Every week someone asks me some version of the same question: “What should we actually be paying for SEO?”
Fair question. SEO pricing is famously murky — some agencies won’t publish a number at all, and the ones that do range from $99/month “guaranteed rankings” specials to $10,000/month enterprise retainers. Somewhere in the middle is what a real Edmonton business should expect to pay.
So here it is, with actual numbers.
The short answer
In Edmonton in 2026, most businesses pay $450 to $5,000 per month for professional SEO. Here’s how that breaks down:
- Local SEO (map pack, Google Business Profile, “near me” searches): $400–$1,500/month. At Holler Digital, done-for-you Google Business Profile management is $450/month per location — and it’s included in every one of our SEO retainer plans.
- Monthly SEO retainers (content, technical work, link building, rank tracking): $1,500–$5,000/month for competitive campaigns in Edmonton. Our retainers run $1,500–$3,500/month depending on how many keyword themes we’re building authority around.
- SEO audits: anywhere from $49 to $5,000 depending on depth. Our Technical SEO Audit is $349 (or $249 with a care plan), and the fee is credited toward your first month if you start an SEO plan within 60 days.
- Hourly SEO consulting: $100–$250/hour for senior-level help in Alberta. Our rate is $125/hour.
That’s the whole answer if your coffee’s getting cold. If you want to know why the range is that wide — and how to avoid paying for SEO that does nothing — keep reading.
Why the range is so wide
SEO pricing isn’t arbitrary, even if it feels that way. Three things drive the number more than anything else.
Competition in your industry. Ranking a plumbing company in Sherwood Park is a very different job than ranking a personal injury law firm in downtown Edmonton. More competition means more content, more links, and more months of sustained work. The price follows.
How big the fix is. Some websites need a tune-up. Others need scaffolding, a new foundation, and a structural engineer. If your site has years of accumulated technical debt — slow pages, thin content, a URL structure only its mother could love — the early months cost more because there’s simply more to do.
Who’s actually doing the work. A $500/month retainer at a big agency often buys you a junior coordinator running a checklist. The same money with a senior specialist buys you strategy. Always ask who’s touching your account.
What Edmonton businesses actually pay in 2026
Market data puts Edmonton and Calgary agency retainers at roughly $1,500–$5,000/month for competitive organic campaigns — a notch below Toronto and Vancouver, where the same work runs $2,000–$7,500.
But most Edmonton small businesses don’t need to start there. A well-run local SEO campaign at $450–$800/month is often the right first move for a service business whose customers search “furnace repair Edmonton” rather than researching nationally.
Here’s a realistic way to think about tiers:
$400–$800/month — Local visibility. Google Business Profile optimization, regular GBP posts, review response management, citation and NAP consistency, and local grid rank tracking with a monthly report. Right for single-location service businesses. (Ours is $450/month per location.)
$1,500–$2,500/month — Growth campaigns. Everything above, plus ongoing content creation, optimized landing pages, technical SEO, link building, and competitor monitoring. Our Core SEO plan at $1,500/month builds authority around 2 keyword themes — 2 optimized landing pages, 2 blogs a month, quarterly internal-linking refreshes, and full local SEO included.
$2,500–$5,000+/month — Competitive and multi-location. More keyword themes, more content, priority link building, and serious technical work. Right for competitive industries (legal, dental, home services at scale) or companies targeting all of Alberta and beyond. Our Growth ($2,250/month) and Authority ($3,500/month) plans live here.
What cheap SEO actually costs you
The $99–$300/month offers you get cold-emailed about aren’t a bargain — they’re a liability.
At that price, nobody can afford to do real work on your site. What you typically get is automated directory submissions, AI-spun blog posts nobody reads, and a PDF report of vanity metrics. In the worst cases, you get spammy links that earn you a penalty you’ll later pay a real agency to clean up. (Penalty recovery projects run $2,000–$10,000 in Canada. Yeah.)
Translation: cheap SEO isn’t a smaller version of good SEO. It’s a different product that happens to share a name.
What about those big upfront “SEO assessments”?
Here’s an honest one: plenty of agencies — including us, until recently — sell a $2,000–$5,000 assessment-and-strategy project before the monthly work even starts.
