How much does it cost to hire an SEO agency?
US SEO agencies typically charge $2,500–$10,000+ per month for retainers, or $5,000–$50,000+ for one-off audits and large technical migrations. Enterprise programs run $15,000–$50,000+/mo. Retainers under $2,500/mo almost always mean templated deliverables from junior staff. That is occasionally worth it for very small local sites and rarely worth it otherwise. The best value tier is $5–10K/mo where you get senior strategy plus real execution capacity.
What these firms charge
551 US listings name search engine optimization and 471 publish an hourly rate. Of those, 333 sit between $100 and $199 an hour. At the edges, 97 price under $100 and 41 price at $200 or more, which is the widest spread of any service in the index.
Minimums are the number that actually gates the engagement. 519 firms publish one, 430 of them open at $5,000 or less, and only 29 require $25,000 or more. The most common single minimum is $1,000+.
SEO retainers are usually monthly rather than project-based, so read a published minimum as the size of engagement the firm will take on rather than as a monthly fee.
How to use this
The spread is the warning. A $60 an hour quote and a $220 an hour quote for "SEO" are not the same product being priced differently, they are different products. Decide whether you are buying senior diagnosis or bulk execution before you compare the numbers.
How this was computed. Every figure on this page is counted from The Wall's own directory of approved, US-headquartered, machine-verified-live listings: 3,460 of them in the snapshot captured 2026-09-14. Rates, minimum project sizes, team sizes, founding years and ratings are provider-declared figures published on public profiles. 1,738 of those listings publish a service list, and that field holds at most 4 services per firm, so service counts are counts of what firms name first rather than everything they sell. Percentages of disclosed values exclude listings that publish no figure. Nothing here is modeled or estimated. Sourcing standards: editorial policy.
Why this matters
Google puts this question in People Also Ask for the "seo agency" query, which means buyers are asking it while they shop. The Wall answers it from the directory position: we index 3,460 verified US growth-services vendors across 10 pillars, so the figures above come from those records rather than from a survey.
If you are evaluating vendors in this category, the SEO pillar page carries the full US firm list with rate, team size and headquarters filters.