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Most published SEO pricing guides quote a range and move on. We went through the hourly rates 1,143 agencies publish about themselves — and found that the headline number is less useful than where an agency sits relative to its size.

Every guide to choosing an SEO agency tells you to check case studies and watch for red flags. Almost none of them admit how little of that is verifiable before you are already in a sales process. Here is what you can actually check first.

Packaged SEO is sold in tiers — silver, gold, platinum — that describe deliverables rather than effort. Converting each tier back into hours, using the rates 1,143 agencies publish, makes it obvious which budgets can work and which cannot.

"Three to six months" is the standard answer and it is not actionable. What a buyer needs is different: a set of checkpoints that tell you at 30 and 90 days whether the engagement is on track, long before rankings could possibly have moved.

Nobody can tell you what return an SEO engagement will produce. But every buyer can calculate, before signing, how many additional customers a year the engagement has to produce to pay for itself — and that number decides more than any forecast.