SEO pricing breaks down into three main models: monthly retainers, hourly consulting, and one-time projects. Monthly retainers are most common because SEO requires ongoing work—content creation, link building, technical monitoring, and algorithm adjustments don't stop after launch. Expect $1,500 to $3,500 per month from a credible Canadian agency for a local or regional business. National or highly competitive verticals push that to $5,000–10,000+. Freelancers charge $75–150 per hour and may offer lighter retainers starting around $500–1,200 monthly, but you get narrower expertise and less bandwidth. One-time projects make sense for audits ($1,200–3,500), site migrations ($2,500–8,000), or penalty recovery ($3,000–7,000). These deliver a roadmap or fix a specific problem, but you still need someone to execute ongoing optimizations. What drives cost up? Competitive keywords, large site structures (500+ pages), technical complexity (JavaScript frameworks, multi-region setups), and content volume. A local plumber in Ottawa competing for 15 service-area keywords needs far less firepower than a SaaS company chasing 200 national terms. Agency overhead, reporting depth, and whether link acquisition is included also matter—white-hat link building alone can run $800–2,000 monthly because it's labor-intensive. At Ottawa SEO Inc., we typically work on performance-based structures for our portfolio sites, but for client work the retainer model wins because it aligns incentives over 6–12 month timelines, which is how long meaningful rank movement takes in moderately competitive spaces. Avoid any agency promising page-one rankings in 30 days for $299—that's either black-hat spam or outright fraud. Real SEO costs reflect the hours needed to research, create, optimize, and promote content that actually ranks.