SEO pricing reflects the hours required to move rankings in your specific market. A local Ottawa plumber competing for 15 service pages needs far less monthly work than a national e-commerce site with 10,000 products competing against Amazon. Most legitimate agencies charge $1,500 to $3,500 per month for ongoing local or regional campaigns. This covers 15 to 35 hours of work: content optimization, technical fixes, link building, and reporting. Below $1,000 monthly, you're usually getting cookie-cutter tasks that won't move competitive keywords. Above $5,000, you're either in a brutal niche like insurance or legal, or you're running a large-scale content operation. One-time projects have different economics. A technical SEO audit for a 200-page site runs $2,000 to $4,000 because it's diagnostic work with a defined endpoint. Site migrations, penalty recovery, or comprehensive content overhauls can hit $8,000 to $20,000 depending on complexity. Hourly rates for credible SEO practitioners range from $100 to $250 in Canada. Toronto and Vancouver agencies skew higher. When an agency quotes you, reverse-engineer the hours: a $2,000 monthly retainer at $150 per hour means roughly 13 hours of work. Ask what those hours cover specifically. At Ottawa SEO Inc., we run fixed monthly retainers because SEO work is predictable once we baseline a site. We know a 50-page local service business needs about 20 hours monthly: 8 hours for content, 6 for links, 4 for technical maintenance, 2 for reporting. A 500-page e-commerce site might need 40 hours because the content and technical surface area quadruples. Beware of $299 monthly SEO packages. They're either automated software with no human strategy, or overseas link farms that'll get you penalized. Also avoid agencies that won't show you exactly what tasks they'll perform each month. SEO isn't magic, it's labor, and you should see the work breakdown before signing.