Search "how much does SEO cost" and you will get a page of agencies explaining, at length, that it depends. It does depend. That is not a reason to refuse to give you a number.
When I went through the Vancouver and Lower Mainland agency market in August 2026, reading each firm's own website, every single one I looked at put pricing behind a consultation call. Not most. All of them. So this post is the one I wanted to find but couldn't: what this work actually costs in Canada, broken down by what it's made of, with the ranges written down.
Start with what an hour costs
Every SEO quote you will ever receive is, underneath, a number of hours multiplied by a rate. Understanding the rate makes the rest of it readable.
Job Bank puts the median wage for a marketing specialist in Canada at $35.58 an hour, with a low of $20.50 and a high of $57.44, drawn from the Labour Force Survey (sourced from Job Bank). At a 37.5 to 40-hour week, that median works out to roughly $69,000 to $74,000 a year, which is my arithmetic rather than theirs.
That is the salary. It is not the billing rate. An hour sold to you has to carry employer payroll costs, software, the hours nobody pays for (sales calls, proposals, admin), and whatever margin keeps the business alive. That is why a competent Canadian agency hour lands somewhere in the $100 to $200 range rather than at $35.
Hold that thought, because it turns every monthly retainer into a simple division problem. A $1,000 retainer is roughly five to ten hours of actual work per month. Not five and ten hours a week. A month.
The real monthly ranges
Here is what each band buys in practice, for a Canadian small or medium-sized business with one location or one product line.
Under $500 a month
This buys monitoring, not work. Expect an automated report, a tool subscription passed through with a markup, and perhaps a listing update. There are honest operators at this price who are clear that it is maintenance. There are also a lot of packages at this price that consist of a dashboard and an invoice.
If your budget genuinely is under $500, you are better off spending nothing and doing the basics yourself than paying someone to do nothing slowly.
$1,000 to $2,000 a month
The realistic entry point for work that moves. At five to fifteen hours a month, you can expect a Google Business Profile that is properly built and maintained, on-page work on your most commercially important pages, one or two pieces of content a month, technical fixes as they surface, and a monthly report that a human wrote.
What you cannot expect at this number is a content engine, link building at volume, or a website rebuild. Those are separate line items, and anyone bundling them in at $1,200 is either subcontracting them to somewhere very cheap or not doing them.
$2,000 to $4,000 a month
Now there is room for a strategy rather than a maintenance list: a proper content cadence, multi-location or multi-service targeting, ongoing conversion work on the pages that matter, and the kind of technical depth that needs a developer rather than a plugin. Most businesses that are genuinely competing for search traffic in a real Canadian city sit in this band.
$4,000 a month and up
Multiple specialists, multiple locations, e-commerce catalogues, or a market where the competition is already spending. At this level, you are buying a team's time, and the reporting should be detailed enough to show which part of the team earned its keep.
A cross-check from outside Canada
Those ranges are my own, built from Canadian labour costs and from quoting this work. As a sanity check, Ahrefs polled 439 SEO service providers on what they charge. They found that $501 to $1,000 per month was the most common retainer, cited by 20.4 percent of respondents, with 68.8 percent charging $2,000 per month or less, and agencies averaging $3,209 per month (sourced from Ahrefs).
Read that with three caveats attached, because they matter. The figures are in United States dollars, the sample is global rather than Canadian, and the poll was published in December 2023. It is directional, not a Canadian price list. What it does confirm is the shape: the mass of the market sits between $500 and $2,000 a month, and the tail above it is thinner than agency marketing suggests.
What actually moves your number
Five things change the quote more than anything else.
How many pages, locations or services you need to rank. One clinic in one city is a different job from eleven service pages across three municipalities.
What state the site is in. A fast, crawlable, well-structured site starts at zero. A slow one on a builder that fights you adds months of remedial work before anything improves.
Who you are competing against. If three national franchises are spending in your category, the work required to appear alongside them is not the same.
Whether content is included. Writing is the single biggest cost variable in SEO. A retainer with two real articles in it and a retainer with none can differ by a thousand dollars and look identical on a proposal.
Who does it. A senior person doing six focused hours often beats a junior doing twenty. This is the variable that quotes hide best.
What a cheap quote leaves out
I have seen a lot of these from the inside. During my years at Google, I handled more than 100 small and medium-sized business partners, as an employee there rather than as an agency, and the pattern in the cheapest proposals barely changes.
The four things most often missing from a suspiciously low number:
Content. Named in the proposal, absent from the scope, or reduced to a 300-word post assembled from a template.
Technical work. Anything requiring access to the site's code is quietly out of scope, which is a problem when that's usually where the issue is.
A human report. An automated tool export is cheap to produce and tells you nothing about what to do next.
Senior time. The proposal is written by the person you met and executed by someone you will never meet.
None of that means cheap is dishonest. It means "cheap" is narrow, and that narrowness is usually undisclosed. Ask what is excluded, and the price starts to make sense.
Where I land on it
My own view is that publishing the number is the easiest trust signal in this industry to earn, and almost nobody takes it, which is why what each tier costs here is written down rather than quoted on a call. If you want the broader version of this argument across agency pricing rather than SEO specifically, that is the honest version of agency pricing generally. And if the real question is how to divide a fixed budget rather than what SEO costs on its own, how to split a $2,000 monthly budget covers that.
The useful test on your next quote is not whether the number is high or low. It is whether the person quoting it can tell you how many hours it represents and who is spending them. What did your last proposal say about that?