SEO services are the work an agency or a consultant does to get a website into Google's organic results and, more and more often, into the answers of AI search tools: technical analysis, page optimisation, content, links and tracking of results.
Everyone writes that much. The useful question is a different one: when you buy an SEO service, what do you actually get each month?
On 30 September 2026 we opened the service pages of 16 Italian providers that appear on the first two pages of Google Italy for "servizi seo" (SEO services). Only 4 publish a price. Only 1 states a quantity of work, meaning how many pages it optimises for that money. The lists of activities, on the other hand, are almost all alike.
Here you'll find the items that make up an SEO service, the table of what those 16 offers state and what they leave out, a comparison with the way SEO is sold in the United States and the questions that make two different quotes comparable.
What SEO services are
An SEO service is a set of activities, sold as a retainer or as a project, with a measurable goal: more qualified organic visits to the pages that bring in enquiries or sales. The singular is misleading. Inside there are different jobs, often done by different people: whoever works on the code is almost never the person who writes the copy.
Google itself lists them on the Search Central page for people choosing an SEO (updated June 2026). There are eight items:
- review of the site's content or structure;
- technical advice on website development: hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript;
- content development;
- management of online business development campaigns;
- keyword research;
- SEO training;
- expertise in specific markets and geographies;
- optimising for generative AI.
The last item is the one changing offers fastest: 4 of the 16 pages we read already have a section on GEO, SEO for AI or ranking on ChatGPT.
The items that make up an SEO service
The 16 offers use different names, but the activities fall into seven blocks. The first three are always there; the others depend on the type of site. The full map, with the boundaries between one area and the next, is in our guide to the types of SEO.
Audit and initial analysis
This is the starting snapshot: technical errors, pages already bringing traffic, competitors, keywords covered and keywords missing. It can be sold as a project on its own. Bruce Clay, on its Italian site, states a preliminary report after 4 weeks and the final one after 10, running to between 80 and 120 pages. A good audit produces a list of priorities in order of impact; how to set it up is explained in our guide to the SEO audit.
Technical SEO
Speed, crawling and indexing, URL structure, structured data, the mobile version. On its own it doesn't bring traffic. When it's broken it blocks everything else, however good the content is. The checks, one by one, are in our guide to technical SEO.
Keywords, content and on-page SEO
Keyword research decides what each page tries to rank for. Then the work moves to copy, titles, headings and internal links. This is the item that takes the most hours, because writing and rewriting pages takes time; it's also the one where two quotes with the same name can contain wildly different amounts of work. The operational detail is in our guide to on-page SEO.
Link building and off-page SEO
Eight offers out of 16 explicitly mention link building, link earning or digital PR. The scope, though, varies a lot: it runs from monitoring the links the site already receives to producing content designed to earn citations from publications and trade blogs. Those are two different services with two different costs, so always ask which one you're buying. How the part that really moves authority works is in our guide to link building.
Local, ecommerce and international SEO, and migrations
These are the vertical services: the same three core areas applied to one type of site. Local SEO appears in 7 offers out of 16, migration in 6. Ecommerce SEO and international SEO usually get pages of their own, with quotes of their own.
Migration is also the only case in our sample where a provider writes price, timing and scope on the same page. La Scribacchina starts at €600 plus VAT as a one-off fee, adds 50% for each extra language and states 1-2 weeks of mapping and planning plus 2-3 weeks of monitoring after go-live. If you're rebuilding your site or changing your name, the sequence of checks is in our rebranding checklist.
Optimisation for AI search
This is the newest block. In SE Ranking's survey with Duda of 260 agencies in North America, Europe and Oceania (2024 survey, updated February 2026) 61% said they planned to add optimisation for AI Overviews and AI search, at an average price of $937 a month. The sample is international and doesn't isolate the UK, so there's no UK benchmark price yet. The differences between SEO, AEO and GEO are explained here.
Tracking and reporting
The report is the only part of the service you actually see every month. It should say what was done, what changed in rankings, clicks and enquiries, and what happens next month. A report that shows only rankings without linking them to traffic and enquiries measures activity, not results: what to put in it is explained in our guide to the SEO dashboard.
What 16 Italian offers state (and what they leave out)
The method. We took the providers among the top 20 results on Google Italy for "servizi seo" (two DataForSEO checks, desktop, Italy, 30 September 2026) and the pages that the AI Overview for the same search cites as sources. We left out blog posts, directories such as Sortlist and one page that refused the connection. For each of the 16 pages left we noted four things: price, reporting, quantity of work and promises about results. "Not stated" means the information doesn't appear on the page, not that the provider won't give it in a quote. This is a test on the Italian market; on Google UK the first page for "seo services" (4,400 searches a month) is mostly made up of "best agency" lists and directories, so a like-for-like sample of provider pages isn't there to read.
