What Does SEO Cost for a Mid-Sized Company? What the Budget Buys — and What It Does Not

SEO quotes are hard to compare because they rarely sell the same thing. One delivers two articles a month, another monitors rankings, a third fixes technical debt. All three call it SEO. This article breaks the budget into its actual components — with the fixed prices I work for.

1. Why SEO quotes are incomparable

Anyone laying three SEO quotes side by side is usually not comparing prices but three different services sharing one name. The first contains two blog articles a month. The second a ranking dashboard with a weekly report. The third technical repairs to the website. All three cost roughly the same, all three are called SEO — but only one of them solves your actual problem.

So the first useful question is not "what does SEO cost?" but: what exactly am I paying for, and how will we measure whether it worked? Once a quote answers that, the price becomes comparable. Until it does, the cheapest number is usually the most expensive decision.

There is a second, structural reason for the incomparability: SEO falls into two blocks that are often sold mixed together. There is a one-off analysis establishing what needs doing and in what order. And there is ongoing implementation that does it. A quote containing only the second sells you work without priorities — and that burns budget more reliably than any overpriced agency.

2. Block 1: The analysis — and why it comes first

An analysis is not a preliminary step towards the real assignment; it is the part that decides whether everything after it is economical. It answers three questions without which any implementation is guesswork: what technically stops Google from indexing the site cleanly? Which search queries is the site realistically within reach of? And where is existing demand being lost?

3. Block 2: Ongoing implementation — what €890 a month stands for

The decisive sentence about ongoing SEO support is this: you are buying implementation time, not placement. Nobody working seriously can promise a position on Google — Google decides the order, not the provider. What a provider can promise is a defined amount of work per month and a measurement you can verify.

With me that block looks like this: the SEO & Content plan costs €890 per month on a six-month term and includes up to eight hours of implementation monthly. Concretely: two AI-assisted, editorially reviewed B2B articles, monitoring via GA4 and Google Search Console with a monthly report, plus a quarterly keyword and on-page audit. Paid annually it is €8,900 instead of €10,680 — two months fall away.

Equally important is what is not included, and I deliberately write it into every quote: no link building, no paid ads, no translations. Not because those do not matter, but because they are separate budgets, and a plan promising everything does none of it properly.

A documented example of what can come of it

So this does not stay abstract: at EsenTrans, a removals company in Würzburg, the problem was not content but technology. Instead of a relaunch, a purpose-built WordPress plugin was deployed. The figures come directly from the customer's Google Search Console and are published with permission: 1,768 clicks and 188,946 impressions across the measurement period, weekly clicks up 115 per cent after deployment, average position improving from 19.3 to 11.2 — on a €0 advertising budget.

The most important part of this example is not the percentage but the diagnosis: it was a technical problem. A content package would have cost money here and moved nothing.

4. The new item: AI visibility

Since answers increasingly appear inside the search itself — in AI Overviews, in ChatGPT, in Perplexity — there is a cost item that did not exist three years ago. Classic SEO tools measure blue links. Whether an AI names your brand as a source is not something they measure.

This is not a rhetorical addition but a real budget question: if a growing share of research ends in an AI answer, GEO decides whether you appear at all — and a ranking report that looks green can hide that loss completely.

5. Four items missing from the quote

6. What a realistic budget delivers

Three typical starting positions, each with what I actually charge. These are my fixed prices, not market averages and not performance forecasts.

One note on financing that is often overlooked: consulting services may under certain conditions be eligible for funding. What that means concretely and which conditions apply is covered in BAFA funding for AI & SEO — it can noticeably change what you actually pay.

7. When SEO is the wrong instrument

Conclusion

"What does SEO cost?" becomes comparable as soon as the budget is split into analysis and implementation, and once you accept that you are buying working time rather than placement. The entry point costs nothing with me — the free website check tells you whether there is anything to do at all. If more comes of it, the deep-dive analysis is a fixed price from €490, and ongoing support €890 a month for up to eight hours of implementation.

The most expensive option is none of those numbers. It is buying a monthly package without first knowing whether the problem sits in the content, in the technology or in the offering itself — and not noticing for six months because the report looks green.

Extended Specialized Glossary