Why a rate card beats a range
Ask what SEO services cost and you'll be handed a range: ₹25,000 to ₹3,00,000 a month. Technically true, practically useless. It's like being told a car costs between two lakh and two crore.
The useful question is what each piece of work costs on its own, because that's the only way to check whether a retainer is fairly priced. A ₹75,000 bundle containing ₹1,10,000 of separately-priced work is a good deal. A ₹75,000 bundle containing ₹35,000 of work is a subscription to somebody's office rent.
So here's the card. Indian market rates, ex-GST, for agencies and senior freelancers who'll show you their previous work. Prices vary by city and by whether the buyer looks like they'll haggle.
The rate card: eight SEO services, priced
One-off unless the row says otherwise.
| Service | Typical price | What sets the number |
|---|---|---|
| Technical + content audit | ₹35,000–₹60,000 | URL count. Under 500 pages sits at the bottom; a 50,000-SKU catalogue with faceted navigation sits well above the top. |
| Keyword research + content map | ₹25,000–₹45,000 | Number of markets and languages. One English market is cheap; Hindi plus two regional languages triples the research. |
| One researched article (1,200–1,800 words) | ₹6,000–₹18,000 | Whether a subject-matter expert is interviewed. That single input is most of the price gap, and most of the ranking gap. |
| Technical fix sprint (two weeks) | ₹60,000–₹1,00,000 | Whether the agency writes the tickets or ships the code. Shipping costs more and takes half the calendar time. |
| Core Web Vitals / speed work | ₹40,000–₹80,000 | Stack. A WordPress theme cleanup is the low end; a React app with hydration problems is the high end and then some. |
| Schema markup rollout | ₹20,000–₹40,000 | Templates, not pages. Six templates cost roughly six times one template, regardless of how many URLs use them. |
| Google Business Profile + citation cleanup | ₹15,000–₹25,000 per location | Duplicate and stale listings. An old business with four abandoned profiles costs more than a new one with none. |
| Digital PR / earned links (monthly) | ₹40,000–₹1,20,000 / mo | Outreach hours, not placements. Anyone pricing per link is buying them, which is a penalty on a delay fuse. |
What ₹40,000 buys versus ₹75,000
Retainers are just this rate card spread monthly. Two realistic monthly baskets, using the numbers above:
₹40,000 a month
Three or four things, done properly, on a site small enough that they matter. No link programme — there simply aren't hours for it. This band works for a 20-to-40-page services business, and it's why our smaller-site floor sits at ₹40,000.
Note the article price: ₹4,000 a piece inside a retainer against ₹6,000–₹18,000 on the card above. That isn't a discount for volume, it's the research and brand context being written once instead of every time. It's the main honest argument for bundling.
- Two researched articles — ₹8,000
- Six to eight hours of technical hygiene and QA — ₹7,000
- On-page and internal linking across existing pages — ₹6,000
- Reporting, Search Console review and a monthly call — ₹8,000
- Tools, overhead and margin — ₹11,000
₹75,000 a month
Six or seven things running in parallel rather than in sequence. That parallelism is the actual product. The full line-by-line breakdown shows where each rupee lands.
- Four researched articles — ₹15,000
- Ten hours of technical work, including dev-ready tickets — ₹10,000
- Eight hours of genuine outreach — ₹8,500
- Nine hours of strategy and account ownership — ₹16,000
- Analytics, reporting and QA — ₹4,500
- Tools, overhead and margin — ₹21,000
What's worth unbundling, and what isn't
Some services genuinely make sense to buy once and own. Others are a false economy the moment you take them out of a retainer.
- Buy once: the audit. Pay for it. A paid audit is a diagnosis; a free one is a sales document with a diagnosis attached. Buying it separately also lets you take the findings to three agencies and get comparable quotes.
- Buy once: analytics and tracking setup. It only needs doing properly one time, and it belongs to you afterwards.
- Buy once: schema and Core Web Vitals. Both are template-level work. Once shipped, they stop costing money and keep paying.
- Buy monthly: content. Cadence beats volume every time. Four solid pieces a month for a year outperforms fifty in one quarter followed by silence — Google rewards a site that's clearly still alive.
- Buy monthly: links. Outreach is a relationship business with a long lag. A one-off link campaign is three months of building contacts you then abandon.
- Buy monthly: technical hygiene. Every release breaks something. A site with an active dev team needs someone watching, permanently.
What gets cut first when the budget shrinks — and what should
Budgets get cut. Here's the order it usually happens in, and the order it ought to.
- Cut first, in practice: links. They're the slowest to show a result, so they look the most optional. They're also the hardest to restart, because the outreach relationships go cold.
- Cut second, in practice: strategy hours. The account lead gets 'more efficient', which means a junior now runs your account and nobody notices for two months.
- Cut last, in practice: content volume. It's the most visible output, so it survives longest — even when the pages being published have no search demand behind them.
- What we'd actually cut first: content volume. Two excellent pieces beat four adequate ones, and the saving is immediate.
- What we'd cut last: technical hygiene and analysis. They're cheap, they're preventative, and they're the only lines that stop a small problem from becoming a six-month recovery. Ask anyone who's been through a replatform that killed their traffic.
How to write a scope brief that makes two quotes comparable
Most founders receive three proposals that can't be compared, because each agency scoped a different job. Send the same one-page brief to all three and the problem disappears.
Six things it needs. Nothing else.
- Your site, in numbers. URL count, CMS, whether you have developers, how many languages, how many locations.
- The one metric you're buying. Qualified leads from organic search, or organic revenue. Not traffic, not rankings. State today's number.
- Your must-haves, from the rate card above. Name the services. "SEO" is not a scope; "a technical audit, four articles a month, and GBP work for three locations" is.
- Your budget, honestly stated. Withholding it doesn't get you a better price, it gets you three proposals aimed at different budgets that you then can't compare.
- Ask for hours by role. One line per role, per month. This is the single question that separates planned work from hopeful work.
- Ask what happens if it doesn't work. Then compare the answers rather than the prices. Ours is on the pricing page — we freeze your trailing-90-day organic lead count on day one and work free past 90 days until we beat it. We never promise a specific ranking position, because nobody controls Google's index.