Done-For-You SEO: What DFY SEO Costs on Page One, and the Part You Can Actually Hand Off
The results for done for you SEO and DFY SEO are the emptiest we have measured in this family. Position three for dfy seo on 16 September 2026 was dfyseo.com, a page whose services section still read Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Position seven was dfy.pro, which returned 24 characters of text to our fetch. The first result was a YouTube review of a software product. Between them sit three real providers with published prices, two essays about the model, and a Reddit thread where contractors argue whether done-for-you or done-with-you pays better.
We sell part of this: MentionAgent does the link building half of SEO for you, and nothing else. So this page reads what each provider on page one charges and delivers, then answers the question the phrase avoids: which part of SEO can be handed off entirely, and which part comes back to you with a price attached. The numbers in the second half are from MentionAgent's own outreach records.
Done-for-you SEO on page one runs from $99 a month (software) to $1,050 to $1,350 a month on contract, GBP 500 to GBP 4,000 in the UK, and packages from $3,997. Deliverables vary so much that price alone says nothing.
Cheapest: Done For You Hub, $99 a month, AI writes and tracks; a free starter tier.
Middle: Simplified SEO Consulting, $1,050 to $1,350 a month by contract length plus $350 onboarding; Figment (UK) GBP 500 to GBP 4,000.
Top: Laura Jawad Marketing from $3,997; SEO.co puts a full retainer at $1,000 to $10,000 or more.
Ours: the link building half only, $99 a month for one site. Pricing.
Across 1,174 timed MentionAgent conversations, the first publisher reply arrived a median 2.3 hours after the send; 78% within a day, 95% within a week. Of 1,655 classified replies, 23.5% carried a price or a counter offer.
What replies say: 17.9% general, 14.6% decline, 13.4% quote a price, 10.1% counter offer, 7.4% ask about your site, 6.5% interested, 4.9% agree, 3.6% propose a deal, 2.2% confirm a link.
What publishers quote: 189 parsed quotes, middle half $99 to $350, median $200; 61 at $100 or under, 27 above $500.
Those two numbers are the case against "fully" done for you: a quarter of replies need a decision, and they arrive the same afternoon.
Who ranks, and why
Three phrasings, three overlapping result sets. Done for you SEO and SEO done for you share five of nine domains, so they are one page's worth of intent. DFY SEO shares only two with either, because the abbreviation pulls in the software product reviews and the exact-match domains. We looked up every domain's Ahrefs Domain Rating on 16 September 2026.
| Query | Positions 1 to 3 | Smallest sites on page one |
|---|---|---|
| dfy seo | YouTube (DFY Suite review), SEO.co (DR 74, an essay), dfyseo.com (DR 0.1, lorem ipsum) | dfyseo.com 0.1, dfy.pro 0, yourdfyhub.com 5, getspike.ai 19, dfymarketingservices.com 19 |
| done for you seo | Laura Jawad Marketing (DR 28), Reddit r/SEO, Figment Agency (DR 46) | seotakeoff.com 18, laurajawadmarketing.com 28, simplybefound.com 36 |
| seo done for you | Google's SEO Starter Guide, the same Reddit thread, Laura Jawad Marketing | laurajawadmarketing.com 28, simplifiedseoconsulting.com 41 |
The editorial median across the three is DR 19 to 44, which is the lowest we have seen on a service query since the affordable SEO services family. Nobody large sells anything under this name; agencies call it "managed SEO" or a retainer, and the buyers who type "done for you" are looking for a page that speaks the way they do. The affordable SEO packages comparison covers what those same agencies sell at the price points below.
The providers, itemised
What each page-one provider says it delivers, and for how much, as of 16 September 2026. Where a page publishes no number, the cell says so.
