Most legitimate legal SEO engagements run between $2,000 and $15,000 a month, with the majority of law firm work landing in the $3,000 to $9,000 range. Anything under $1,000 is almost always package SEO that won’t move cases. Anything over $15,000 only makes sense if the firm is doing $5M+ a year and can absorb that retainer against real revenue.
That’s the honest answer. Below is the breakdown — by firm size, by what each price tier should actually include, and where most of the bad money in legal SEO gets spent.
What each price tier should include
$2,000 to $3,000 a month. This is the floor for real strategic work. At this price, a competent agency or consultant can take a small firm — one or two attorneys, one or two practice areas — and run a focused engagement on practice pages, GBP, and reviews. You should not expect aggressive content production or link-building at this level. You should expect someone who knows what they’re doing to fix what’s broken on a small surface area.
$3,000 to $5,000 a month. The most common range for a firm doing $750K to $2M in revenue. Practice page rewrites across three or four practice areas, ongoing GBP management, citation cleanup, review-velocity work, and a small amount of new content where it earns its keep. This is where most firms get the best ratio of strategic attention to dollars spent.
$5,000 to $9,000 a month. Larger firms, more practice areas, multiple offices, or competitive markets like Phoenix-metro PI. At this level you should be getting deeper topical authority work, more substantial content production (the kind that actually ranks, not the kind that fills a calendar), and proactive competitive monitoring. You should also be getting senior strategic attention — not just more junior hours.
$9,000 to $15,000 a month. Multi-location firms, regional or national footprint, firms competing for the most expensive PI or mass-tort keywords. This is real money. It should buy a dedicated senior strategist, a content team that knows your practice areas, and an ROI conversation tied to revenue, not impressions. Most firms below $5M in revenue cannot defend a retainer at this level.
The warning signs at both ends
Below $1,000 a month is almost always package SEO. Some directory listing, a few automated reports, maybe a token blog post. The agency cannot afford to put a real strategist on the account at that price, and they don’t. You will pay $12,000 over a year and have nothing to show for it except a slightly fuller blog page. If the pitch is “starter package” or “small firm tier,” walk.
The other end is its own trap. I’ve seen firms paying $20,000 to $30,000 a month to large legal SEO shops while their actual revenue can’t sustain the spend. The math doesn’t work — you need that retainer to produce, conservatively, three times its monthly cost in new case revenue before it makes sense as a line item. Most firms below $5M in annual revenue can’t carry a $15,000 retainer without it being a meaningful drag on profit, even if the SEO is working.
If your SEO retainer is bigger than what your worst paralegal makes, the agency should be producing more value than your worst paralegal. If you can’t tell whether they are, that’s the actual problem.
Why the range is so wide
Legal SEO pricing varies more than most professional services because the work itself varies. A solo estate planning attorney in a quiet market needs a fraction of the work a five-attorney PI firm in Phoenix needs. The honest agencies scope to the firm. The dishonest ones sell tiered packages — bronze, silver, gold — that are priced for the agency’s billing model rather than what the firm actually needs.
The other reason the range is so wide: a lot of the price difference between agencies is overhead, not output. A 50-person agency with a Manhattan office and a six-person sales team needs to charge more per client to support that structure. None of that overhead helps your rankings. It just shows up on your invoice.
Where PHX Search Co. lands, and why
Most of our engagements land between $3,000 and $9,000 a month. We don’t have a published tier table because the work is custom — what a four-attorney PI firm in Phoenix needs is different from what a solo family practice in Mesa needs, and pretending otherwise produces bad engagements.
We land where we land for two reasons. First, the owner does the strategy on every engagement, which means we can’t run on the volume model — there’s a hard ceiling on how many firms one person can serve well. Second, we’re month-to-month, which means we have to actually earn the next retainer every thirty days. Those two facts price out anyone who wants a $1,200 package, and they price out the largest national firms who want a 30-person team. We sit in the middle on purpose.
What to ask before you sign anything
Two questions cut through most of the pricing fog. First: what specifically am I paying for each month, in terms of work delivered? Not “ongoing SEO management” — actual deliverables. Second: what’s the contract length, and what happens if I want out? If the agency can answer both clearly and without flinching, you can probably trust the price. If they get vague on either, the price is meaningless — you’re buying a contract, not an outcome.
Related reading: how we charge, SEO budget benchmarks for law firms, and how to vet an SEO agency before hiring.