Affordable SEO Services: 11 Cheap Packages Itemised, $99 to $1,800
The results page for affordable SEO services is unusual. The first result is a site with an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 0.7 whose title says "From $299". The third is a site at DR 2.1 whose title says "$99 Month". Between them sit WebFX, Thrive and a dozen "N Best Affordable SEO Services" lists, and across eleven related searches those two tiny sites hold twenty page-one slots. They rank because they answer the question the searcher is asking, which is not "who is the best SEO company" but "what can I get for a number I can afford". This page answers the same question with the packages itemised, every price checked on 14 September 2026, and one thing none of those pages has: what a $99 plan produced for thirty real accounts, including the seven that never sent an email.
We sell one of the packages below, so read the MentionAgent rows with that in mind. The comparison is fair by construction: the same columns for everyone, and the numbers about us are the ones that make us look ordinary as well as the ones that do not.
Published cheap-SEO prices run $99 to $1,800 a month. Under $300 you get on-page basics or a local checklist; backlinks appear at $500 to $599; nine of the twenty ranking sites publish no price at all.
$99 to $149: on-page basics (BnBSeo), a two-keyword local plan (99dollarlocalseo.com), an all-in claim with a money-back promise (seorankmybusiness.com, one of nine such promises itemised on the guaranteed SEO page), or Mainstreethost's entry tier billed annually.
$299 to $599: audits, 5 to 15 keywords, on-page for 5 to 10 pages; the first links (2 to 4 a month) at $599.
$500 to $1,800: either hours (eSEOspace, 5 to 40 a month) or volume (Digital Guider, 40 to 200 backlinks a month).
30 accounts have paid $99 for MentionAgent. 23 sent email. Those running a full month sent 305 to 1,010 emails, 8.2% got a reply, 3.4% a positive one, and 14 of 30 received a publisher price quote.
Never sent: 7 of 30 never sent a single email.
Links recorded as live: 8 across those 22 single-site accounts, plus 26 on one five-site account over six months. Undercounted: a link is only recorded when the publisher confirms it in the thread.
Kept paying: 14 active, 15 cancelled, 1 past due, read 14 September 2026.
Who ranks, and why
We pulled the top ten for eleven searches in this family on 14 September 2026 (affordable SEO services, affordable SEO, affordable SEO company, affordable SEO agency, cheap SEO, cheap SEO services, cheap SEO company, cheap SEO agency, inexpensive SEO services, and the two "for small business" variants) and looked up every domain's rating. Reddit held 12 slots. seorankmybusiness.com, DR 2.1, held 11, with a best position of first. Webtonic's "36 Best Affordable SEO Agencies" held 11. theaffordableseoservices.com, DR 0.7, held 9, also with a first place. Then seoTuners (DR 57) with 9, SEOProfy with 7, Quora with 6, Thryv with 4. WebFX, the biggest SEO brand on the page, held one.
The pattern is the same one we found on the $99 SEO search: when a query contains a price signal, Google rewards the page that names a price. A DR 89 agency article titled "Affordable SEO Services: Budgets, Options and Prices" loses to a DR 0.7 package page titled "From $299" because the second one is the answer and the first one is an essay about the answer. That is also why this page has a table before it has an argument.
The 11 packages, itemised
Every row was read from the vendor's own site on 14 September 2026. "Included" lists what the page states, not what we assume; where a vendor names a count we quote the count. Prices are monthly unless marked.