| Provider | DR | Price | What is in it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Done For You Hub | 5 | $99 a month ("Local Dominator"); free starter tier, no card | Software: rank tracking, written content, local visibility, technical issues flagged. "AI does the work" is the page's own phrase. |
| Simplified SEO Consulting | 41 | $1,350 a month on 3 months, $1,250 on 6, $1,150 on 9, $1,050 on 12; $350 onboarding; early exit at least $100 per remaining month | "Foundational SEO & AEO program" for therapists and helping professionals: schema on home, about and FAQ pages, on-page work, page audits, "backlink resources". |
| Figment Agency (UK) | 46 | GBP 500 to GBP 4,000 a month; a 20-hour campaign on 50 keywords about GBP 2,000 plus VAT | Weekly blogs, technical SEO, manual outreach, management, by the hour. |
| Laura Jawad Marketing | 28 | Packages from $3,997 | Custom scope for service businesses; a tracking and reporting add-on. Expects 3 to 6 months before steady movement. |
| SEOTakeoff | 18 | No price; lists the models (retainer, project, per deliverable, hours, software subscription) | An explainer of done-for-you as an operating model, with a checklist for normalising proposals. |
| SEO.co | 74 | Its comparison table: DFY retainer $1,000 to $10,000 or more a month | A pros-and-cons essay: hands-off, high cost, limited control. |
| Bulldog Digital Media (UK) | 65 | No price on the page | Link building and digital PR agency; the page is a four-minute read on outsourcing. |
| dfyseo.com | 0.1 | None | Template page, placeholder Latin in the services section, a consultation form. |
| dfy.pro | 0 | None | Returned 24 characters of text when fetched. |
| MentionAgent | 24 | $99 a month, one site | Link building outreach only: prospecting, warmed inboxes, pitches, sending, drafted replies, placement record. No content, no technical work. |
Two things stand out. The spread is forty to one between the cheapest and dearest published price, and the deliverables behind them do not overlap: schema and audits at one, blogs and outreach at another, software at a third. "Done for you SEO" is a promise about who does the work, not what the work is, so a price comparison without a deliverables list compares nothing. The $99 SEO page goes through what that floor price can honestly contain.
Done-for-you versus done-with-you
The second result for both long phrasings is a Reddit thread where SEO contractors compare the two models from their side. Done-for-you: the contractor executes, the client approves, and the retainer is priced on the contractor's hours. Done-with-you: the contractor teaches on a fixed program, the client executes, and the price is lower and finite. Simplified SEO sells both, a 12-week intensive alongside the monthly program, which is the clearest illustration on page one.
For a buyer the distinction is about which tasks you are willing to keep. If you have a person who can write and edit, done-with-you on the content side plus done-for-you on the parts that need infrastructure (sending domains, warmup, prospecting) is usually the cheaper split. Our outsource link building page lays out that split for the link half.
What can be handed off completely, and what cannot
Read the deliverables above as two lists. The first is work with no decision in it: a schema block is right or wrong, a title tag fits or does not, a prospect list is on topic or not, an email sends or bounces. All of that can be done for you in the full sense, and most of it can be done by software. The second is work where somebody has to choose: which pages to build, what to say about the business, whether to pay a publisher $200 for a placement, whether a counter offer is worth taking. That list is short and it never leaves you, whatever the service is called.
Link building is the part of SEO where the second list shows up most often, because it involves other people. The done-for-you link building page walks through the six steps and where the hand-off usually breaks; the short version is that everything up to the publisher's reply runs unattended, and the reply does not.
The replies that come back, classified
MentionAgent classifies every publisher reply so the customer sees what kind of decision is waiting. Across the 1,655 conversations with a classification as of 16 September 2026:
| What the reply does | Share | Needs you? |
|---|---|---|
| General (a question, an acknowledgement, a redirect to a colleague) | 17.9% | Sometimes |
| Declines | 14.6% | No |
| Quotes a price | 13.4% | Yes |
| Counter offers (a swap, a different page, different terms) | 10.1% | Yes |
| Off topic | 7.9% | No |
| Asks for details about your site | 7.4% | Usually the agent can answer |
| Interested, no commitment | 6.5% | No |
| Spam or auto-reply | 6.2% | No |
| Agrees | 4.9% | No |
| Proposes a deal of another kind | 3.6% | Yes |
| Confirms the link is live | 2.2% | No, but verify it |
| Redirects, hesitant, asks for social proof, other | 5.3% | Mixed |
Add the three "yes" rows and 27.1% of replies put a decision in front of the site owner. A provider that never shows you those is making them for you, and the only two ways to do that are to decline everything with a price (which loses the placements) or accept it (which spends your money). The link building communities page covers the swap offers specifically, since they are the largest kind of counter offer.
What publishers charge, when they charge
Of those conversations, 203 contain a price the publisher asked for. 189 of them parse to a dollar figure (the rest are attached invoices, pound sterling, or "not specified"). The distribution:
| Quoted price | Quotes | Typical wording |
|---|---|---|
| $100 or under | 61 | "$65", "$90 guest post, $70 link insertion", listing fees |
| $101 to $250 | 58 | "$150 one-time", "$200 per post, from $120 with volume" |
| $251 to $500 | 43 | "$300 standard article, $350 promotional" |
| Above $500 | 27 | "$550 link insertion, $700 guest post", "$1,000 standalone review" |
Median $200, quartiles $99 and $350, extremes $20 and $3,200. Most quotes name more than one product: 84 of the 203 price both a guest post and a link insertion or mention, 29 price insertions only, 19 posts only. This is the market a done-for-you provider is negotiating in on your behalf, and it is why the per-link fee inside a retainer cannot be much under $200 if the provider is paying publishers at all. How much backlinks cost puts these quotes next to the published agency prices.
