What SEO actually costs: published agency rates and what you pay for
Real SEO pricing from published Russian agency rate cards, converted to USD, my own rate, and a breakdown of what the money buys. Plus a case with zero link budget.
Ask what SEO costs and almost everyone answers “it depends on the project”. Technically true, practically useless: the person asking wants to know whether $400 is cheap or expensive, and walks away with nothing.
So I will start with numbers that are publicly posted, then break down what the money actually buys.
All figures below are Russian market rates converted at the Central Bank rate of 15 August 2026, 84.54 ₽ to the dollar. I round to the nearest five dollars.
What agencies publish themselves
Ashmanov & Partners, one of the oldest search agencies in Russia, lists on its pricing page: search optimisation from 110 000 ₽ (about $1 300) a month, promotion in Yandex from 90 000 ₽ ($1 065), a search audit from 140 000 ₽ ($1 655). By industry it climbs: B2B from 140 000 ₽ ($1 655), online stores from 150 000 ₽ ($1 775), finance and insurance from 180 000 ₽ ($2 130).
SEO-Impulse publishes tiers: “Start” from 60 000 ₽ ($710) a month for low-competition niches and sites older than three years, “Business” from 70 000 ₽ ($830), “Pro” from 110 000 ₽ ($1 300) for online stores, young sites and high competition. Their stated floor is 60 000 ₽, roughly $710.
My own rate is from 80 000 ₽ a month, about $945, with a one-off audit from 40 000 ₽, about $475. I work solo, with no account manager and no project office, and that is the only reason the number sits below agency rates for the same scope of work.
Notice the gap: a search audit costs $1 655 at Ashmanov and $475 with me. That does not make either of us wrong. It means the word “audit” covers wildly different volumes of work - and that is where it gets interesting.
What you are actually paying for
SEO is not a subscription to secret knowledge. It is one person’s hours multiplied by months. Everything else follows from that.
The technical part: speed, response codes, duplicates, indexing, structured data. One-off work at the start plus supervision so it does not slide back after every release. Then semantics and structure - collecting demand and spreading it across pages so each answers its own query rather than all of them answering one. Then content, and this is the most expensive part in hours, because you have to write month after month rather than ship forty pages at once and wait.
And only at the end - links.
This is usually where the misunderstanding about price begins. A client hears “$945 a month” and mentally divides it into links: how many can that buy. Yet in my most recent case the link budget was zero - over four months organic traffic grew sixfold, from 151 visits in the first month to 936 in the fourth, the site produced 1 858 search visits and 233 enquiries at a 4.79% conversion rate. Not a single paid link, not a single agency.
The honest part of that same case: Yandex’s site quality index sat at 40 for all four months and never moved. It leans on domain age and link profile far more than on traffic, and it cannot be pushed quickly. So links do matter - just not for what and not as fast as they are sold.
Why you sometimes see $180
You do. The question is what is inside.
For $180-235 a month you physically cannot buy more than a few hours of a specialist’s time. In those hours someone can glance at rankings once a month, fix a couple of titles and report back with a spreadsheet. That is not fraud, that is exactly as much work as was paid for. The problem starts when that money comes with promises that would need five times the hours.
The second flavour of cheap SEO is the template. The same set of actions rolled onto any site regardless of niche: generate some text, buy some links, report growth in “visibility”. Works until the first algorithm update.
So cheaper exists, and the price honestly reflects the volume. When the price is far below market but the promises are at market level, it is not the prices that diverge - it is the promises.
What to ask before you pay
Three questions sort it out quickly.
How many hours a month are budgeted for the project and who exactly will work them - this converts an abstract price into something you can picture. What is included in the first month and what do I keep if we part ways after it - if the answer is “a strategy”, that is a bad answer; if it is “technical specs, a keyword map and a list of fixes”, that is a normal one. And the most awkward: what specifically will grow traffic on my site - a contractor who answers in generalities about a “comprehensive approach” has not looked at the site yet.
Separately on timing. In my case the turning point came between the second and third month, when the programmatic cluster of districts and metro stations matured in the index, while the first 50 days went into infrastructure: 194 pages indexed in Yandex, +86% clicks in Search Console, Lighthouse 93 out of 100 on mobile. There were almost no enquiries in that period, and that is a normal course rather than a failure. A contractor promising results in a month is either inflating numbers or counting the act of publishing pages as the result.
One last thing. Any price can buy you a result or an empty seat, because what decides it is not the figure in the contract but how many hours and whose hands stand behind it. So if you are choosing between two offers that differ twofold, compare the scope of the first month rather than the totals - everything is visible there straight away.