Managed, agency, or in-house.
Three ways to get SEO done, compared on what they actually cost and what you actually get. Including the cases where the managed model is the wrong answer.
What are you actually choosing between?
Almost every business weighing up SEO is choosing between the same three things, and the choice is usually made on price alone because the other differences are hard to see from the outside.
- A managed subscription. A fixed monthly fee, work shipped on a set cadence, no contract. This is what we sell, so read the rest of this page with that in mind.
- A traditional agency retainer. A monthly fee, usually on a six or twelve month contract, with a named account manager and a strategy deck.
- An in-house hire. A salaried person who owns SEO alongside whatever else lands on them, plus the tooling they need.
What the market actually charges
The best public number on agency pricing comes from the Ahrefs SEO pricing survey, which polled 439 SEO service providers. The average monthly retainer across all of them was $2,917. Split by provider type, agencies averaged $3,209 a month, consultancies $3,250, and freelancers $1,348.63. 63% of all providers charge somewhere between $500 and $5,000 a month.
Our fee is $500/month per domain, which puts us at the bottom of that band. That is the honest framing: we are not cheaper than every freelancer, and we are well below the agency average.
Managed vs agency vs in-house, compared
| What you are comparing | Managed (ConceptSEO) | Agency retainer | In-house |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $500/month per domain | $3,209 average | Salary + tooling |
| What the fee covers | SEO, GEO and Local SEO on one domain | One person's time, split across everything else they own | |
| Cadence | Weekly. Analyses Monday, fixes shipped through Friday | Typically a monthly report | Whatever the rest of their workload allows |
| Who implements the fix | We do, directly on the site | Often you or your developer, from a recommendations list | They do, if they have the access |
| Commitment | None. Cancel any month | An employment contract | |
| Setup cost | None. Live within 72 hours, no sales call | Recruitment, onboarding, tooling licences | |
| What happens if they leave | Not a single point of failure, because the cycle is the product | Account manager turnover restarts the context | The knowledge leaves with them |
| Knows your business | Partly. We read your data, we do not sit in your meetings | Varies with the account manager | Best of the three, by a distance |
| Handles work beyond SEO | No. SEO, GEO, Local, and Google Ads as an add-on | Usually, at additional cost | Yes, that is the point of a hire |
When managed SEO is the wrong choice
A comparison that concludes "us" on every axis converts nobody, because everyone has read one before. Here is where we would tell you to go elsewhere.
You need someone in the room
If what you actually want is a strategist in your planning meetings, arguing about positioning and sitting with your sales team, hire that person or retain an agency that provides them. We ship fixes and report on them. We are not in your Monday standup and we do not pretend otherwise.
The site cannot actually be changed
The entire value of a weekly cadence is that changes ship weekly. If your site sits behind a release process where a title tag takes six weeks and three approvals, you will pay a monthly fee to watch a queue grow. Fix the deployment path first. That is the real bottleneck, and no SEO provider can fix it for you.
You need a project, not a subscription
A replatform audit, a domain migration, a one-off technical review before a launch: these are projects with an end date. A monthly subscription is a bad shape for them. Buy the project from someone who sells projects.
The site is very large
At hundreds of thousands of URLs, log-file analysis, crawl-budget engineering and index management become full-time work with dedicated tooling. A per-domain subscription is priced for sites where that is not the constraint.
Search is not your channel
If nobody is searching for what you sell yet, SEO is the slowest way to find that out. Categories that do not exist have no search volume to capture. Outbound, partnerships or paid will tell you whether there is demand months before organic would. Our own case studies are all businesses whose customers were already searching.
You want a ranking guarantee
Nobody can honestly promise a position, because nobody controls the ranking. Any provider who does is either misunderstanding the mechanism or counting on you not checking. If a guarantee is what closes the deal for you, we are going to lose that deal.
Cite this page
ConceptSEO figures are computed at render time from our own rate card, so this page and the invoice cannot disagree. Every agency cost figure comes from the Ahrefs SEO pricing survey of 439 providers and is linked inline; we did not run a pricing study of our own. Cells we cannot source are left blank rather than estimated. Figures are read from ConceptSEO's own published rate card, plus the Ahrefs SEO pricing survey for third-party pricing and were last checked on 18 August 2026.
You may republish these figures with attribution and a link to https://seo.concept211.com/compare.
ConceptSEO. "Managed SEO vs an agency retainer vs in-house." Last updated 18 August 2026. https://seo.concept211.com/compare
<a href="https://seo.concept211.com/compare">Managed SEO vs an agency retainer vs in-house</a> — ConceptSEO, last updated 18 August 2026
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