Ask five New Zealand agencies what SEO costs and you’ll get five ranges, no numbers, and an invitation to book a call. This article gives you the numbers, including ours.
Fair warning on what follows: we’re a marketing agency, so we are one of the options being priced here. We’ll be specific about our own costs and careful about everyone else’s, because we can verify ours and we can’t verify theirs.
The short answer
For a New Zealand trade or local business, SEO generally lands in one of three bands.
Roughly $300 to $600 a month. Local SEO for one business in one area. Google Business Profile properly run, a handful of service and location pages, reviews chased, the technical basics kept healthy. For a plumber in Napier or a sparky in Rangiora, this band is usually enough, because you are competing with a dozen local businesses rather than the whole country.
Roughly $1,000 to $2,500 a month. Multiple services, multiple towns, or a genuinely competitive market. More pages, more content, link building, and someone actually watching the numbers each month rather than sending an automated report.
$3,000 a month and up. National campaigns, big service areas, competitive commercial terms. Most trade businesses reading this do not need this and should not be sold it.
Below about $300 a month, be careful. That does not buy enough hours for anyone to do real work, so it usually buys an automated report and some directory submissions.
What we charge
Every article on this topic gives you a range and stops. Here is ours, in full.
We do not sell SEO as a standalone product. It is bundled into our monthly plans alongside the website, the ads and the automation, because for a local business those things only work together. Splitting them out means paying three suppliers to argue about whose job the enquiry was.
- Setup: $1,997 +GST, one-off. The website build, tracking, Google Business Profile and the initial search work.
- Starter: $497 +GST a month. Getting found locally on one core service. Includes local SEO and Google Business Profile optimisation, the smart website, Google Ads management on one service, AI chat, automated email follow-ups, a review funnel and monthly reporting.
- Growth: $697 +GST a month. Most trades. Everything in Starter plus Meta ads, retargeting, Google Ads across multiple services and areas, email nurture workflows and a live dashboard.
- Scale: $997 +GST a month. Multi-region campaigns, expanded keyword coverage, advanced automation, conversion-rate optimisation and priority support.
Ad spend is separate and goes to Google, not to us. There is no lock-in contract and no notice period: cancel any time and the plan ends at the end of the month you have paid for.
If you want SEO alone with no website and no ads, we are probably not your best option, and we would rather say that here than on a call.
Why the quotes vary so much
Because “SEO” describes work that ranges from twenty minutes to twenty hours a month, and the word does not tell you which you’re buying. Three things drive the real number.
How competitive your market is. Ranking a drainlayer in Waipukurau and ranking a plumber in central Auckland are not the same job and cannot cost the same. Anyone quoting you before asking what you do and where is quoting a package, not your situation.
How much has to be built versus maintained. A site with no service pages, no location pages and a half-finished Google Business Profile needs months of building first. A site that already has good bones needs maintaining. The first is dearer, and it should be.
Whether a human is actually on it. This is the big one. A lot of cheap SEO is a tool subscription with a report generator attached. The tools cost the agency very little, which is how the price gets so low, and they do not do the work.
What should be in an SEO quote
If a quote does not tell you what happens each month, it is not a quote, it is a subscription. You want to see, in writing:
- What gets built or changed, specifically. “Two new service pages and the Hastings location page” is a deliverable. “Ongoing optimisation” is not.
- Who does the work and roughly how many hours. You are buying someone’s time. You are allowed to ask how much of it you’re getting.
- What the reporting covers. Rankings and traffic are fine, but the number that matters is enquiries. If reporting stops at traffic, nobody is being held to the thing you actually care about.
- What happens to the work if you leave. Pages, profile, tracking and content should be yours. Some agencies build on their own platform and you walk away with nothing.
- The contract length. Lock-in contracts exist to protect the agency from its own results.
Red flags worth walking away from
Guaranteed number one rankings. Google does not sell rankings to anyone, so nobody can guarantee them. This one is not a grey area.
A price with no questions asked. If they quoted before understanding your trade, your area and your current site, they quoted a template.
Very cheap monthly SEO with a long contract. The cheap price gets you in, the contract keeps you there while very little happens. If the price is low, you want the contract short, not long.
Reports full of things you didn’t ask for. Impressions, domain authority, keyword counts. All real metrics, none of them a phone call. Ask what changed in enquiries.
Nobody will tell you what they actually do. Real SEO is not secret. Anyone unwilling to describe the work in plain English is usually hiding that there isn’t much of it.
When SEO isn’t worth buying at all
There are three situations where we tell people not to spend on SEO yet.
You need work this month. SEO takes months. If the phone is quiet now, that is a Google Ads problem, not an SEO one. Ads produce enquiries in days. Put the first dollars there and let SEO build underneath. Our guide to lead generation for tradies covers the whole picture.
Your website cannot convert. Sending more people to a site that does not ask for the job is paying to be ignored at higher volume. Fix the site first. That is also why we bundle the two.
Nobody is searching for what you do. It happens. Some services genuinely have almost no search volume in New Zealand, and for those, referrals, ads on other channels or outbound work beats SEO no matter how well it’s done. We check the search volumes before we take the work, and we have told people there isn’t enough demand to justify it.
SEO cost FAQ
How much does SEO cost per month in New Zealand?
Most local businesses land between $300 and $600 a month for genuine local SEO, with competitive or multi-region work running $1,000 to $2,500. Our own plans are $497 to $997 +GST a month with SEO bundled in alongside the website and ads, plus a one-off $1,997 +GST setup.
Is cheap SEO worth it?
Below about $300 a month there are not enough hours in the budget for a person to do meaningful work, so you are usually buying software output. The risk is not just wasted money, it is the year you spend thinking SEO is being handled.
Should I pay monthly or per project?
Monthly suits most local businesses, because search work compounds and stops working when it stops. A one-off project makes sense for a specific job, like fixing a technical mess or building a set of location pages, but do not expect a project to hold its position forever without maintenance.
How long before SEO pays for itself?
Local SEO usually shows movement in 2 to 3 months and meaningful results in 6 to 12. Work out what one job is worth to you, and how many extra jobs a month would cover the fee. For most trades that number is one or two, which is a fair way to judge whether it is worth starting.
Do I need SEO if I’m running Google Ads?
They do different jobs. Ads stop when you stop paying; SEO compounds and keeps producing. Businesses that show up in the ads, the map pack and the organic results at once take a disproportionate share of the calls, which is why we run both rather than picking a side.
Can I do SEO myself?
The local basics, yes, and plenty of tradies do. Fill in your Google Business Profile properly, ask every happy customer for a review, and make sure your site says clearly what you do and where. That covers a surprising amount of it. The parts that take real time are the pages, the technical work and the consistency, which is usually where people run out of evenings.
Want to know what SEO would actually cost for your business rather than a range off a blog? Get a free game plan: 20 minutes with Ryan or Matt, your real numbers, no obligation.