SEO services are monthly programs covering 4 things: technical repair a crawler can confirm, content built for searches people run, local profile and citation work, and answer engine optimization. Portland Peak SEO has sold them from Lake Oswego since 2015 at $450, $950 and $2,500 a month, month to month, with the same four deliverables behind every tier.
| Local tier | $450 per month, month to month |
|---|---|
| Growth tier | $950 per month |
| Authority tier | $2,500 per month |
| What every tier covers | Technical, content, local, AI answers |
| First movement | 90 to 180 days |
| Office | Lake Oswego, Oregon |
| Page freshness | Updated September 7, 2026 |
Written and maintained by Andreas Benavente, Founder, Portland Peak SEO. Updated September 7, 2026. Every statistic on this page names its publisher and date in the sentence, with links in the sources list at the foot of the page.
Almost every agency sells SEO services and almost none will say plainly what the fee buys, what it costs, or how a buyer checks the work. This page does all three: the types of service and what each one includes, what the market charges and why the spread is so wide, the questions that separate a real proposal from packaging, and how to verify any provider in ten minutes.
SEO services are ongoing work to make a website the answer search engines choose, sold as a monthly program rather than a one-off project. Google’s own starter guide, updated December 10, 2025, describes the discipline as helping search engines understand your content and helping people decide whether to visit, which is the whole job in 1 sentence.
The work is ongoing because the conditions are. Competitors publish, Google ships core updates, a site’s own pages age, and the way people search keeps changing. A project that ends leaves a snapshot; a program keeps the site current against all four.
What separates a real SEO service from packaging is whether the deliverables can be named in nouns. A proposal that promises visibility, momentum and a holistic strategy has said nothing. A proposal that says which pages will be written this month, which technical faults will be fixed, which profiles will be reconciled and what will be reported against a recorded baseline can be checked at the end of the month by anybody.
SEO services divide into 6 types, and most engagements combine several: technical SEO, on-page and content SEO, local SEO, off-page or authority work, answer engine optimization for AI results, and ecommerce SEO. Each has its own deliverables, and a proposal should say which of the six it is buying this month.
Technical SEO makes the site reachable and readable. It covers crawlability and indexation, the XML sitemap, canonical tags, redirects, site architecture, page speed and mobile rendering. The targets are public: web.dev, updated October 31, 2024, sets Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint at or under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift at or under 0.1, each at the 75th percentile of real visits. Deliverables look like a crawl report, a list of fixed URLs, and a before and after speed reading. The technical SEO services page describes the scope in detail.
This is the work most people picture: choosing which searches to target, writing or rewriting the page that answers each one, and structuring it so both a reader and a crawler can follow it. Deliverables are pages, with the search each one targets named in advance. The unglamorous half is consolidation, merging pages of the same site that compete for one intent, which often lifts rankings faster than new writing does.
For a business with a service area, this is usually the highest-return type. It covers the Google Business Profile, categories and services, review generation and responses, citation consistency across directories, and a real page for each place served. Google publishes the guidelines for representing a business, and the profile itself is free. The local SEO page covers the stack.
Authority arrives from outside the site: references from local news, trade associations, suppliers, partners and the directories customers use. The honest version is earned through work worth citing and outreach that names a reason. The dishonest version is bought, which Google’s spam policies, updated August 28, 2026, name as link spam, with the exposure landing on the domain that received the links. The link building services page says what is and is not included.
AI Overviews, AI Mode and the assistants now sit above the ranked results. Google reported on May 20, 2025 that AI Overviews had passed 1.5 billion users. The work is structural rather than mystical: a direct answer under each question-form heading, an entity a system can resolve, coverage of the sub-questions an assistant searches for, and sourced statistics. Ahrefs’ 2026 controlled study of 1,885 pages that added schema against 4,000 matched controls found no meaningful citation uplift, so schema is kept for rich results rather than sold as an AI lever. The AI SEO services page covers this, and at Portland Peak SEO it is included in every tier rather than billed separately.
Product and category pages, faceted navigation that does not generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs, product schema, and internal linking from guides to the products they mention. The technical half is larger than on a service site, because the URL count is larger.
Five deliverables belong in any SEO service, and each is checkable at the end of the month: pages built for named searches, technical repair a crawl report confirms, local signals reconciled, authority earned rather than bought, and reporting against a recorded baseline. A provider who cannot name which of the five ran is not running them.
Two more things belong in the contract rather than the deliverables. Who does the work, by name, and whether that is the person who sold it. And the cancellation terms, because a twelve month lock-in protects the agency’s revenue from its own results in a way month to month terms cannot.
SEO services sell across a range of roughly $300 to $10,000 a month in the wider market, and most of that spread is overhead rather than different work. Portland Peak SEO publishes 3 tiers at $450, $950 and $2,500 a month, month to month, and the same four deliverables sit behind each one.