| Vendor | Price | What the page says is included | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| seorankmybusiness.com | $99 | "Unlimited SEO keywords and phrases", competition research, custom backlinks, off-page then on-page setup, a monthly progress report in the first week of each month. | "Don't rank, don't pay" money-back guarantee. No contract or setup fee; cancellation needs 30 days' emailed notice before the next billing date. Offered since 2014. White label and reseller on request. |
| bnbseo.com (Reno, NV) | $99 | "Foundational SEO": titles, descriptions and image alt text on each page, navigation and sitemap, optimisation inside your SEO plugin if you have one. | Also sells $48/month site management and a one-off $185 keyword research report. Says outright it is not the team for competing with a casino. |
| 99dollarlocalseo.com | $99.99 | "Appear": rank 2 keywords, Google Business Profile optimisation, one citation-building round a month, monthly progress report. | "Compete" $299.99: 6 keywords, two citation rounds, review automation. "Dominate" $499.99: adds AI-search ranking and Google Local Ads management. |
| Mainstreethost | $149 (annual billing) | "SEO Essentials", a "flexible, low-risk solution" for small businesses and start-ups. Deliverables are not itemised on the packages page. | Standard $249, Premium $449, Custom $999, all "when billed annually". Monthly prices are not shown. |
| theaffordableseoservices.com | $299 | "Starter": website SEO audit, keyword research (5 to 8 keywords), on-page SEO for up to 5 pages, technical basics, Search Console and Analytics setup. | No backlinks at this tier. No setup fee, no long-term contract, free audit before work starts. |
| theaffordableseoservices.com | $599 | "Standard": in-depth audit, 10 to 15 keywords, on-page for up to 10 pages, technical SEO, content optimisation of 2 pages or posts, local SEO including GMB if needed, 2 to 4 backlinks a month, monthly report and strategy call. | First tier on this list with links. Pro at $999: 20 to 30 keywords, 20 pages, 8 to 10 backlinks. |
| Digital Guider | $500 | "Basic": 30 keywords, 40 backlinks a month, target pages optimised, up to 10 Google Business Profiles, geotagging, GEO and AEO, AI visibility audit for 2 pages. | Silver $700 (60 backlinks), Gold $1,000 (100), Premium $1,800 (200 backlinks a month, 100 keywords). |
| eSEOspace | $500 | "Essential": 5 hours a month of SEO, GEO and AEO work, spent "wherever it'll make the biggest impact". No fixed checklist. | Basic $1,200 (15 hours), Advanced $1,500 (20), Concierge $3,000 (40, with a dedicated strategist). The only vendor on the list that prices in hours. |
| Third Marble Marketing | from $549 | Google Ads management and "AI SEO"; the homepage prices the ads service and sends SEO to a call. | No contracts, pause or stop any time. Work done in the USA. |
| cheapseo.io | self-serve | A marketplace: order from a dashboard, "cheapest SEO rates", full link reports, white-label reports, free rank tracking, bulk and reseller discounts. | $10 free credit on sign-up, money-back guarantee "if not getting sufficient results". No package price on the homepage; you see prices after signing up. |
| Winston Digital (NYC) | from $1,800 | Published floor for SEO as a single service; marketing services run $1,000 to $5,000 a month per service. | Listed here because it ranks on these searches, not because it is cheap. It publishes its numbers, which most of the field does not. |
| MentionAgent | $99 | Link building outreach for one site: prospect blogs in your niche, write one pitch per site, send up to 40 a day from a warmed inbox on its own sending domain, draft replies to publishers, record placements. | No on-page, content, citations or Google Business Profile work. 50 free credits with no card. 14-day money-back. Numbers below. |
Nine that publish no price
seoTuners, Blackbird Digital, Deftsoft, Click4Corp, MOZ Web Media, WebTek, Elsner, Percepture and OuterBox all rank on these searches and none of their homepages, or the package pages we could find, states a monthly figure. Blackbird's homepage offers "over $3,000 in savings for new SEO customers" without saying what the savings are against. The package URLs we tried on WebTek and Elsner returned 404. That is not a criticism of the work; it is a note that "affordable" on a page with no number is a positioning word, and you will only learn the number on a call. If a price matters to you, the eleven rows above are the ones you can compare without one.
Where backlinks start on the price ladder
Read the table by one column and the market's shape appears (the packages page reads it by rows instead, tier by tier). Under $300, nobody itemises a link: the $99 plans are on-page basics, a local checklist, or an unitemised "custom backlinks" claim. At $500 Digital Guider promises forty backlinks a month. At $599 theaffordableseoservices.com promises two to four. At $999 the same vendor promises eight to ten, while Digital Guider at $1,000 promises a hundred.
