SEO cost calculator: a budget you can explain line by line.
Choose in-house or agency, enter what each part of the work actually costs you, and get a monthly and total budget with each line's share. It is a transparent sum of your inputs; it does not pretend to know market rates.
By Mike Cecconello · Updated September 25, 2026
SEO cost calculator
Runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
The pre-filled numbers are an example, not market rates; we do not have a reliable source for those, so we do not show any. Use quotes and salaries you actually have. For an agency, enter only the work billed outside the retainer in the lines below it, or you will count it twice.
What you can do with it
- Build a budget line for a proposal or an annual plan
- Compare an in-house hire with an agency retainer on the same terms
- See the all-in cost per published article
- Find which line dominates the budget before cutting anything
How it works, step by step
- 1
Choose who does the work
In-house counts a share of a salary plus employer costs. Agency or freelancer counts a monthly retainer. The other lines apply to both.
- 2
Enter content as volume times cost
Articles per month times what one article costs you, including editing. For in-house writing already covered by the salary line, set the per-article cost to what you pay outside it, which may be zero.
- 3
Enter technical work as hours times a rate
Developer or specialist time for fixes, migrations and site changes. Use the internal cost of a developer hour if the work stays in-house.
- 4
Add tools and outreach
Subscriptions for crawling, rank tracking and research, and the budget for digital PR and outreach work. Do not put paid links here: buying links that pass ranking credit is against Google's spam policies.
- 5
Read the share column
The line with the largest share is where a saving or an overspend actually matters. A plan that spends most of its budget on tools and little on content is worth questioning.
A budget is a set of claims
Every line in an SEO budget is a claim about the work: this many articles, this many hours of technical fixes, these tools. Written as one lump sum, none of the claims can be checked. Written as lines, each one can be questioned on its own, which is exactly what a finance team or a client will do.
The calculator does nothing clever. It multiplies the inputs that are rates (articles by cost per article, hours by hourly rate, a salary by the share of time on SEO and employer costs), adds the fixed monthly lines, and shows each line’s share of the total. The “how it is worked out” column spells out every multiplication.
Where budgets usually go wrong
- Counting the retainer and its contents twice. If the agency retainer includes four articles a month, do not also enter four articles below it. Enter only what is billed outside the retainer.
- Leaving out the people. In-house content looks free when the salary sits in another budget. It is not, and a comparison with an agency that leaves it out is not a comparison.
- Treating tools as the strategy. Tools make work faster. They do not produce pages. A budget where subscriptions outweigh content is worth a second look.
From cost to return
A cost only means something next to what it buys. Take the monthly total into the SEO ROI calculator to see how much extra traffic it needs to pay for itself, and when.
Frequently asked questions
How much does SEO cost?
It depends on how many pages you need, who writes them, how much technical work the site needs and whether a person or a team runs it. We do not quote a typical figure because we do not have a reliable source for one. Enter real quotes and salaries and the calculator shows your number.
Why not show average agency prices?
Published averages come from small, self-selected surveys, mix countries and business sizes, and age quickly. A number on this page would look authoritative and be wrong for most readers. The example inputs are there to show the arithmetic, and are labelled as examples.
How do I compare in-house and agency fairly?
Run the calculator twice with the same content, technical and tool lines, switching only the people line for the retainer. Then remember what neither line shows: an in-house hire takes time to recruit and ramp up, and an agency retainer may or may not include content and technical work, so check the scope before comparing.
What does cost per published article mean?
The whole monthly budget divided by the articles published that month. It is higher than the writer's fee, because the people, technical and tool costs exist to make those articles rank. It is a useful number to compare against what a published article is worth to you.
Should link building be in the budget?
Outreach and digital PR, yes: earning coverage and links through work people want to cite. Paying for links that pass ranking credit, no. It violates Google's spam policies and can lead to links being ignored or a manual action.
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