SEO costs €800 to €1,500 a month for a single-location business in Ireland, €1,500 to €3,500 for one competing across counties, and €3,000 and up for national or ecommerce work. Those are our prices, and they sit in the middle of the Irish market. Across the price lists that twelve other Irish SEO providers publish, the cheapest package is €199 a month and the dearest quoted range tops €10,000.
How much does SEO cost in Ireland?
By the kind of business, from the twelve Irish price lists and our own:
| Business | Typical monthly cost in Ireland | What the money goes on |
|---|---|---|
| Single-location local business (trade, clinic, salon, café) | €500 to €1,500 | Google Business Profile, the main service pages, citations, reviews, a little content |
| Professional services in a city (solicitors, accountants, clinics in Dublin or Cork) | €1,200 to €3,000 | Content that earns trust, links, technical work, competing with established firms |
| Business competing across several counties | €1,500 to €3,500 | Location pages, content clusters, link outreach, conversion tracking |
| Online shop | €1,500 to €5,000+ | Category and product pages, technical clean-up at scale, content, links |
| National brand, SaaS, finance, large enterprise | €3,000 to €10,000+ | Everything above, at volume, with digital PR |
| One-off audit | €185 to €2,500 | A written diagnosis and a prioritised list of fixes |
| Hourly consultancy | €50 to €250 an hour | Advice for a team that does the work itself |
Below about €400 a month you’re buying two or three hours of someone’s time. That can keep a profile tidy and a page title current. It can’t run a campaign. Above €3,000 you’re paying for a team and for content and links at a rate that competes nationally. The band most Irish guides agree on for a single-location business is €800 to €1,200, and that’s where ours starts too.
SEO company prices in Ireland, what twelve price lists show
Nobody publishes the shape of the whole market, but twelve Irish SEO companies and consultants on the first page of google.ie for these searches publish their prices or a cost guide, ourselves included. Side by side, as of 20 September 2026, this is what they show.
| What’s being priced | Lowest published | Highest published | Where most of the market sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheapest monthly package on each price list | €199 | €900 plus VAT | €350 to €500; the median is about €425 |
| Entry level or maintenance (one to four hours a month) | €199 | €600 | €300 to €500, described by the sellers themselves as support or upkeep, not a campaign |
| Local campaign, single location | €350 | €2,000 | €800 to €1,200 on nearly every list |
| Regional, multi-county or a competitive city | €1,000 | €4,500 | €1,500 to €3,000 |
| Ecommerce | €1,500 | €6,000+ | €1,500 to €5,000 |
| National, enterprise, finance, SaaS | €2,000 | €10,000+ | €3,000 to €5,000 |
| One-off audit | €185 | €2,500 | €500 to €2,000 |
| Hourly consultancy | €50 | €250 | €100 to €150 |
Read down the table and three things stand out. Half the market will sell you something for €425 a month or less, and the guides that explain what the money buys all describe that band as maintenance or DIY support. The band for a real local campaign clusters at €800 to €1,200 whoever you read. And the spread at the top is about who you’re competing with, not who you hire: every provider prices Dublin, ecommerce and national work at two to five times the local figure.
One thing the table can’t show is what’s inside each price, which is the whole question.
What search engine optimisation packages include at each price
SEO packages in Ireland are sold by the month, and the useful way to compare them is hours and deliverables, not keyword counts. “Up to 40 keyphrases” sounds like twice “up to 15”; Google ranks pages, not keyword lists, and one good page can rank for hundreds of searches. Here’s what each band realistically buys, drawn from the price lists above and from what our own packages include.