Forty links for $500 is $12.50 a link. Two to four for the link portion of a $599 plan is somewhere above $100 a link once you allow for the audit, on-page and reporting that come with it. Both vendors are describing something called a backlink, and the twentyfold gap is the whole subject of what backlinks cost: a link a publisher agrees to after an email is a different product from a link placed on a site that exists to sell them. When we email blogs and they reply with a price, the middle of their asks is $175 for one placement, and three in ten will do it for under $99, which is the range the $599 plan's two-to-four figure sits in and the range the forty-a-month figure cannot. A package that quotes links per month without saying where they come from is quoting the cheap kind.
The hours behind each price
eSEOspace is the one vendor honest enough to price in the unit everyone else hides: hours. Five hours for $500 is $100 an hour, which is a normal rate for a person who knows what they are doing. That gives you a ruler for the rest of the table. If $99 buys an hour of that person, the $99 plans are one hour of work a month, and BnBSeo's "we will check the titles and alt text" is the honest version of what one hour does. Digital Guider's forty backlinks and thirty keywords at $500 is five hours of the same person, so either the hours are cheaper than $100, the links are automated, or both. seorankmybusiness.com's "unlimited keywords" at $99 is a promise about scope that no hourly reading can support, which is why its page needs a money-back guarantee to carry it.
Ours is the same arithmetic with the labour removed. A warmed sending domain, a prospect list, forty written pitches a day and the reply drafts are software costs, and the $99 covers them without a person's hours in the middle. What the buyer does with their own hour is read the drafts before they go out, which is the one part we refuse to automate.
Our $99, with its numbers
Every account that has ever paid MentionAgent is on the $99 starter plan, so the whole paying customer base is the sample. Thirty accounts, read from the database on 14 September 2026. The plan gives one site one sending inbox on its own domain, warmed on a schedule (5 emails a day in week one, 10 in week two, 20 in week three, 40 from week four), with drafts shown before sending and replies drafted for you. Here is what happened.
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Accounts that have paid | 30 (14 active, 15 cancelled, 1 past due) |
| Sent at least one outreach email | 23 of 30 |
| Never sent one | 7 of 30 |
| Monthly volume, accounts running a full month at full warmup | 305 to 1,010 emails a month; the cap is about 1,200 |
| Median emails per month, all single-site accounts that sent and ran past one month (15 accounts) | 128, because half of them ran below the cap or cancelled inside the ramp |
| Reply rate, pooled over those accounts | 8.2% of sends got a reply |
| Positive reply rate (interested, agreeing, proposing terms, naming a price, or confirming a link) | 3.4% of sends |
| Accounts that received at least one publisher price quote | 14 of 30; the five busiest single-site accounts got 14 to 24 quotes each in their first one to three months |
| Links recorded as live | 8 across the 22 single-site accounts that sent; 26 on one account that runs five sites (6 months, 8,234 sends) |
Two honest readings of that table. First, the product works as described for the accounts that run it: several hundred pitches a month, a reply on one in twelve, a real conversation with a publisher on one in thirty, and a stream of price quotes to accept or decline. Second, the outcome most buyers want, a link that is live, is recorded rarely, and part of that is measurement (the count only moves when a publisher writes back "it's up", and many placements bought after a quote are never confirmed in the thread) and part of it is the market: publishers quote more often than they say yes for free. Seven accounts in thirty never sent an email at all, which is the number we would most like to be zero and the reason the first month now starts with 50 free credits before any card is taken.
Against the table above, that puts the $99 plan in the same tier as the $599 "2 to 4 backlinks" row on outcome and in the $99 tier on price, with the difference that the labour is yours: reading drafts, answering the quotes, deciding which publisher is worth paying. The done-for-you SEO page prices the providers who take that labour on, from $99 software to $3,997 packages. The pricing page has the full ladder ($99 for one inbox to $629 for eight), and the affordable link building page compares that against agencies doing the same work by hand.
Local package or outreach: which one you actually need
Three of the eleven packages are local products in disguise or by name: 99dollarlocalseo.com is explicit, seorankmybusiness.com leads with GMB and the Map Pack, and theaffordableseoservices.com's Starter is "best for new businesses getting into local search". If your customers walk in or call from a few miles away, that is the right kind of package and outreach is the wrong one; a plumber does not need a link from a marketing blog, they need their profile, their citations and their reviews in order. The citation building packages page prices that part on its own.
