Build the quote yourself: one base, seven deltas
Founders assume SEO quotes vary because agencies are guessing. Mostly they aren't. They're pricing different amounts of work and describing it with the same three words, which produces two numbers ₹2 lakh apart for what looks like the same site.
So build the number yourself before anyone sends you one. Start from a ₹40,000/mo base: a single-language site under 40 pages, one city's worth of competition, CMS admin access in your gift, two content pieces a month, one stakeholder. That's the cheapest configuration where a competent generalist genuinely covers the work.
Then add the seven things that make your site harder than that one. These aren't survey figures — nobody has surveyed this honestly. They're what the extra work costs at Indian delivery rates. Your agency's numbers will differ; the direction and rough size won't.
The seven variables, each with a rupee swing
Every line below changes the number of specialist hours your site needs each month. The swing is the monthly difference between the easy end and the hard end, ex-GST.
| Variable | The easy end | The expensive end | Monthly swing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site size and CMS access | Under 40 pages, one or two templates, you have admin access | 1,000+ URLs, a locked CMS, changes queued behind a fortnightly dev sprint | −₹10,000 to +₹40,000 |
| Competition tier | One city, service business, competing with local firms | National keyword set, or YMYL — health, finance, legal | +₹0 to +₹40,000 |
| Content velocity | Two researched pieces a month | Ten to twelve a month with subject-matter interviews | +₹8,000 to ₹15,000 per extra piece |
| Link and digital PR ambition | Citation clean-up and profile hygiene only | A funded digital PR programme with original data | +₹20,000 to +₹60,000 |
| Languages and markets | English, India only | Hindi plus two regional languages, or three country versions with hreflang | +₹15,000 per additional language |
| Catalogue and template complexity | 50 URLs from one template | 10,000+ SKUs with faceted navigation generating parameter URLs | +₹25,000 past 10,000 SKUs |
| Reporting, attribution and stakeholders | One founder, one dashboard, one call | CRM attribution, three stakeholders, a board slide, a QBR | +₹5,000 to +₹15,000 |
Site size and CMS access is the biggest lever, and it isn't close
The number of pages on your site matters less than founders expect. The number of templates matters enormously. A 1,000-product store built from one product template and one category template can be cheaper to fix than a 60-page site where every page was hand-built by a different freelancer since 2019.
Templates mean a fix ships once and lands everywhere. Bespoke pages mean a fix ships sixty times. Price follows the second number.
The −₹10,000: you can hand us the keys
If we have CMS admin access and can push a title tag, a canonical or a schema block ourselves, we don't bill for the waiting. If every change queues behind a checkout bug in your developer's backlog, a three-hour fix becomes a six-week negotiation and somebody has to be paid to run it.
That discount is genuinely available. Ask any agency what their quote drops to if you hand over staging access and a named developer to ping. If the number doesn't move, they'd already priced you as easy.
The +₹40,000: locked stack, legacy URLs, no staging
Enterprise CMS platforms with change-control boards, a checkout nobody dares touch, redirect rules only one contractor understands, and no staging environment to test on. Every recommendation now needs documentation, a ticket, a QA pass and a rollback plan.
None of that is SEO work. All of it is billable, and the agency that priced it in is the one being honest with you.
Competition tier: local pack, national, or YMYL
The same 40 pages cost wildly different amounts depending on who else wants those queries. This is the variable clients underestimate most, because from the inside every market feels competitive.
Three tiers, and the jump between the second and third is the expensive one.
- Local, +₹0. You're competing with eight to fifteen businesses in one city and a map pack. Relevance, a correct Google Business Profile, real reviews and a decent services page get you most of the way. Links matter far less than founders fear.
- National, +₹25,000. Now you're up against aggregators, marketplaces and publishers with a decade of accumulated links. You need genuine content depth, internal architecture that concentrates authority, and a link programme that's actually funded rather than aspirational.
- YMYL, +₹40,000. Health, finance, legal, insurance. Google applies stricter quality expectations to pages that can affect someone's money or wellbeing, and the practical consequence is a second cost centre: a credentialed reviewer. You're paying a doctor, a CA or a lawyer to read and sign content before it ships. That's not a markup, it's a salary line.
- The one nobody quotes: a competitor who publishes weekly. If two rivals ship four pieces a month each, matching them is the floor, not the ambition. Check their sitemap dates before you set your budget.
Content velocity, and what each extra piece a month adds
Content is usually 40–50% of an SEO retainer, so it's the line that moves a quote fastest. A researched 1,200–1,800 word page — real brief, real search-intent analysis, an editor, internal links wired in — costs ₹8,000 to ₹15,000 depending on how hard the subject is to get right. Technical, medical and financial topics sit at the top of that range, because the writer has to be credible as well as fluent.
Going from two pieces a month to six is therefore ₹32,000–₹60,000 of extra monthly cost. Any quote that adds four pieces for ₹10,000 is quietly changing what a piece means.
The ceiling on velocity is almost never the agency. It's your review capacity. Twelve pieces a month with nobody internally checking them produces twelve pages of plausible, unverified, faintly wrong content — precisely the profile Google's helpful-content systems demote. If you can approve four a month, buy four.
How to compare two quotes that look nothing alike
Once you have two proposals in front of you, normalise them before you compare rupees. Five steps, about forty minutes of work, and it usually reveals that the cheap quote is cheap for a stated reason.
- Convert both to hours by role. Ask each agency for a monthly split: strategist hours, technical hours, writer hours, outreach hours. One that has planned the work answers in a day. One that hasn't will explain that they don't think in hours.
- Count deliverables with numbers, not nouns. "Content optimisation" and "four rewritten service pages with new internal linking" are not the same promise, even when they cost the same.
- Price the same three add-ons with both. One extra article a month, a second language, and migration support. The deltas expose each agency's real rate card in a way the headline number never will.
- Separate one-off from recurring. Many quotes bundle the month-one audit into the retainer; others bill ₹75,000 for it separately in month one. Compare year-one totals, not month-one totals.
- Add GST and contract length last. ₹60,000/mo on a twelve-month lock-in is a ₹7,20,000 decision. ₹75,000/mo month-to-month is a ₹75,000 decision. The cheaper monthly number is frequently the larger commitment, and the proposal will never put it that way.
Where we land, and what does not change our price
Our 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. Bundles: SEO plus social ₹99,000/mo, social plus performance ₹75,000/mo, all three ₹1,75,000/mo. All ex-GST, ad spend billed separately with zero media markup.
Three things that genuinely change our number: catalogue size, language count and whether your developers can move. Three things that don't: how urgently you need it, how much you just raised, and how well the first call went. Urgency pricing is a tax on panic and we'd rather not build a business on it.
What we sell instead of a promise about position: on day one we freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search. Miss that number in 90 days and we keep working free until we beat it. We never guarantee a specific ranking for a specific keyword, because nobody controls Google's index and anyone claiming otherwise is selling a coin flip.
If you want the same numbers arranged differently, what SEO costs in India breaks them down by site size, ecommerce SEO priced by SKU count handles catalogues, and our pricing page has the current card.