What Should My Agency Be Charging for Local SEO?

What are your competitors charging?

As we’ve already discussed, your positioning, experience, and location should significantly influence your price point, but there’s still more to it: no one works in a vacuum; it’s time to look at your competitors.

There are many reasons to monitor your direct competitors in the marketing space, and understanding and comparing pricing models is just one of them. Comparing services, website messaging, attitude, customer satisfaction, reputation and performance are all valuable ways to allow you to position yourself differently and more appealingly to your given client.

That said, there’s nothing quite like knowing exactly what your competitors are charging for comparable services. This gives you a real edge in the game and is naturally going to influence your pricing.

The only problem is that, far more often than not, marketing agencies don’t display their rate cards on their websites or discuss this kind of thing openly on social media (for the precise same reason you want to get at those rate cards).

While I could suggest you contact your competitors anonymously to ask for the pricing plans, I personally feel that’s rather underhand. There are other ways of getting an idea of what your potential clients are paying, and they start right there, with the very people you’re competing for.

If, from the very start of your relationship with a potential client, you can develop a good rapport with them by always being open, honest, and friendly, you’ll feel much more comfortable asking the difficult questions later on. Remember there’s nothing wrong with asking which other agencies are in the mix when it comes to a pitch, and if you feel it’s appropriate, you may well be able to come right out and ask what they’re charging for what service.

Even if gaining competitive insights this way isn’t productive, remember that every lost pitch is an opportunity to learn about your competitors. If you know who you were up against, and you learn in your post-pitch communications that price was a determining factor, you can make a note that that agency is charging less than you for an equivalent service.

Do this a few times and you’ll have a clear picture of where your pricing sits in terms of your competitive landscape.

How to Put Together a Pricing Plan for Local SEO

While it might not be suitable for every local SEO, setting up a simple pricing plan that stays fairly consistent between pitches is a great way to simplify pricing and allow potential clients to build trust in your agency.

If what you’re proposing is clear and easy to understand, there’s nowhere for you to hide hidden costs. This will appeal particularly to those potential clients who have perhaps been burned by an SEO agency in the past.

A local SEO pricing plan is best suited to agencies kicking off an ongoing retainer with a client. Sure, there might be some one-off tasks on there, such as a local SEO audit or a citation-building campaign, but the majority of factors that keep local businesses high in rankings require ongoing work and investment. These include Google My Business management, spam fighting (depending on the industry), link building, and so on.

Be Realistic: Make Sure Your Services and Pricing Are Scalable

Once you’ve gone through the factors that affect pricing that we discussed earlier, such as local economics, specialisms, and competition, you’ll have a fair idea of what’s realistic to charge before potential clients scoff at your prices and turn their backs. However, it’s not just client expectations you have to be realistic about, it’s what you can achieve in your own time.

Consider this: your pricing plan includes a single charge for writing and placing five guest blog posts linking back to your client’s site per month. Sounds reasonable, right? Provided you have the time and skill, you could achieve this, and the client would, over time, benefit from it.

Now, let’s say this tactic works well, and your client spreads the good word about your agency. Suddenly, three other businesses are knocking at your door, wanting the Content Hero they’ve heard so much about.

If you’re sticking to the same pricing plan, as you probably should, the same charge for five blog posts per month suddenly isn’t quite so achievable. As a small agency, are you about to churn out 20 blog posts of good quality per month while also working on the various other factors we know impact and improve local search visibility?

Sure, you could trawl the web for freelance writers or hire new staff in a mad panic before your new potential clients lose interest, but there’s bound to be a dip in quality.

The issue is this: your pricing plan was never scaleable in the first place. Through greed or ambition, the local SEO tasks you said you could perform in a given month simply aren’t achievable in the same number of hours for two or more clients.

So, the takeaway is to start your pricing plan small and leave room in your month for additional client work. Be realistic about what you can achieve and about your pricing plan, and you’ll prevent yourself from ever having to stress about managing expectations.

Consider Using a Plans-based Pricing Model

Borrowing from the SaaS world, a popular model for local SEO pricing is that of tiered pricing plans (e.g. Bronze, Silver, Gold). Provided you have some clients under your belt and have experience in what each set of tasks can truly deliver, you can confidently package your services up in this way.

The benefit of this is that it’s easier for potential clients to understand the comparative value of what they’re paying for. Also, if you name the plans after the types of clients they best serve (e.g., Small Business, Multi-location, etc.) so that the plan name and description immediately speak to them, you’ll have an easier time convincing them that you have a plan that suits them.

A good way to approach this is by having the plans quite simply scale in terms of size, rather than scope, of operations. With this model, every plan includes the same tasks, but what changes is the amount of time devoted to them.

For example, you could have one plan that offers one guest blog per month and two hours spent monitoring reviews, another that offers two posts per month and four hours spent on reviews, and so on.

This is probably the simplest model for clients to understand and inherently acknowledges that every local SEO task you perform is critical for every business.

Conversely, removing some tasks from your smaller plans can leave clients with a fear of missing out, meaning they may be more likely to consider a more expensive package just to ensure their local SEO strategy covers all bases.

