Live is $1,690: the site moved, found and secured. Found is $3,490: the same with a redesign, AI answers and Maps. Everything is $5,900: a new site, all of it, and a year of the work included.
Half up front, half on approval. The free audit comes first, and if a bundle is more than you need I will say which parts to drop — the price drops with them.
Pay monthly and you pay list. Pay for a year and you pay half. A year booked in advance is work I can plan instead of re-sell every thirty days, and that saving is yours.
SEO does not work in thirty-day pieces. A page published today is indexed this week and competitive in two months. Selling it monthly encourages both of us to judge it too early. The yearly price is what the work costs; the monthly price is what the option to walk away costs.
If you get all the customers you can handle, do not buy a visibility retainer. If your business has no reviews, no photographs and no opening hours published anywhere, fix those first — they are free and they matter more. I will tell you that on the call rather than take the money.
A year of the Visibility retainer is $2,340. The average published SEO retainer is $2,917 a month, which is $35,004 a year for the same category of work.
| One year of | Published price | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| SEO retainer, survey average | $2,917/mo | $35,004 |
| SEO retainer, most common band | $501–$1,000/mo | $6,012–$12,000 |
| BrightLocal Managed SEO | $1,299/mo | $15,588 |
| AI search retainer, mid-market | $2,000–$8,000/mo | $24,000–$96,000 |
| Google Business Profile management | $125–$400/mo | $1,500–$4,800 |
| Semrush + Ahrefs Lite, software only | $268/mo | $3,216 |
| Visibility retainer here | $195/mo effective | $2,340 |
The row that should decide it is the second-to-last one. Two industry-standard tools cost $3,216 a year on their own and do no work for you. A year here costs $2,340 and includes the person using them.
Sources: retainer average and most common band from Ahrefs' SEO pricing survey of 439 polled SEO professionals. BrightLocal Managed SEO Service price published on brightlocal.com/pricing. Semrush SEO plan $139/mo and Ahrefs Lite $129/mo read from their own pricing pages on 8 August 2026. AI search and Google Business Profile management ranges from published 2026 agency guides, which vary widely. Annual figures are the monthly price multiplied by twelve. Verify all of them before deciding.
On nbdigitaldentistry.com, four new enquiries arrived within two days of the positioning work going live. All four were people looking for a dental clinic, not for the service the site sells.
That is a real result and a real miss at the same time. The site became findable fast — four strangers, two days, no advertising spend. But they were searching for a clinic, so they were passed to the clinic as leads rather than becoming customers for the digital-dentistry service itself.
Visibility arrived before targeting did. The fix is more pages aimed at the people the business actually wants, not fewer — nothing gets switched off.
16 pages pixel-compared live against migrated at three widths. 13 of 16 differed by 0.00%; the worst was 0.38%.
A restore drill was run from the backup archive alone into an empty folder: 0.06%, 0.34% and 0.08% different.
Two client sites run on their own custom domains at $0/month hosting today.
You pay for half. Every line inside a bundle has its own published price on the services page, so removing one subtracts its price and you keep a smaller discount. The bundles are a discount for volume, not a trap that forces you to buy things you do not need.
Unused months are refundable. If you pay for a year and stop at month four, you are refunded for months five to twelve at the annual rate. What is not refundable is work already done — pages written and published, a profile rebuilt, schema deployed. That is fair to both of us and it is written into the invoice, not just this page.
For a small local business with three or four services and no serious competitor, the one-time setup is often enough for a year. Buy the setup, watch what happens, and add the retainer only if the numbers say it is worth it. The setup does not expire when you stop paying, because it is built into your site's files.
Three reasons, and none of them is that the work is smaller. There is no office, no account manager and no sales team — you talk to the person doing the work. The hosting costs nothing instead of being resold at a margin. And the sites are static files, so what an agency spends on maintaining a CMS, a plugin stack and a staging server does not exist here. What you should ask is whether one person can do the volume you need. For a business with fifty locations, no. For a business in Aruba, yes.
Technical and profile work shows up in days — Google Business Profile changes can surface within a week, and AI engines re-crawl quickly. Ranking for a competitive non-brand search takes two to six months honestly, and anyone quoting less is quoting brand searches, where your own name was always going to find you.
You get a written page telling you what you rank for, what is broken, and which bundle — if any — is worth your money. Keep it either way.