How Much Do WordPress SEO Services Cost?

SiteMile lists WordPress SEO from $499 a month, PageTraffic from $499, WPBeginner Pro from $649, Straight North from $1,500 and WebFX from $3,000. Sitewired's pricing guide splits the market into a budget band of $100 to $500 a month, a mid band of $500 to $3,000 and a premium band above $3,000, and prices the parts separately: technical work $300 to $800, content $500 to $1,500 and local SEO $400 to $1,200.

These are starting prices and guide figures as listed in October 2026 on each company's own page. Prices change, so confirm on the page before you compare.

Local SEO on your existing WordPress site is $350 a month for Starter and $700 a month for Growth. Starter covers five target keywords, on-page work on five core pages, ten citations a month, two posts a month published in WordPress, a monthly ranking and call tracking report and a quarterly strategy call. Growth covers fifteen keywords, fifteen pages, twenty-five citations, four posts, basic link building, weekly ranking and call tracking reports and a monthly call.

Hosting, plugin updates, security and backups are not in either plan. The audit tells you what to change there and your host or developer keeps running it.

Because the first hours go to cleanup. A site built on a page builder with thirty plugins, tag and date archives indexed, three sets of redirect rules and the plugin's default schema needs weeks of fixes before any new page can rank. A site with one SEO plugin, a light theme and a page cache starts the content work in week one.

The gap is visible in the audit. Of the 63 Space Coast business sites read in March 2026 (97 businesses), the median mobile speed score was 48 of 100 and 1 passed Core Web Vitals. A fee quoted without an audit of the install is a guess about how many of those hours your site will need.

A written list of what gets done each month: the plugin and theme items fixed, pages written or improved, citations built, schema added or corrected, posts published, and a report that puts calls and form fills before rankings. Ask who holds the admin account, who makes the changes, whether there is a staging copy, and what is backed up before a plugin is removed.

If a quote says ongoing optimization and nothing else, you cannot tell in month three whether it was delivered.

Fixing is cheaper when the theme and builder can be made fast: a lighter theme setting, fewer plugins, archives closed, redirects in one place, images compressed, schema replaced. That is the normal case and it sits inside the monthly plan.

Rebuilding is cheaper when the theme and builder have to be replaced anyway, because replacing them across a whole site is most of a rebuild. Our rebuilds are $1,500 one time for one to five pages or $3,000 for five to ten, built custom on our own stack rather than on WordPress, with the SEO plan running on the new site afterwards. You keep the domain, the content and every URL that has traffic.

Someone has to update the core, the theme and the plugins, keep backups and watch for break-ins, and that is not SEO. Keep it with your host or your developer, or with a care plan sold for that purpose. We do not sell one, so the SEO fee above never includes it.

What the SEO plan does is reduce the maintenance load: fewer plugins means fewer updates, fewer conflicts and fewer ways in.

Put them on the same terms: monthly fee, setup fee, length of commitment, who makes the changes in WordPress, and what is in the scope. A $499 quote that sends recommendations and a $700 quote that makes the changes are not the same product.

Then ask each company what it knows about your city. A real answer names the competitors, their review counts or the speed scores in your market. A national statistic is not an answer about you.