Outreach is for the other case: a site that could be found from anywhere, with a page other sites would plausibly cite (a tool, a guide, a data page, a product with something to say about it), and no links pointing at it. That is a SaaS product, an online store with a category worth ranking, a publisher, a consultancy with a national audience. The how many backlinks do I need page is the question to answer before buying any of the link rows, and SaaS link building is the case where the outreach model fits best.
How to compare affordable SEO packages
- Count what is countable and ignore the rest. "Unlimited keywords" is not a deliverable. "5 pages of on-page" is. "2 to 4 backlinks" is, and so is "40", and the gap between them is where the questions go.
- Ask where the links come from. A vendor quoting links per month should be able to name the last three sites. If the answer is a network, a marketplace, or "our partners", the $12.50 arithmetic above is what you are buying.
- Convert the price to hours. Divide the monthly price by $100 and ask whether the promised list fits in that many hours. If it does not, something on the list is automated, outsourced or not happening.
- Check the billing terms, not just the price. Mainstreethost's $149 is "when billed annually", which is $1,788 committed. seorankmybusiness.com needs 30 days' notice. Ours and Third Marble's are month to month with no notice.
- Ask what survives cancellation. Links on other sites and citations should. Profile edits stay. Rank-tracking dashboards vanish. A money-back guarantee is a claim about the vendor's confidence, not about what you keep.
- Ask to see the work. Outreach emails, on-page edits, citation submissions. A vendor who shows the work is selling a scope; one who shows a dashboard of green arrows is selling reassurance. Our version of this is that every draft and every reply is in the dashboard before and after it goes out.
Frequently asked questions
How much do affordable SEO services cost?
Checked 14 September 2026, the packages on page one for this search that publish a price run from $99 a month (seorankmybusiness.com, bnbseo.com, 99dollarlocalseo.com at $99.99) through $149 to $449 (Mainstreethost, billed annually), $299 to $999 (theaffordableseoservices.com), $500 to $1,800 (Digital Guider) and $500 to $3,000 (eSEOspace, sold as hours). Nine of the twenty sites on those results pages publish no price at all and quote on a call.
What does a cheap SEO package actually include?
At $99 the scope is either on-page basics (titles, descriptions, alt text, navigation and sitemap at BnBSeo) or a local checklist (two keywords, a Google Business Profile tune-up, one citation round and a report at 99dollarlocalseo.com). Backlinks first appear at $599 on theaffordableseoservices.com, at two to four a month, and at $500 on Digital Guider, at forty a month. The difference between those two numbers is the whole question of what a cheap link is.
Is $99 a month SEO worth it?
Only for a scope small enough to be done properly at that price. Our own $99 plan runs link building outreach for one site: across the 30 accounts that have paid for it, 23 sent email, the ones running a full month sent 305 to 1,010 emails a month, replies came back on 8.2% of sends, and 14 of the 30 received at least one publisher price quote. It does not do on-page work, content or local citations, and seven of the thirty never sent an email at all.
Why do such small sites rank for affordable SEO services?
Because the search wants a cheap package page, and large agencies do not sell one. On 14 September 2026 the first result for affordable SEO services was theaffordableseoservices.com (Ahrefs DR 0.7) and the third was seorankmybusiness.com (DR 2.1); across eleven related searches those two sites held twenty page-one slots between them, ahead of WebFX and Thrive. Intent match beats authority when the authoritative sites have nothing at the price.
What is the difference between affordable and cheap SEO?
On the results pages, nothing: the same eleven sites rank for both words. In practice, affordable means a small, honest scope done every month, and cheap means the same price with a bigger promise attached. A $99 plan that says it will get you on the map for two keywords is affordable; a $99 plan that says rankings, content and links together is cheap in the second sense, because the price cannot cover the labour.
Should a small business buy SEO packages or link building?
Depends on what is missing. A local business with no Map Pack presence needs the local package first. A site with pages worth citing but no links pointing at them needs outreach, and that is the only part MentionAgent sells. A site with neither should fix the pages before paying anyone, because every package on this list assumes there is something on the site worth ranking.