How fast "done for you" has to be
The strongest argument for a system over a person on the reply side is timing. For 1,174 conversations where the first inbound message could be matched to the first outreach email to that contact, the gap between send and first reply was:
- Median 2.3 hours. A quarter of replies came within five minutes.
- 78% within 24 hours, 89% within 72 hours, 95% within a week.
- The 90th percentile was 76 hours; almost nothing arrives after day seven.
A provider that checks the outreach inbox twice a week answers most publishers three days after they wrote, which is how threads go cold and why "we sent 400 emails and got nothing" is so often really "we got 30 replies and answered them late". Whoever is doing it for you needs to be answering the same afternoon, and the outreach agent exists mostly to make that true without a person on call.
Our half, with its numbers
MentionAgent is done-for-you SEO in the narrow sense that matters for this page: the link building half runs for you, and the decisions with money in them come back to you drafted, so a yes takes a click. It is $99 a month for one site, with higher tiers adding sending inboxes; the ladder is on the pricing page. It does not write your content, fix your site or run local SEO, and if those are the missing pieces, the providers in the table above are the ones to price.
What it delivered, verified rather than reported, is on the done-for-you link building page: every placement in the records re-fetched on the same day, with the ones that were not really there counted honestly. Read the automatic link building page for what 940 runs produced in 30 days, and link building on autopilot for which steps are unattended.
How to buy done-for-you SEO
- Get the deliverables as a list with quantities. "SEO" is not a deliverable. Pages edited, posts written, links placed, hours logged.
- Ask which decisions will come back to you, and how fast. If the answer is "none", ask who is spending your money on publisher fees.
- Ask for placement URLs, not counts, and open them. This is the check in the table above, and providers rarely run it on themselves.
- Check the contract's exit terms. Simplified SEO publishes theirs (at least $100 per month remaining); most do not, which is worse.
- Price the split. Software for the parts with no decisions, a person or an agent for the replies, and your own judgement for the rest. It is usually cheaper than one retainer that claims all three.
Frequently asked questions
How much does done-for-you SEO cost?
Read on 16 September 2026, the page-one providers that publish a price run from $99 a month (Done For You Hub, AI-run) through $1,050 to $1,350 a month on a 3 to 12 month contract (Simplified SEO Consulting, plus a $350 onboarding fee) and GBP 500 to GBP 4,000 a month (Figment, UK) to packages from $3,997 (Laura Jawad Marketing). SEO.co's own comparison puts a full DFY retainer at $1,000 to $10,000 or more a month. MentionAgent's link building plan is $99 a month for one site.
What is included in done-for-you SEO?
It varies by provider more than the name suggests. Simplified SEO's program is schema, on-page work and page audits; Figment's is a 20-hour monthly campaign with weekly blogs, technical fixes and manual outreach; Done For You Hub is software that tracks rankings and writes content; SEOTakeoff describes it as an operating model rather than a package. Ask for the deliverables as a list with quantities before comparing prices.
What is the difference between done-for-you and done-with-you SEO?
Done-for-you means the provider executes and you approve; done-with-you means they teach and you execute, usually on a fixed-length program such as Simplified SEO's 12-week intensive. The Reddit thread ranking second for the term is contractors arguing which model pays better, which tells you the distinction is about the provider's time, not your results.
Which part of SEO can actually be handed off completely?
The parts with no decision in them: technical fixes, schema, on-page edits, and the prospecting, sending and follow-up of link outreach. The parts that cannot are the ones with money or positioning in them. In MentionAgent's records, 13.4% of classified publisher replies quote a price and 10.1% counter offer; those wait for you however done-for-you the service is.
Why does a lorem ipsum page rank for DFY SEO?
Because nobody with authority has written a page for the term. On 16 September 2026 dfyseo.com, a template whose body copy was still placeholder Latin, sat at position three for dfy seo, and dfy.pro, a page that returned 24 characters of text to our fetch, sat at seven. When the query is that empty, the exact-match domain is enough.
How fast do publishers reply when the outreach is done for you?
Across 1,174 MentionAgent conversations where the first reply could be timed against the first send, the median reply arrived 2.3 hours after the email. 78% came within 24 hours, 89% within three days and 95% within a week. The provider has to be answering the same day, or the thread goes cold while it is done for you.