We retired ours. Not because the research wasn’t valuable — it was the same deep-dive we still do — but because it left clients with a great report and no momentum. Paying four figures to be told what needs doing, before anything actually gets done, is a hard way to start a relationship.
So we build it into the retainer instead. Your first 90 days are structured deliberately: month one is strategy — full research, keyword themes, competitive positioning. Month two is technical SEO — the fixes that make everything else work. Month three is content — the first optimized pages and posts go live. By day 90 you have the full foundation, and the work never stopped moving.
Want to test the waters before committing to anything monthly? That’s what the audits are for: the $49 AI-Readiness Scan, the $349 Technical SEO Audit (complete crawl, Core Web Vitals, site architecture, structured data), and the $249 Trust & Authority (E-E-A-T) Audit. Each ends in a prioritized fix list, and audit fees are credited toward your first month if you start an SEO plan within 60 days. No black boxes.
The question behind the question
When people ask “how much does SEO cost,” what they usually mean is “how do I know I won’t waste this money?”
Here’s what separates SEO that pays for itself from SEO that quietly burns budget:
A real strategy tied to revenue, not rankings. Ranking #1 for a keyword nobody searches is a party trick. Good SEO starts with the searches your actual customers make — that’s why our plans are built around tightly defined keyword themes rather than a grab-bag of terms.
Transparent reporting. You should see rankings, traffic, and — most importantly — leads. If the monthly report needs a decoder ring, that’s by design.
Someone senior on your account. Ask who does the work. Ask how long they’ve done it. (For the record: I’ve been doing this since 2005, and clients work directly with me — not an account manager relaying messages.)
AI-search readiness. In 2026, showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI answers matters as much as the classic ten blue links. We build this in: an AI Visibility Add-On (+$500/month on any SEO plan) layers AI citation tracking, FAQ schema, and E-E-A-T implementation on top of the retainer — and a standalone AI Visibility Monitor (from $95/month) tracks your brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. If a prospective agency looks blank when you ask about AI visibility, keep shopping. (We wrote more about that in SEO Isn’t Dead. It’s Entered a New Era.)
How long before SEO pays off?
Honest answer: local SEO typically shows movement in 60–90 days. Competitive organic campaigns take 4–6 months to build momentum and 6–12 months to compound properly.
And that timeline isn’t theoretical. Six months of SEO took Essex Lease from page two to ranking across four provinces, and nine months (plus a redesign) took WC Marker’s store to #1 in Canada for the terms that actually sell gear. Real businesses, real numbers — have a look at how the work compounds.
Anyone promising page one in 30 days is either targeting keywords nobody searches or doing something Google will eventually punish. SEO is a compounding asset, not a light switch — that’s exactly why it ends up cheaper than ads over time. You stop renting traffic and start owning it.
Quick answers for the skimmers
How much does SEO cost per month in Edmonton?
Most Edmonton businesses pay $450–$5,000/month. Local SEO (Google Business Profile management) starts around $450/month; competitive organic campaigns typically run $1,500–$5,000/month. Holler Digital’s SEO retainers run $1,500–$3,500/month with local SEO included.
How much does an SEO audit cost?
From $49 for an AI-readiness scan to several thousand dollars for enterprise deep dives. Holler Digital’s Technical SEO Audit is $349 standalone ($249 with a care plan), credited toward your first month if you start an SEO plan within 60 days.
Do I need to pay for a big SEO assessment before starting?
Not with us. The strategy deep-dive is built into every retainer’s first month — month one is strategy, month two is technical SEO, month three is content. No separate four-figure assessment required.
Is SEO worth it for a small business?
If your customers search for what you sell — yes. A $450/month local SEO campaign that produces two extra jobs a month has usually paid for itself several times over.
Can I do SEO myself?
Some of it, absolutely. Claim your Google Business Profile, ask happy customers for reviews, and write pages that answer real questions. The technical and competitive work is where professionals earn their fee. (Budgeting for a bigger project? Here’s what a website costs in Edmonton.)
Ready for a real number?
Every business is different, which is why “starting at” is doing some work in every price on this page.
If you want a number specific to your site and your market, book a free consultation. We’ll look at where you stand, tell you what it would honestly take, and if we’re not the right fit, we’ll say so.
No pressure, no black boxes — just a straight answer to “what should we be paying for SEO?”