| Monthly price | Roughly how many hours | What you should get | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under €300 | 1 to 2 | Automated reports, a few title tags, directory submissions. Often offshore or software-driven. | Nobody who needs to win a ranking |
| €300 to €600 | 2 to 4 | Keyword research, light on-page fixes, Google Business Profile kept current, a monthly report | A business that already ranks in a quiet market, or one doing its own content with guidance |
| €800 to €1,500 | 8 to 15 | A technical audit and the fixes, a keyword strategy, on-page work across the main pages, Google Business Profile management, citations and reviews, one or two articles a month, some link building, a monthly call and a report on enquiries | Most single-location Irish businesses. This is where a campaign starts |
| €1,500 to €3,500 | 15 to 30 | Everything above plus deeper technical SEO, content built in clusters, dedicated link outreach, competitor gap analysis, location pages, conversion tracking that ties rankings to enquiries | Businesses competing across counties or in Dublin and Cork |
| €3,000+ | 30 to 60+ | A full technical programme, content at volume, digital PR, structured data across large catalogues, a senior team | Online shops, national brands, finance, SaaS |
Whatever the band, a package should start with an audit before the quote, so the price reflects the real job, and it should report on calls, enquiries and sales, not only rankings. If a provider won’t tell you roughly how many hours your fee buys, you can’t compare it with anything.
What’s usually not included
The things that turn up as extras: developer time to make the changes the SEO recommends, photography and video, tool subscriptions, paid PR placements, and site migrations when you change platform. Ask which of these your quote covers. A €900 package that needs €400 of development a month is a €1,300 package.
SEO pricing models, retainer, project, audit or hourly
Four models, and most Irish SEO companies use two or three of them.
- Monthly retainer. A fixed fee for an agreed scope, month after month. The standard model everywhere: Ahrefs’ 2025 survey of 439 SEO providers found 78.2% charge this way, with $501 to $1,000 a month the most common band worldwide and agencies averaging $3,209 a month against freelancers’ $1,348 (those are the survey’s figures in dollars; they aren’t converted here).
- One-off audit. A diagnosis of the site, its content and its links, with a prioritised list of fixes. €185 to €2,500 in Ireland depending on the size of the site and whether implementation is included.
- Project. A migration, a technical clean-up, a content build, a new site launched without losing rankings. €1,000 to €5,000 is the range Irish providers publish.
- Hourly. €50 to €250 an hour across the Irish price lists, with €100 to €150 the common middle. Right for a business with its own marketing person who needs an expert on call.
Performance-based pricing, where you pay per ranking or per lead, exists but is rare in Ireland and worth treating with care: the easy keywords get chased and the hard ones that bring customers get avoided.
What makes SEO cost more, or less
Two quotes for “SEO” can be five times apart and both be fair. These are the things that move the number.
Where your site starts
A site with no previous SEO, slow pages, missing titles, no Google Business Profile and thin content needs months of set-up before the ongoing work begins. A healthy site that just needs momentum costs less from day one.
How competitive your market is
“Plumber Athlone” and “solicitor Dublin 4” are different jobs. One Irish agency publishes Dublin at €800 to €4,500 a month against Carlow at €350 to €1,500, and that’s the honest shape of it: the price follows the competition. Legal, finance, insurance, health and anything in Dublin city sit at the top because the firms already ranking have years of content and links behind them.
How much content and how many links you need
If the three sites above you have 200 pages and you have ten, the gap is content, and content costs hours. If they have links from fifty Irish sites and you have three, the gap is authority, and links cost more hours still. This is why a proper quote follows an audit and a look at your competitors, not a form.
How many places and services
One town and five services is a small job. Five counties and twelve services is a large one, because each place and each service needs its own page and its own work. Multi-location businesses pay roughly per location.
Who does the work
A freelancer with low overheads can charge €500 a month and put most of it into the work. An agency at the same price is paying for account management and a team; at €1,500 a month the agency’s team starts to outweigh that. The right question is who will actually work on your site each month, and for how many hours.
Agency, freelancer or in-house?
| Freelancer | Agency | In-house | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost in Ireland | €50 to €200 an hour, or €350 to €1,500 a month on retainer | €800 to €5,000+ a month | SalaryExpert’s 2026 estimate for an SEO specialist in Ireland averages €60,844 a year, from about €44,700 entry level to €69,400 senior, before employer PRSI, pension, holidays and tools |
| Strength | Direct access to the person doing the work, good value | Specialists for technical, content and links; cover when someone is off | Knows your business, always available |
| Weakness | Limited hours, one skill set, no cover | You’re one of many clients; junior work at senior prices if you don’t ask | One person can’t be a technician, writer, outreach specialist and analyst; tools cost extra |
| Best for | Small businesses with a clear, contained job | Competitive markets, several locations, ecommerce | Companies spending €5,000 a month or more, often alongside an agency |
The hybrid is common in Ireland and usually the sensible answer once you’re past €2,000 a month: someone inside who owns the strategy and approves the work, and an agency or freelancer who does it.
