Pricing guide
How much does SEO cost and when do results appear?
Nobody can guarantee position one in Google — but costs and timelines can be estimated honestly.
A guaranteed first place in Google is the most profitable false promise in online marketing: nobody controls the algorithm, so nobody can guarantee positions. What can be estimated honestly are the costs and the time horizon. For the Romanian market in 2026 the indicative ranges look like this: an SEO audit — the technical and content analysis telling you where you stand and what needs repair — costs €300–1,500 as a one-off; a monthly retainer for an SME in a normal niche runs €300–1,500 a month; and in fiercely contested niches such as finance, real estate or medical services, budgets climb to €1,500–5,000 a month. Measurable results usually appear after 4–8 months of steady work rather than in a fortnight. If somebody promises you otherwise, what you are really buying is a subscription to attractive reports.
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Key takeaways
SEO audit: €300–1,500 (one-off)
An X-ray of the site: technical issues, content, authority, comparison against competitors. The correct starting point before any retainer.
SME retainer: €300–1,500 a month
Continuous optimisation, new content, technical improvements and monthly reporting on positions, traffic and conversions — not merely on activities.
Competitive niches: €1,500–5,000 a month
Finance, real estate, healthcare, legal: competitors with large budgets and years of head start demand serious content volume and authority to move positions at all.
Why it takes 4–8 months, and how to recognise a scam offer
The timeline is not an agency excuse but the mechanics of the search engine: new or modified pages must be recrawled and re-evaluated, authority is built through links earned over time, and Google tests positions gradually as it accumulates user signals. The first movements usually show at 3–4 months on low-competition keywords; commercially valuable positions arrive at 6–12 months. That is why serious SEO contracts are judged at six months rather than at thirty days.
The scam signals, in order of frequency: position guarantees (first place in three months or your money back), prices of €100–150 a month for complete SEO (at real labour rates that covers 2–3 hours monthly — cosmetics, not strategy), reports listing activities instead of results, and refusal to tell you concretely which links are being built and where. The test question for any offer: which business indicators do you report to me monthly? If the answer does not include organic traffic and conversions, look elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Is SEO worth it for a small company at these budgets?
It depends on how your customers search. If your service is searched for by name and city, local SEO on a modest budget beats any leaflet over time. If you sell B2B through tenders and direct relationships and clients never look you up online, the money produces more elsewhere — an answer an honest agency gives you in the first conversation.
Can I do SEO myself, without an agency?
The basics, yes: correct titles and descriptions, a fully completed business profile, content that answers customer questions, decent site speed. With 4–5 hours a month and free guides you cover what matters for a local company. An agency becomes necessary when you compete on contested keywords, where technical experience and systematically built authority make the difference.
What do I concretely get for a monthly SEO retainer?
A healthy contract lists deliverables: optimised articles or pages (with a number), technical fixes from the audit, links obtained (with a named list), plus a monthly report on positions, organic traffic and conversions. If the offer only says on-page and off-page optimisation with no quantities, demand the breakdown before signing — vagueness in the offer becomes vagueness in delivery.
SEO or Google Ads — where does the first budget go?
At launch, Ads: you pay and appear today, and within two weeks you learn which keywords bring paying customers. That data then makes SEO more precise, and in the long run organic traffic lowers the cost per acquired customer. The standard combination for an SME: Ads for immediate results, SEO started in parallel as the investment that compounds.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247