The honest way to read a quote is to ask what the money is paying for. A national agency quoting at the top of that range and an independent quoting near the bottom are frequently proposing the same deliverables. The difference is account managers, offices, sales commission and margin, none of which move rankings. That is not an argument that expensive agencies are frauds; larger firms buy bench depth and process, which matter on complex sites. It is an argument that price alone predicts very little.
| Provider type | Typical monthly | Strength | Standing risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | $300 to $1,500 | Direct access, low overhead | Capacity and continuity |
| Independent agency | $450 to $2,500 | Founder led, published pricing | Scale ceiling |
| Mid-size agency | $2,000 to $5,000 | Process and bench depth | Junior delivery under a senior pitch |
| Enterprise agency | Over $5,000 | Brand-name reporting | The buyer funds the overhead |
Every row can be the right answer for somebody. The failure mode is paying enterprise overhead for freelancer attention, which is what happens when a buyer compares monthly figures without asking who does the work. The SEO pricing guide takes the arithmetic further, and the pricing page lists what separates the three tiers here.
First tracked movement usually appears within 90 to 180 days, with technical fixes registering soonest because they remove drag rather than build authority. Local searches move before national ones. Anybody quoting a guaranteed date is selling, because nobody controls the algorithm being optimized against.
The window depends on the starting point. A page already sitting on page two can move within weeks of a rewrite. A new domain in a contested national category needs the long end of the range and sometimes longer. Position matters once movement starts: Backlinko’s analysis of 4 million search results, updated April 16, 2025, measured a 27.6 percent average click-through rate for the first organic result and roughly a tenfold gap between positions one and ten, so a move from nine to five is worth more than it looks in a report.
What should be visible inside the first month is work, not rankings: the baseline recorded, the crawl run, the first pages published, the profile reconciled. A provider who has nothing to show in month one has nothing to show in month six either.
Three checks take about 10 minutes and eliminate most of the industry: search the service they sell and see whether they appear, open their pricing page and see whether numbers exist, and ask what your baseline is and who records it. A fourth question, who personally does the work, decides more outcomes than the fee does.
Two answers should end the conversation. A guaranteed ranking, because the seller does not control the algorithm. And a refusal to name deliverables in nouns, because a program nobody can describe is a program nobody can check.
SEO services suit businesses with 3 things: a working website, a defined market, and a customer worth enough that one durable position pays for the program. A company with no site yet should build first, and this practice says so before recommending a tier rather than after taking a deposit.
The arithmetic is the test. If one new customer is worth several hundred dollars or more over the relationship, a handful of customers a month from search covers the fee and the rest is margin. If a customer is worth twenty dollars and never returns, search has to deliver volume that most local categories cannot supply, and the money is better spent elsewhere.
Small businesses often do best, because local intent searches are winnable without an enterprise budget. National informational terms held by publishers and software companies are a different sport, and a proposal that quietly targets those with a local budget is how a year gets spent for nothing. The free SEO audit says which of these situations applies before any tier is recommended.
Measurement rests on 1 baseline recorded before any work starts, then the same tracked searches read every month in a rank tracker held under the client’s own login, beside impressions and clicks from Google Search Console. Months where nothing moved are reported as such, which is the part that makes the rest believable.
Three habits keep it honest. The tracked list is fixed at the start, so it cannot be swapped for easier terms later. Positions are read as a trend across a quarter, because a single week is noise. And the report separates what was done from what moved, so a busy month with no movement is recorded as exactly that rather than dressed up in activity metrics.
Portland Peak SEO has sold SEO services since 2015 from Lake Oswego, Oregon, publishes all 3 tiers at $450, $950 and $2,500 rather than quoting privately, and works month to month. The person who maps the strategy writes the pages. A business needing a large team and formal enterprise reporting should hire a larger firm.
Four things, whatever the packaging says: pages built for the searches your buyers run, technical repair a crawler can confirm, the local signals that decide map results, and authority earned from sources search engines already trust. Reporting against a baseline recorded before work began is the fifth, and it only counts if the baseline exists.
Across the market, anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands a month, and most of that spread is agency overhead rather than different work. Portland Peak SEO publishes $450, $950 and $2,500 a month, month to month, and the pricing page explains what separates the tiers.
Below a certain floor the arithmetic stops working, because professional tools, real writing and real technical time all cost money. What matters more than the number is whether the deliverables are named in nouns and whether a baseline gets recorded. A cheaper program with both beats a dearer one with neither.
Local movement often shows inside a quarter. Competitive national terms take two to four times that. Anyone quoting a guaranteed date is selling, because nobody controls the algorithm being optimized against.
They work best for small businesses, because local intent searches are winnable without enterprise budgets. The deciding question is customer value: if one customer is worth several hundred dollars or more, one durable page one position usually pays for the program that earned it.
SEO is one channel inside digital marketing, the one that compounds. Advertising rents visibility and stops the day spending stops; positions earned through SEO keep producing after the work that won them. Most businesses need both eventually and should usually fund the compounding channel first.
No. Month to month terms mean the work has to earn retention every thirty days. Twelve month lock-ins exist to protect revenue from results, and the cancellation clause tells you more about an agency than its case studies do.
More than before. Assistants compose answers from the pages search engines index, so the same work that earns a ranking earns a citation. Google reported on May 20, 2025 that AI Overviews had passed 1.5 billion users, and Ahrefs’ 2026 data still put 38 percent of AI Overview citations on pages ranking in the top 10.
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