Is cheap SEO worth it? The red flags
Google’s own advice for anyone hiring an SEO is blunt: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a ‘special relationship’ with Google, or advertise a ‘priority submit’ to Google.” And: “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.”
The Irish versions of those warnings:
- €99 and €199 packages. An hour or two of work, usually automated reports and directory links. They look like SEO on an invoice.
- “50 blog posts a month for €200.” Generated or offshore content that won’t rank for an Irish search and can drag the rest of the site down.
- “100 backlinks for €X.” Bulk links from junk sites; the quickest route to a Google penalty, and the clean-up costs more than the package did.
- Guaranteed page one. See Google, above.
- “Proprietary techniques.” If they can’t say what they’ll do each month, that’s the answer.
- Twelve-month lock-ins with no exit. A short minimum, three months or so, is reasonable so results have time to show. A year with no performance clause protects them, not you.
- Full access on day one. Google again: “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access).”
We’ve cleaned up after cheap SEO more than once. It always costs more than doing it properly the first time would have.
How long does SEO take to work in Ireland?
Google’s guidance says that “in general, SEOs need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit.” In Irish markets that runs roughly like this:
| When | What happens | What you’ll see |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1 to 4 | Audit, technical fixes, titles, Google Business Profile | Cleaner Search Console, early movement on searches you were already close on |
| Months 2 to 4 | New pages indexed, on-page work lands | Local pack and lower-competition rankings improve; first extra enquiries in a quiet market |
| Months 4 to 9 | Content and links compound | Competitive county and Dublin searches move; enquiries you can count |
| Months 9 to 12+ | Authority built | National and ecommerce searches, and the return that pays for the year |
A quiet county market can show results inside eight to twelve weeks. Dublin professional services and national ecommerce are a six to twelve month job before the numbers justify the spend, which is why the minimum term exists and why a month-to-month trial of SEO tells you almost nothing.
Is SEO worth the cost? Work it out before you spend
Three numbers decide it, and you know two of them already.
- What a customer is worth to you. A kitchen, a conveyance, a year of accounts, a course of treatment. Use the profit, not the invoice.
- How many enquiries you close. One in three, one in five; be honest.
- How many extra enquiries a month SEO would need to bring to pay for itself at the price you’ve been quoted.
If a customer is worth €1,500 in profit and you close one enquiry in four, a €1,200 a month campaign pays for itself at four extra enquiries a month, about one a week, and everything after that is return. If a customer is worth €80, the same campaign needs sixty extra enquiries a month, and you should look hard at Google Ads or at a cheaper band first. Our SEO ROI calculator does this arithmetic with your own numbers, and our Google Ads cost guide gives the paid cost per lead to compare it with.
The reason SEO wins that comparison over time is that the asset stays. Pages, links and a profile keep bringing leads and revenue after the spend stops; an ad stops the second the card does. That’s the return an Irish SME is buying, and the reason to judge a quote over 12 months rather than one.
Can I do SEO myself?
Google says so, for the right business: “If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself. We recommend starting with the SEO starter guide.” The parts you can do: claim and complete your Google Business Profile, ask for and answer reviews, make your name, address and phone number match everywhere, put your town in your page titles, and write down the questions customers ask you and answer them on your site. Our local SEO guide is the step by step.
The parts that usually need paying for: a technical audit and its fixes, content at a rate that closes a gap with competitors, and earning links. Most Irish small businesses do the first list themselves and buy the second, and that’s a perfectly good plan.
What to ask before you sign
Google’s list of questions for a prospective SEO is the best one there is, and worth quoting in full:
- “Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?”
- “Do you follow the Google Search Essentials (previously known as Webmaster Guidelines)?”
- “What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?”
- “What’s your experience in my industry?”
- “What’s your experience in my country/city?”
- “What’s your experience developing international sites?”
- “How long have you been in business?”
- “How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?”
Add three of ours: how many hours a month does this fee buy; who will do the work, not who will present it; and what will the monthly reporting show. A report worth paying for shows the work done, the rankings that moved, the organic traffic against last month and last year, Google Business Profile calls and direction requests, and the leads and enquiries. A traffic graph on its own is not a report.
