Nobody Can Tell You What SEO Costs Until They’ve Done This

Every week, I get some version of the same question.

“How much will it cost for me to rank for [keyword], [keyword], and [keyword]?”

I understand why founders ask it that way. You want a number. You’ve probably been quoted several already: wildly different ones, from agencies you’re not sure you can trust, promising timelines that feel too good. And you’re trying to make sense of it all.

Here’s the honest answer: I can’t tell you what SEO will cost until I understand your business, your website, your competitors, and what it will actually take to win in your specific market. Any agency that gives you a number before doing that work is either guessing or telling you what you want to hear.

Both will cost you.

The Wrong Question

When someone asks me “how much to rank for these keywords,” two things are almost always true.

One: the keywords they’ve listed are probably not what their ideal customers are actually searching for. Founders think about how they’d describe their own product. Buyers think about the problem they’re trying to solve. Those are different searches.

Two: they’ve been led to believe SEO is about showing up on Google’s first page for specific terms. It isn’t. Not really. First-page rankings are a mechanism. Revenue is the point. What that means for how SEO is built for a Nigerian business is a very different question from which keywords to rank for. Getting those two things confused is where most SEO budgets disappear.

I do not charge per keyword. Nobody serious does. Ranking for a keyword that doesn’t bring buyers is not a result. It’s just a number on a report that looks good until your sales pipeline tells the real story.

What Fixed Monthly Packages Actually Mean

Let me be direct about this.

Agencies selling fixed monthly SEO packages (₦50,000/month, ₦150,000/month, whatever the number) mostly do not know what they’re doing. I’ve been in this industry for nine years. That is not a controversial take among people who actually understand what SEO requires.

SEO cannot be sold as a one-size-fits-all service. Businesses are different. Websites are different. Competitive landscapes are different. The work required to rank a brand new domain in a crowded fintech market has almost nothing in common with what’s needed to recover a five-year-old e-commerce site that got hit by an algorithm update.

What these packages usually include is content writing and a handful of other activities that sound productive but may have zero connection to what your business actually needs. You get reports. You get blog posts. You get a call every month where someone tells you things are progressing.

Six months later, nothing has moved.

That’s not bad luck. It’s the predictable outcome of applying a standardised solution to a problem that was never properly diagnosed. And it’s exactly what the traffic data looks like when the work being done has no connection to what a business actually needs to grow revenue.

What I Actually Look at Before Cost Comes Up

When a potential client comes to me, here’s what needs to be understood before any number leaves my mouth. These are not boxes I tick quickly. Each one changes the answer.

That’s the process. Not a checklist I run through in ten minutes on a call. Actual research. Actual audit. Actual understanding of what’s in front of us before I say anything about what it’ll cost or how long it’ll take.

When I Told a Client SEO Was the Wrong Move

About four years ago, an interior design business owner in Lekki came to me for a quote. She wanted organic visibility and leads her sales team could convert. Clear goal, motivated client, real budget.

I did my research. Brand new domain, brand new website, no established authority. And she needed to see positive results within three months because her marketing budget was tight and she needed the business generating quickly.

I told her SEO was not the right move for her at that point.

Not because I didn’t want the work. Because it was true.

With a new domain and no authority, SEO was going to absorb her budget and produce almost nothing visible in that window. What she needed was Google Search Ads. Get real buyers to the site, generate revenue, and use the conversion data from those campaigns (what searches lead people to actually call, what does not) to build a sustainable SEO strategy later once the business had room to breathe.

That’s what I recommended. Get the business generating first. Then invest in organic. The thinking behind how to sequence SEO investment for a Nigerian business is something most agencies never discuss before they start collecting a retainer.

I don’t know what an agency selling a fixed monthly package would have told her. I know what would have happened to her budget.

The Result That Surprised Even Me

I want to tell you about a US-based e-commerce client selling vitamin supplements. Established store, over 500 products, had been operating for years. But almost no investment in SEO over time. The only people finding them on Google were people already searching for their brand name. Everyone else: gone.

When I audited the site, the first thing I noticed was the product structure. Or the absence of one.

500-plus products across roughly 50 categories. No proper category pages. No logical architecture. Products existed. Structure did not. Google had no way to understand what this store was actually about beyond the brand name.

I knew fixing the architecture would produce results. I didn’t expect it to happen at the scale it did, or that fast.

By the end of month one, 300-plus product pages had been mapped to relevant categories with proper structure in place. By month three, weekly sales from organic had grown from an average of $20,000 to an average of $60,000.

That was from one strategy out of seven I had planned for the full engagement.

That result came from treating the architecture and the conversion path as one problem, not two. And it came from spending the time to properly diagnose what was actually wrong before deciding what to do about it. Not from a package. Not from a content plan applied to every client the same way.

Questions to Ask Before You Pay Anyone

If you’re talking to an SEO agency right now, here is what should happen before any price is discussed.

They should ask about your business goals. Not “rank higher” but what revenue or lead targets you’re working toward and in what timeframe. If they skip this, they’re not building a strategy. They’re selling a package.

They should want to audit your website before quoting. A price without an audit is a guess.

They should be honest about timeline. If someone promises first-page results in 30 days for a new domain in a competitive market, that’s not a confident agency. That’s a desperate one.

They should explain specifically what they will do and why those activities are right for your situation. “We do on-page SEO, content, and link building” is not an answer. That’s a brochure.

And if they quote you a fixed monthly package without looking at your site or asking about your business, that tells you everything. I scored every Nigerian SEO firm — including my own — against five criteria that actually matter. See how the best SEO companies in Nigeria compare before you commit to anyone. And once you know what you’re paying for, here is what the actual ranking sequence looks like in practice.

If you want to know what your specific situation actually requires, book a free audit call. We’ll look at your site, your competitors, and your goals. You’ll leave with a clear picture of what’s needed and what it’ll realistically cost. Not a sales pitch dressed up as a proposal.