SEO subscription: what do you get per month, and what is a fair price?

An SEO subscription is a fixed monthly amount for which someone, or something, keeps improving your website for Google. At an agency you pay roughly $500 to $5,000 a month for a specialist’s hours. With software you pay about $50 to $150 a month for a service that goes through or improves your site on a fixed rhythm. Which of the two you need depends on what needs to happen on your site.

The word subscription sounds tidy. A fixed amount, no surprises. In practice the packages differ enormously. This article covers what belongs in one and how to compare two offers fairly.

Two kinds of SEO subscription

The hours retainer from an agency or freelancer

You buy a fixed number of hours per month. A specialist spreads them over research, changes to your site, texts and reporting. Many agencies call the tiers Bronze, Silver and Gold, or Starter, Growth and Pro.

The upside: a person thinks along with you. The downside: hours are expensive, and from the outside you cannot see where they go.

The software subscription

You do not buy hours but a result. The software scans your site on a fixed rhythm and improves what pays off most. On some systems it applies the change itself. On others you get the proposal and put it on the site yourself.

The upside: it happens every week, for a fraction of the price. The downside: there is no person who gets to know your business and comes up with a plan.

What does an SEO subscription cost?

Type of subscription	Price per month	What you roughly get
Most common agency retainer	$501 to $1,000	A few hours: basic work and a report
Average agency retainer	About $3,200	A team working on site, content and links
Freelancer	About $1,350 on average	Hours from one person
Hourly work	About $111 an hour on average	Whatever the hours cover
Software that advises	$30 to $150	A list of what needs improving
Software that applies the improvements	About $100 to $150	A fixed number of improvements per week

The agency, freelancer and hourly figures come from Ahrefs’ survey of 439 SEO providers. It is an older survey, so treat the amounts as a floor rather than today’s going rate. The full calculation per type of provider is in SEO pricing.

What belongs in a good SEO subscription?

Whether you pay $99 or $2,000: these four things must be in it.

1. A scan that recurs. Your site changes. You add a page, your web developer adjusts something. A subscription that only looks at your site in month one is a one-off job with a monthly fee.

2. Improvements that are on your site. Advice does not count. Ask at the end of the month: which pages were changed?

3. A measurement per improvement. A new title is only good if it brings more clicks. You see that after about four weeks in Google Search Console.

4. An overview in plain language. What was done, what it did, what comes next month. It does not need to be a twenty-page report. A one-page example is in SEO reporting.

What is often included but adds little: a monthly list of rankings for fifty keywords, an “SEO score” and an hour-long call in which the report is read out loud.

Seven questions before you sign

Ask these of every provider. Ask them of us too.

1. How many pages are changed per month? Hours say nothing. Changed pages do.

2. Do I get a list with old and new? For every change you want to see what was there and what is there now.

3. Who does the work? The senior from the sales call, or an intern? With software: what does the AI do itself, and what comes past me first?

4. What is the term, and how much notice do you need to cancel? An annual contract is nice for the provider. For you it is a risk.

5. What is not included? Content, links and technical changes often cost extra.

6. How do you measure results? Clicks and inquiries count. Rankings for words nobody searches for do not.

7. What happens to the work if I stop? Do the improvements stay on your site? With a good provider they do.

An example: two subscriptions side by side

A dog training school in Columbus has a WordPress site with 28 pages. The owner gets two offers.

Offer A is from a local agency. $795 a month, six hours of work, a six-month term. A report and a call every month.

Offer B is software. $99 a month, cancelable monthly. Every Monday up to five improvements on the site, with an email.

In six hours a month, after the report and the call, a specialist can spend three to four hours on the site. That is about five pages. The software applies up to twenty improvements a month.

The agency does do something the software cannot. It figures out that the school should create a page on puppy classes in a nearby suburb, because no competitor is there. That kind of insight is worth money.

Our advice in such a case: take B, and book a two-hour strategy session with a freelancer once. Together that costs less in the first year than three months of offer A.

When is a software subscription enough?

On most sites up to a hundred pages, the problem is maintenance. The strategy is often clear enough. The owner knows what they sell and to whom. The site has just never been kept up.

Then software is enough, especially if your site runs on WordPress, where the software can also apply the improvement itself. That is how WordPress SEO on autopilot works. Read what software takes over in your SEO and what it does not.

An hours retainer makes sense in a heavy market, for a large online store or when you need links from other sites to compete. That takes people.

GreatCompany’s subscription

GreatCompany has two plans for businesses. Both start with a free report.

Pro, $49 a month. For any website. GreatCompany measures every day whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your business. Every month your site is scanned and you see per page what needs improving. Your SEO assistant in the chat writes the new titles and texts. You or your web developer put them on the site.

Automatic, $99 a month, introductory price. For WordPress. Everything in Pro. On top of that GreatCompany scans your site every week and applies up to five improvements itself every Monday: titles, meta descriptions, internal links and alt text. You choose per item what may run automatically.

Both are cancelable monthly. Stop, and the improvements stay on your site. Details are on the pricing page.

In addition to the seven questions above: GreatCompany does no link building and does not make a strategy for you. Need that? Add a specialist.

Prefer no subscription?

That works too. Do it yourself, with two hours a week and free tools. How to keep it up is in DIY SEO. Or have an SEO audit done once and carry out the points yourself. Want to hand it off entirely? You can outsource your SEO.

Start with the free report

Before you take any subscription, you want to know how much work there is. Join the waitlist. When we open in the US, your free report shows which errors we find on your site and whether ChatGPT names you or your competitor. With that list in hand you can judge every offer better.