Is there a grant for SEO in Ireland?
Not one that pays for it. The Trading Online Voucher, which every older guide points at, closed to new applications in December 2024. Its replacement, the Grow Digital Voucher, covers 50% of new off-the-shelf software subscriptions up to €5,000, and the Local Enterprise Office’s own list of examples is software: ecommerce, CRM, booking, accounting, cybersecurity, analytics. An SEO retainer isn’t on it. Our guide to small business grants in Ireland has what each scheme does pay for.
Our SEO packages and prices
Since we’ve shown you the market, here are ours, in full on the SEO packages page.
- Maintenance, from €400 a month. For a business that already ranks in a quiet local market and wants to stay there. Two or three hours a month: small on-page fixes, a focused set of searches tracked, your Google Business Profile kept current, a short report.
- Local SEO, €800 to €1,500 a month. A technical audit and the fixes that follow, a keyword strategy built on how your customers search, on-page work across your main pages, your Google Business Profile, one or two articles a month, some link building and a monthly call.
- Regional growth, €1,500 to €3,500 a month. Everything in local, plus deeper technical work, content built in clusters, dedicated link outreach, competitor gap analysis, and conversion tracking that ties rankings to enquiries.
- National and ecommerce, from €3,000 a month. A full technical programme, content at volume, digital PR, and structured data across large catalogues. Online stores, see ecommerce SEO.
Every package starts with an audit before the quote and reports on enquiries, not just rankings. Prices are before VAT. If you want the audit first and the quote after, that’s how we work.
Questions people ask about SEO costs in Ireland
How much should SEO cost?
For a single-location Irish business, €800 to €1,500 a month buys a real campaign; €400 holds a position you already have. Competing across counties is €1,500 to €3,500, national or ecommerce from €3,000. Anything under €300 is an hour or two of work.
How much does SEO cost per month for a small business in Ireland?
Most published Irish local packages sit between €800 and €1,200 a month. The cheapest published is €199, which the sellers themselves describe as entry-level support rather than a campaign.
How much does an SEO package cost?
From €199 to €1,995 a month across twelve published Irish price lists, with €800 to €1,200 the common band for a local package and €1,500 and up for regional or ecommerce work. Compare the hours and the deliverables, not the keyword count.
Is it worth paying for SEO services?
When customers search for what you sell, your site is built to take enquiries, and a customer is worth enough to cover the fee at a realistic number of extra enquiries. If those three aren’t true yet, fix them first; if they are, SEO is usually the cheapest lead you’ll ever buy.
Can I do SEO on my own?
The local basics, yes, and Google says as much. Technical work, content at scale and links are where most businesses pay.
What is the 80/20 rule in SEO?
The observation that a small share of pages and searches produces most of the traffic and enquiries. In practice: find the handful of pages and searches that bring customers, and spend most of the budget on those before adding anything new. It’s also why a cheap package spread thinly across forty keywords underperforms a dearer one focused on ten.
Does SEO still matter in 2026 with AI answers?
More, not less. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and ChatGPT’s answers, draw on the pages that already rank and the profiles that already have reviews. The businesses AI recommends are the ones that did the SEO. Our AI Mode guide covers what changed and what to do.
Is search engine marketing the same as SEO?
No. Search engine marketing usually means paid search, Google Ads, where you pay per click. SEO is the unpaid results. Most Irish businesses end up running both, with the ads for speed and the SEO for the long run.
How long until SEO pays for itself?
Google’s own range is four months to a year. Quiet local markets are at the short end; Dublin professional services and ecommerce at the long end.
Sources
Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO? and the SEO starter guide; Ahrefs’ 2025 survey of 439 SEO providers; SalaryExpert’s 2026 salary estimate for SEO specialists in Ireland; the published pricing pages and cost guides of twelve Irish SEO companies and consultants ranking on the first page of google.ie for these searches, read from Ireland on 20 September 2026 (the list is kept on file); the Local Enterprise Office’s Grow Digital Voucher terms as recorded in our grants guide. Prices change; treat the table as a snapshot and check the provider’s page before you compare quotes.
