SEO for a small business typically runs CAD $1,000–$3,000 per month in Canada, with most legitimate agencies landing in the $1,500–$2,500 range. This covers ongoing technical fixes, content creation, link building, and monthly reporting. Highly competitive markets—think personal injury lawyers in Toronto or plumbers in Vancouver—can push costs to $4,000–$6,000 monthly because you're fighting entrenched competitors with years of authority. What you get in that range matters more than the price itself. A $1,200 package might include 2–3 optimized blog posts, basic technical audits, and local citation cleanup. A $2,800 package typically adds 4–6 content pieces, deeper technical work, backlink outreach to relevant Canadian sites, and conversion rate tweaks. Anything under $800 per month is usually offshore cookie-cutter work or automated tools with minimal human oversight—those rarely move the needle past six months. The biggest cost driver is content volume and link acquisition. Writing genuinely useful content costs $150–$400 per piece when done properly, and earning backlinks from DA 40+ sites takes relationship-building time. Small businesses competing locally in Ottawa or smaller cities can often succeed at the lower end because local pack rankings depend heavily on Google Business Profile optimization and local citations, not massive content libraries. At Ottawa SEO, we've run small business clients as low as $1,400 monthly when they're in low-competition service areas and already have decent site foundations. Others need $3,200 because their industry is saturated or their site requires extensive technical debt cleanup before content work even makes sense. The smart move is aligning spend with realistic timelines—SEO generally takes 4–8 months to show material traffic gains, so budget for at least six months of consistent work. One-off projects rarely succeed because Google rewards sustained authority-building, not sporadic effort.