How much does SEO cost for a construction or engineering firm in 2026?
Industry surveys put most monthly SEO retainers between $500 and $5,000, and US providers sit toward the top of that range. For a construction or engineering firm, the price moves on how many pages need writing and what state the site is in. Our program starts from $1,499 a month.
If you've asked two agencies for an SEO quote, you've probably had two very different numbers. One quotes $500 a month and another $5,000, and both proposals list much the same things.
Both can be honest quotes. Most of the gap comes down to how many hours of work the fee buys, as the two surveys below show.
Most SEO retainers fall between $500 and $5,000 a month.
Ahrefs polled 439 SEO providers around the world. Most of them (63%) charged between $500 and $5,000 a month. Agencies averaged $3,209 a month and freelancers $1,348. In the US and Canada, 79.1% charged at least $1,001 a month. Ahrefs last updated the post in August 2024 and worked out its averages from the top of each price band, so treat the averages as rough.
Backlinko surveyed more than 300 SEO professionals for a guide last updated in December 2025. It put the average monthly cost at $1,000 to $2,500. Only 7% of providers in the US, UK and Australia charged under $500 a month. A third of them (34%) charged $2,501 to $5,000, and 19% charged more than $5,000.
Both surveys found that agencies charge more than freelancers, and that US providers charge more than most.
The fee mostly buys hours of work.
Backlinko's survey ties each price band to the hours of work it usually buys, and to what fits in them.
| Monthly fee | Hours a month | What usually fits |
|---|---|---|
| $500 or less | 5 to 10 | Advice on one area, with your team doing most of the work |
| $501 to $1,000 | 10 to 20 | Technical fixes and suggestions for content |
| $1,001 to $2,500 | 20 to 40 | Adds writing pages and some link building |
| $2,501 to $5,000 | 40 to 80 | Adds deeper technical work and more active link building |
| Over $5,000 | 80 or more | A team working on your account |
Hours matter less than what they produce. Ask any provider how many pages they'll write or fix each month, and who writes them.
What moves the price for a construction or engineering firm.
- How many services, sectors and places you want to be found for. Each needs its own page, and each page needs facts from your projects.
- Whether the pages exist yet. Rewriting ten service pages is quicker than writing them from nothing.
- How technical the writing is. A page about post-tensioned slabs or a Phase I site assessment needs a writer who understands the work, plus time with your people.
- The state of the site. If Google has indexed little of it, or it can't take new pages without a developer, that gets fixed first.
- How crowded your market is. A general contractor in a big metro usually has more firms publishing for the same searches than a specialist in a smaller market.
- Languages. Each extra language means another set of pages to write and keep current.
Cheap SEO can cost more than it saves.
Google's guide to hiring an SEO warns that if an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, your site could be removed from Google's index entirely. It also says you're responsible for what the companies you hire do.
The usual problems at the bottom of the market are bought links and pages turned out in bulk. Google's spam policies name both, as link spam and scaled content abuse. A cheap plan built on either puts the site you already have at risk.
Google Ads is a separate budget.
The same Google guide says advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in its search results, and that Google never accepts money to include or rank sites there.
Ads put you at the top of the page while you pay. SEO builds pages that keep bringing in searches after the work is done. You can run ads for a few months while SEO builds up and then cut back. Decide each one on its own numbers.
A rebuild is a one-off cost on top.
Sometimes the site can't carry the pages SEO needs. It may be slow, hard to edit or built in a way Google struggles to read. Then the first step is a website rebuild, priced separately. Our guides to what a construction website costs and what an engineering firm website costs set out those numbers.
How to compare two quotes.
Put these questions to each provider and compare the answers side by side:
- How many pages will you write or fix each month, and which ones first?
- Who writes them, and how do you get the technical detail right?
- Which links will you go after, and how?
- What's in the monthly report, and does it include inquiries?
- How long is the contract, and how much notice do I give?
- Who owns the pages and accounts if we stop?
There's more on what each month should include in what a monthly SEO plan should include.
Our program starts from $1,499 a month.
Our SEO Growth Program starts from $1,499 a month. That sits inside the range the surveys above found US providers charge. The price for your firm depends on the things listed above, mainly how many pages need writing and what state the site is in.
Book a call and we'll give you a price for your firm and a list of what you'd get each month.