SEO pricing models explained

Monthly retainer

A fixed fee for ongoing work. The most common model and the one that fits SEO best, because the work compounds and does not finish.

What it incentivises: retention. That is mostly healthy, and it becomes unhealthy when the agency has no reason to tell you the programme has done its job.

Project or one-off

A fixed scope with an end: a migration, an audit, a site build.

Incentive: deliver and leave. Good for work that has an end. Poor for anything that needs maintenance, which is most of SEO.

Hourly

Rare above the freelance tier. LYFE Marketing publishes $50 to $99 an hour as at July 2026.

Incentive: hours. It also makes the client ration the thinking, which is the part worth buying.

Pay per lead

You pay for contacts rather than work. Service Direct and Local Services Ads operate this way.

Incentive: lead volume, not lead quality. Leads are often shared with competitors. Read what counts as a billable lead before signing, because that definition is the whole contract.

Performance or revenue share

Payment tied to rankings, leads or revenue.

Incentive: whatever the metric is, gamed to the edge. Ranking-based deals reward easy keywords. Revenue share needs attribution clean enough to survive a dispute, and local service marketing rarely has that.

What we use and why

A monthly retainer, priced by complexity, with a 90-day initial term and month-to-month after. No performance pricing, because the attribution needed to make it fair does not exist. No pay-per-lead, because it pays us to send you volume.

“Whatever the metric is, it gets gamed to the edge.”