At the early stages of your agency, it’s fine to play around with different pricing models for different clients, testing different plan names and contents, but always have in mind the goal of reaching one core pricing model that you know is a good fit for all businesses. If you do this, be sure not to advertise your rate cards on your website, for obvious reasons.

If, early on, you have a client you have a particularly good relationship with, you could use them as an ambassador client, and test a strategy and pricing plan on them to see what you can achieve on that plan.

Later on, though, once word gets around about your agency and businesses start to compare what you offer, you don’t want to look inconsistent or tricksy. The whole point of a pricing model is that it’s consistent across pitches, and changing this too much can lead to a lack of trust in your business.

Include Competitor Comparisons

If you’ve been particularly successful in eking out the pricing models of your competitors, you have the opportunity to include a competitor comparison in your pricing model, to clearly display where your services are less expensive or where you offer more for a similar price. This will work well for businesses where you know price points and cost savings are critical decision factors.

If you want to be less upfront about it, and perhaps more tactful, an alternative to displaying the price difference on a rate card is to mention it to potential clients in conversation during pitches more casually. This method is more suited for businesses that you feel wouldn’t appreciate the cutthroat nature of competitor-slamming, and instead want to work with an agency it perceives as caring and supportive.

So, it’s important to consider your potential client’s personality and pain points and choose how or if you should communicate your competitive advantage based on this. It’s equally important to remember that most buyers don’t just want to see a comparatively lower price; they want to be assured they’ll get the same amount of expertise, better service, added value, and be charged a little less.

On that note, I’d strongly recommend not undercutting the competition to a ridiculous degree just to win business. Hugely reduced prices can give the impression that your services aren’t of as high a quality as those of your competitors. Remember that buyers want things that are ‘affordable’, ‘inexpensive’, and offer ‘great value’; no one wants ‘cheap’.

Other Frequently Asked Questions on Local SEO Pricing

I hope that, while I haven’t supplied a magic bullet for pricing, the above guidance has given you inspiration for how to research and consider your pricing models, particularly at the start of your agency journey.

There are a few common questions I haven’t been able to cover neatly in the structure above, though, so I’ve done my best to answer them below.

Should I offer loss leaders?

Loss leaders, wherein you offer something for free in order to shore up interest and gain work in the long term, are a great way to show commitment and value to your potential clients.

One element of local SEO that’s particularly suited to offering for free at the start of a relationship is a local SEO audit. In fact, performing an automated audit of a business site, using a tool like BrightLocal’s Local Search Audit, is a great way to find businesses with local search visibility issues in the first place, and showcase where you can help.

Going one step further, and taking your potential client through the audit for free, is a perfect opportunity to give them an insight into your expertise and make them feel like they’ve got a bit of free consultancy to boot.

When should I start to upsell my clients on other services?

Providing your initial local SEO work goes well, you may find opportunities to work with your clients that go beyond your original retainer or project work. The key to getting this right isn’t just to look at what services they’re not buying and try to convince them of a need, but to sit down with them and talk through what’s not quite working that other services can help with.

For example, if your client has plenty of people viewing their Google Business Profile or website, but not enough people becoming customers, then you have an issue of conversion. You can then sell conversion rate optimization services off the back of this. Likewise, if their PPC ads aren’t converting, you can upsell them on landing page content improvements.

Ask for a free meeting to look at where the blockers to success are, and use these as opportunities to provide more value with other services, in a way that the client can clearly understand will definitely impact their bottom line for the better.

Can I just ‘set it and forget it’?

While you could simply offer a month’s worth of local SEO (including foundational tasks like citation building and local SEO auditing), take the money and run, I’d strongly recommend against this.

Firstly, we know that improving local search visibility takes time and effort, no matter the industry. If you simply do a month’s work and move on, your clients will never really see any tangible benefits from your work, preventing you from receiving quality testimonials and reviews, a good reputation, and the potential to grow.

Additionally, there are only so many small businesses in any market, and the quicker you burn through them, the faster you’ll run out! A much more scalable solution is to work with clients on an ongoing basis wherever possible.

What should my markup on citation building be?

This question sadly betrays a fundamental understanding of how citation building fits into the bigger picture of local search success. Asking this question suggests that you’re interested only in scale of citation building, and how many you can get away with selling, rather than quality or impact.

Instead of thinking so granularly, consider citation building a single task at a single price. Rather than saying “we will build citations on X number of sites, and the more the better”, you should be saying “for $X, we will ensure your business is listed and managed on every citation site that is relevant and important for your industry and audience”. This way, you’ll be selling value rather than mere quantity.

Should I guarantee results?

Put simply: absolutely not. No one can possibly guarantee their clients new customers or results in local search every time, even if they can prove they’ve achieved it for previous clients. Every business is its own unique challenge, and you need to manage expectations to accommodate this.

At best, you can provide broad outlines of what results you hope to achieve in a given time, but this is still risky. Instead, sell your potential clients on the ongoing benefit of regular SEO work, and sell based on core, measurable deliverables rather than promising rankings, traffic, or sales.

This approach is more likely to lead to a positive relationship with your client and well-managed expectations mean you can underpromise and overdeliver, rather than vice versa.

How Do You Charge for Local SEO?

Do you have any tips you’d like to share about how you build your pricing model? Agree or disagree with any of my points above? Let us know on X or in our Facebook community, The Local Pack.