What SEO companies charge, and where every rupee goes

One ₹75,000 retainer, opened up

Most agencies won't show you this. Not because it's shameful — because once you can see the line items you can argue with them, and arguing with a range is much harder.

So here is a real ₹75,000/month SEO retainer as a P&L. Ex-GST. Roughly what a mid-size Indian site gets, and roughly how we'd staff one.

Salaries set the floor, and nothing moves them

An agency's price cannot go below its payroll for long. So the salary market is the real ceiling on how cheap SEO can honestly get in India.

These are the bands the Indian market broadly runs on. They vary by city — Bengaluru and Gurgaon sit at the top, tier-2 cities can be 25–35% lower — and by whether the employer is an agency or a product company, which is usually a 20–40% gap in the product company's favour.

• Loaded cost is CTC × ~1.3, divided by ~130 billable hours a month. The 1.3 is PF, gratuity, a laptop, a seat, health cover and training. The 130 is what's left of 176 working hours after internal meetings, sick days, leave and the hours nobody can bill to anyone.
• This is why a ₹15,000 retainer only ever gets a fresher. It's the only band the arithmetic permits, and freshers unsupervised are how sites end up with duplicate title tags across 4,000 URLs.
• And why senior time is rationed. At ₹1,800 an hour, nine hours of a lead is ₹16,000 — over a fifth of a ₹75,000 retainer for roughly two hours a week. That's the correct amount. It's also why agencies quietly substitute juniors when margins get tight.

The tool stack, and why it isn't optional

You can do SEO with Search Console and a spreadsheet. You cannot do competitive SEO with them, because you can't see anything happening outside your own domain.

Approximate list prices at the time of writing, converted at roughly ₹88 to the dollar. Vendors change these regularly, so treat them as an order of magnitude, not a quote:

• Ahrefs — entry tier around $129/mo, roughly ₹11,000. Higher tiers with more seats and credits run 2–3.5x that.
• Semrush — entry tier around $140/mo, roughly ₹12,000. Similar multiples upward.
• Screaming Frog — around £199/year, roughly ₹1,800/mo. Free below 500 URLs, which is genuinely enough for a small site.
• Rank tracking, log analysis, content tooling, QA and monitoring — another ₹15,000–₹35,000/mo across a team.
• Total for a working agency stack: ₹50,000–₹80,000 a month, before any per-client costs.

Margin, and the 18% nobody quotes

Two numbers sit on top of the work, and both are routinely left out of the conversation until the invoice arrives.

Margin. A well-run Indian services agency nets 10–20%. Below 10% it can't survive a client leaving; above 25% it's usually running juniors on senior rates. On our ₹75,000 example, ₹8,000 is about 11%. We'd rather show you that than pretend we're a charity — an agency with no margin is an agency that will quietly cut your hours to survive the quarter.

GST. Almost every Indian agency quotes ex-GST and then adds 18%. That ₹75,000 retainer invoices at ₹88,500. Over a year that's ₹1,62,000 of tax on ₹9,00,000 of fees. If your business is GST-registered you claim it as input credit, so it's a cash-flow cost rather than a real one. If you're not registered, it's a straight 18% price rise you didn't budget for.

The phrase to watch for on a quote is "plus taxes as applicable". It's accurate, it's legal, and it means your ₹40,000 budget is really a ₹33,900 budget.

What ₹10,000 a month actually buys

Run the same sum backwards on the packages advertised across Indian marketplaces.

Of ₹10,000, tools and overhead still take their cut — a smaller stack, but not zero. Call it ₹7,000 reaching delivery. At a mid-level ₹1,000 blended cost, that's seven hours a month. Under two hours a week, including the time spent producing the report that proves the two hours happened.

Staff it entirely with a fresher at ₹350 an hour and you get twenty hours instead. Which sounds better until you consider that twenty unsupervised hours is enough time to deploy a sitewide canonical error, and not nearly enough to notice one.

This isn't an argument that cheap agencies are dishonest. Most aren't. It's that the arithmetic can't be beaten, and the pitch deck is written as though it can. The lowest price of SEO takes the ₹2,999 packages apart the same way.

How to read what a quote leaves out

A quote's silences are more informative than its inclusions. These four are the ones worth chasing.

Then compare like with like. Two proposals for "SEO — ₹60,000/mo" can differ by a factor of three in actual work, and neither is lying.

1. No hours or headcount anywhere. Not necessarily bad — some agencies genuinely price by output. But then the output must be specified: how many pages, how many fixes, how many placements.
2. Content counted in articles, not in researched articles. A 700-word AI-assembled post and a 1,500-word piece with a subject-matter interview both count as "1 blog". One of them ranks. See content writing cost in India.
3. Links quoted per placement. Per-placement pricing means bought placements, because earned ones can't be guaranteed to a schedule. We bill link work by hours for exactly this reason.
4. No line for reporting or analysis. If nobody's paid to interpret the data, you'll receive a dashboard export and a cheerful summary, which is how twelve months disappear.
5. "Plus taxes as applicable." Add 18% before you compare it to anything.