Managed, agency, in‑house, or DIY with AI.
Four 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 four things, and the choice is usually made on price alone because the other differences are hard to see from the outside. We sell the first one, so read the rest of this page with that in mind.
A managed subscription
A fixed monthly fee, work shipped on a set cadence, no contract.
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.
Doing it yourself with AI
A ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini subscription and your own hours. Finding the problem, making the change and coming back next week is on you.
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. 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.
Average monthly SEO fee
All four, compared.
The same ten questions for each option. "No sourced figure" means we do not have a defensible number, not zero. Third-party costs are cited to the survey above; we did not run our own pricing study and are not going to imply we did.
ConceptSEO
- Monthly cost
- $500/month per domain
- What the fee covers
- SEO, GEO and Local SEO on one domain
- Cadence
- Weekly. Analyses Monday, fixes shipped through Friday
- Who implements the fix
- We do, directly on the site
- Keeps up with Google's changes
- Reads every Google update, documentation edit and Search Central post the day it's posted
- Commitment
- None. Cancel any month
- Setup cost
- None. Live within 72 hours, no sales call
- What happens if they leave
- Not a single point of failure, because the cycle is the product
- Knows your business
- Partly. We read your data, we do not sit in your meetings
- Handles work beyond SEO
- No. SEO, GEO, Local, and Google Ads as an add-on
Agency
- Monthly cost
- $3,209 average
- What the fee covers
- No sourced figure
- Cadence
- Typically a monthly report
- Who implements the fix
- Often you or your developer, from a recommendations list
- Keeps up with Google's changes
- Varies with the agency
- Commitment
- No sourced figure
- Setup cost
- No sourced figure
- What happens if they leave
- Account manager turnover restarts the context
- Knows your business
- Varies with the account manager
- Handles work beyond SEO
- Usually, at additional cost
In-house
- Monthly cost
- Salary + tooling
- What the fee covers
- One person's time, split across everything else they own
- Cadence
- Whatever the rest of their workload allows
- Who implements the fix
- They do, if they have the access
- Keeps up with Google's changes
- If they have time to follow the news
- Commitment
- An employment contract
- Setup cost
- Recruitment, onboarding, tooling licences
- What happens if they leave
- The knowledge leaves with them
- Knows your business
- Best of the four, by a distance
- Handles work beyond SEO
- Yes, that is the point of a hire
ChatGPT or Claude
- Monthly cost
- A chat subscription, plus your hours
- What the fee covers
- Answers to the questions you think to ask
- Cadence
- Whenever you find the time
- Who implements the fix
- You do. Agent tools like Claude Code can edit files if you set them up
- Keeps up with Google's changes
- Knows what it was trained on. Looks newer things up only when you ask
- Commitment
- None
- Setup cost
- Learning what to ask and how to check the answer
- What happens if they leave
- Nothing leaves, but each chat starts without your site's history
- Knows your business
- Only what you paste into the chat
- Handles work beyond SEO
- Yes, anything you ask it
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'd rather do it yourself, and you have the hours
If you enjoy the work and have a few hours every week, ChatGPT or Claude plus your own Search Console will take a small site a long way. Ask it to explain a report, draft a title tag or review a page you paste in. What you give up is the weekly habit, the history and someone tracking Google's changes for you.
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.
Quoting a figure? Cite this page
Methodology. 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 marked as having no sourced figure 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 7 October 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 vs DIY with AI." Last updated 7 October 2026. https://seo.concept211.com/compare
<a href="https://seo.concept211.com/compare">Managed SEO vs an agency retainer vs in-house vs DIY with AI</a> — ConceptSEO, last updated 7 October 2026
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