The Realtor SEO Pricing Breakdown That Helps You Decide — Not Just Spend

Most realtor SEO pricing falls into three practical tiers. Understanding what's actually delivered at each level helps you avoid paying for work that won't move your rankings — or overpaying for services your market doesn't require.

Entry-Level: $300–$800/month

At this range, you're typically getting technical maintenance, basic on-page optimization, and Google Business Profile management. Content production is minimal or absent. This tier works for agents in low-competition markets who already have a functioning website and just need upkeep. If you're in a metro market competing against Zillow neighborhood pages and top-producing team sites, this budget will stall out quickly.

Mid-Range: $800–$2,000/month

This is where most independent agents and small teams find the right balance. At this level, you should expect monthly content (neighborhood guides, buyer/seller pages, market update posts), active GBP management, local citation building, and basic link acquisition. A competent agency at this price point can move a single-city agent into the Map Pack and onto page one for several transactional keywords within six to nine months, though results vary by market.

Full-Service: $2,000–$3,500+/month

Designed for team leaders, multi-area agents, or brokerages targeting multiple submarkets simultaneously. You're getting dedicated content strategy, aggressive local link building, competitive gap analysis, conversion rate work on landing pages, and regular reporting tied to lead and pipeline metrics — not just rankings. In markets like Miami, Dallas, or Los Angeles, this level of investment is often the minimum to compete meaningfully against dominant team sites and portal aggregators.

A note on pricing below $300/month: These packages exist, but in our experience working with real estate professionals, they rarely include the content production or authority-building work that actually drives organic leads. They are maintenance agreements, not growth campaigns.

Not every agent needs an ongoing retainer from day one. Several high-value SEO services are scoped as one-time or quarterly projects — particularly useful when you're evaluating whether your current site and GBP are even ready for a full campaign.

SEO Audit: $300–$800

A proper audit covers technical site health (crawlability, page speed, mobile usability), on-page optimization gaps, GBP completeness, local citation consistency, and a keyword opportunity map for your farm area. The output should tell you exactly what's broken, what's missing, and what to prioritize. If an agency offers an audit for free as a sales tool, ask whether you'll actually receive a written deliverable or just a pitch deck.

Google Business Profile Setup and Optimization: $300–$600

If your GBP is unclaimed, incomplete, or inconsistently categorized, this is a high-ROI first project. A one-time optimization covers category selection, service area configuration, photo strategy, Q&A seeding, and an initial review request framework. Ongoing GBP management (posts, review responses, updates) is a separate monthly line item.

Website SEO Foundation: $800–$1,500

This covers a full on-page pass — rewriting title tags, meta descriptions, header structures, and internal linking across your core service pages and neighborhood pages. It's typically delivered as a one-time project, after which you move into an ongoing content and authority-building retainer. Think of it as building the foundation before you start driving traffic to it.

In our experience, agents who invest in a proper foundation project before starting a retainer see faster traction — because the baseline is clean from the start rather than getting fixed piecemeal over the first three months of an ongoing engagement.

Two agents in different markets can get very different quotes for what sounds like the same service. That's not agencies being arbitrary — it reflects real differences in what it takes to rank in each environment. Here are the primary cost drivers.

Market Competition

Ranking in a rural county seat is a different project than ranking in a major metro suburb. In competitive markets, you need more content, stronger backlinks, and longer timelines. The agency has to do more work — and charge accordingly. An honest agency will tell you this upfront and quote based on a competitive analysis of your specific market, not a one-size-fits-all rate card.

Number of Target Markets

An agent working one ZIP code needs one set of neighborhood content. An agent working six suburbs across two counties needs six times the local content infrastructure. Multi-area campaigns cost more because the content and citation work scales with geography.

Content Volume and Quality

Thin, templated neighborhood pages don't rank in 2025 or 2026. Google's helpful content signals favor pages that genuinely address what buyers and sellers want to know about a specific area — schools, commute, price trends, inventory. Producing that content at scale requires real research and writing time. Agencies that quote low are often producing low-effort content that provides little ranking benefit.

Link Building Scope

Local authority links — from community organizations, local news, business associations, and complementary professionals (mortgage brokers, home inspectors) — are time-intensive to acquire. Campaigns that include active link building cost more than campaigns that rely solely on on-page and content work.

Reporting and Strategy

Some packages include monthly calls with a strategist who interprets data and adjusts the campaign. Others send an automated report and move on. The former costs more and usually produces better outcomes over a 12-month engagement.

The right way to evaluate SEO cost isn't to compare it to nothing — it's to compare it to your other lead sources and to the value of a single transaction in your market.

If your average gross commission income per closed transaction is $8,000 and SEO generates two additional closings per year that you otherwise wouldn't have gotten, the math becomes straightforward. The question is: how confident are you in that attribution, and how long does it take to get there?

The Realistic Timeline

Most realtor SEO campaigns start showing measurable organic traffic movement at three to four months. Meaningful lead volume — consistent inbound inquiries from organic search — typically begins at the five to eight month mark, though this varies significantly based on your starting domain authority, market competition, and content investment. SEO is not a same-quarter lead channel. It is a compounding asset that performs better in month 18 than in month six.

Comparing to Paid Alternatives

Zillow Premier Agent, Google Ads, and social media advertising generate leads faster — but the spend stops when the budget stops. SEO-built content and authority persist. In our experience working with real estate professionals, agents who combine a mid-range SEO retainer with selective paid activity during their slow seasons often find better overall cost-per-lead than those relying exclusively on paid channels.

Budget Allocation Guidance

Industry benchmarks suggest real estate professionals typically allocate two to five percent of gross commission income to marketing. For an agent closing $600K in GCI, that's $12,000–$30,000 annually. SEO at $1,200/month fits comfortably within a mid-range marketing budget at that production level — and unlike portal advertising, the asset compounds over time rather than resetting to zero each month.

For a deeper look at how to model the return on an SEO investment, see our realtor SEO ROI analysis — it walks through commission-based modeling specific to real estate.

Not all SEO pricing represents equal value. Some pricing structures are designed to extract budget with minimal accountability. Here's what to watch for before signing anything.

designed to Rankings

No legitimate agency guarantees specific Google rankings. Search results are determined by Google's algorithm, not by any agency. A guarantee of "page one in 30 days" is either a false promise or a reference to low-value keywords nobody searches. Either way, it's a red flag.

Long Lock-In Contracts with No Deliverable Milestones

A 12-month contract is reasonable for SEO — the timeline requires it. But a contract that locks you in for 12 months with no defined deliverables, no reporting cadence, and no performance benchmarks leaves you with no recourse if work quality declines. Reasonable contracts include monthly deliverable summaries, 90-day milestone reviews, and a defined offboarding process if the relationship ends.

Vague Scope Language

"Full SEO services" is not a scope. A clear engagement should specify: how many pages of content per month, what link building activity is included, how often GBP is updated, and what constitutes the monthly reporting deliverable. If the proposal doesn't define this, ask before signing.

Extremely Low Pricing with Broad Claims

Packages under $400/month that claim to handle content, link building, GBP, technical SEO, and reporting are almost certainly cutting corners somewhere. In our experience, it's usually the content and link quality — which are the two components that matter most for ranking.

No Discovery or Market Analysis Before Quoting

An agency that quotes a flat rate before understanding your market, your current site health, and your target keywords isn't pricing your actual campaign — they're selling a product. Good agencies ask questions first.