sign
Ask these in the meeting, not over email. You're measuring how long the pause is.
- "How many hours a month does this fee fund, and split by role?" An agency that has planned the work answers in ten seconds. One that hasn't will tell you they don't work in hours, which is a real philosophy and also a very convenient one.
- "What number are we measuring, and what is it today?" If nobody writes down the starting point, nobody can prove movement later. This is the question that most often ends a sales call early.
- "Who specifically does the work, and are they in this room?" The pitch team and the delivery team are frequently different people. That's normal. Not telling you is not.
- "Where do the links come from?" "Our network" means a private blog network. "We buy from vendors" means the same links your competitor bought. Both are penalties with a delay fuse. See what link building actually costs.
- "What happens if this doesn't work?" Listen for whether the answer contains a consequence for them or only a plan for you.
The notice period is part of the price
A ₹20,000/mo retainer on a twelve-month lock-in is not ₹20,000. It's ₹2,40,000 you have already committed to spending, and you will find that out in month five when nothing has moved and the exit clause requires 90 days' notice.
Long contracts exist because SEO takes time — that argument is genuinely true. They also exist because they protect agency revenue from agency underperformance, and that argument is genuinely true too. The honest version is a short commitment plus a reason to stay.
We run month-to-month after the first quarter, 30 days' notice, and you keep every asset — content, links, dashboards, documentation — whatever happens. Switching agencies is expensive enough without your last one holding your Search Console access hostage.
If you want the full ladder by city and site size, what SEO costs in India breaks the same numbers down by headcount, and our pricing page has the current rate card.