| Provider | Published price | Reporting stated | Quantity of work stated | Promises about results |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Register.it | €647.45 / €1,242 / €1,719.25 a year + VAT | Monthly | Yes: 10, 20 or 40 pages | No guarantee stated |
| SitoWP | Yes, four fixed-price packages | Monthly, by email | No | No guarantee stated |
| Valentino Mea | From €500/month (full campaign), from €500 one-off (single services) | Monthly or quarterly | No | No guarantee stated |
| La Scribacchina (migration) | From €600 + VAT one-off | 2-3 weeks of monitoring after launch | No, the price varies with the number of URLs | Keep rankings and traffic |
| NetStrategy | No | Every 30 days, meeting every 90 | No | No guarantee stated |
| Simpliza | No | Monthly | No | No guarantee stated |
| Club4business (off-page) | No | Every two months | No | No guarantee stated |
| Italiaonline | No ("from a few hundred to a few thousand euros") | Not stated | No | 70% of clients on page one for the selected keywords |
| Avantgrade | No ("a few thousand euros a year is not enough") | Not stated | No | No guarantee stated |
| Bruce Clay (Italy) | No | Audit: preliminary at 4 weeks, final at 10 | No | No guarantee stated |
| Nextre Digital | No | Not stated | No | No guarantee stated |
| IM*MEDIA | No | Not stated | No | No guarantee stated |
| Bravi a parole | No | Not stated | No | No guarantee stated |
| NUZO (local SEO) | No | Not stated | No | No guarantee stated |
| Francesco Belgrano | No | Not stated | No | No guarantee stated |
| Mariachiara Marsella | No | Not stated | No | Explicitly rejects ranking guarantees |
What the table shows:
- 4 offers out of 16 (25%) publish a price. Two are recurring packages (Register.it and SitoWP), one is a "starting from" (Valentino Mea), one is a single project (La Scribacchina).
- 6 out of 16 say how often the report arrives. Four monthly, one monthly or quarterly, one every two months. The other ten don't mention it.
- 1 out of 16 states how much work you're buying. Register.it ties each plan to a number of optimised pages. Nobody states hours, number of pieces of content or number of links.
- Nobody promises the top spot. Italiaonline reports 70% of clients on page one "for the selected keywords": a number worth as much as the keywords chosen, and the person choosing them is the one selling the service.
- 2 offers out of 16 still list submitting the site to search engines (Register.it and SitoWP). It's an activity that doesn't move rankings: more on that below.
The practical upshot is simple. To compare two offers you have to ask for the quantities yourself, because they aren't on the page.
How SEO is sold in the United States: by quantity
The difference with the American market shows up on a single page. WebFX, one of the agencies in the US results for "best seo services" (and first in SEO.com's list of UK companies on Google UK), writes on its New York page: 30 to 60 optimised pages and 150 to more than 300 keyphrases depending on the plan, a monthly report on traffic and goals, rankings and competitors every quarter, a six-month commitment. The entry plan costs $5,900 for the first two months and $2,900 a month after that. Those are the prices of an agency with hundreds of staff on a market with a different labour cost: don't use them as a yardstick for a small UK business.
What's worth borrowing is the habit of writing down quantities. Packages are now the norm: in the SE Ranking survey 85% of agencies sell SEO in packages and 93% sell it alongside other services, such as paid campaigns, social, web design and maintenance. And on rates Europe sits a step lower: 47% of European agencies bill less than $75 an hour.
In the UK the typical client is small. At the start of 2025 there were 5.69 million private sector businesses, and 4.27 million (75%) had no employees other than the owners; of the 1.42 million that do employ staff, 1.15 million have between one and nine employees, according to the Business population estimates 2025 from the Department for Business and Trade. People buying on a small budget need to know how many hours sit inside a retainer more, not less.
What's inside a real contract
As a point of comparison, here is what one of our 2026 contracts with an Italian SME contains, already described in our article on how much SEO costs: 12 monthly payments of €1,560. Inside there are:
- ongoing SEO strategy, with activities defined month by month;
- guidelines for new pages handed to whoever writes them;
- rank tracking, with the cost of the tool paid by us;
- CMS and server support, plugin licences included;
- management of Google Tag Manager and GA4;
- Google Ads campaign management, with a monthly report (how hours are split between the two channels is explained in our piece on SEO and Google Ads working together).
Three services in the same fee, as with 93% of the agencies in the SE Ranking survey. And part of the fee is software, not work. A quote should keep those two things apart, and almost no service page does.
What the first months of an ongoing service produce, on two clients whose data is already public. Sunscape, which develops solar farms in Italy, went in six months from March 2026 from 1 to 38 keywords on page one out of 143 tracked, and from 46 to 195 organic clicks a month. Macropix, an Italian LED wall manufacturer, took "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor) from position 88 to position 2 between 2020 and 2025, and in July 2026 it holds a 25.55% share of voice on its cluster, ahead of Amazon at 18.08% (full case). Six months for the first signs, years to own a niche: SEO timescales are as much part of the service as the activities.
How much SEO services cost
In the Italian sample, the four offers with a public price run from €647.45 a year plus VAT for 10 pages (Register.it) to €500 a month as the base for a full campaign (Valentino Mea). In the UK, the six pricing guides on page one of Google UK for "how much does seo cost" state monthly retainers from £300 to over £25,000, while Bark, the marketplace connecting buyers with freelancers and agencies, gives £400-1,500 a month and £40-100 an hour. Sources, bands and how to read them are in our article on SEO prices in the UK.
The quickest check on a quote is still dividing it by the hourly rate. At £40 to £100 an hour, £500 a month buys between 5 and 12.5 hours of work. What can and can't be done below that threshold is worked out in our analysis of cheap SEO.
How to compare two quotes: six questions
Two of the six come from Google's page on choosing an SEO, the others from the items missing in the table above. If you need the full set, they're in the 21 questions to ask an SEO agency.
- How many hours, or how many pages, are included each month? If the answer is "it depends", ask at least for the hours in the first quarter.
- What results do you expect, and in what timeframe? It's one of the questions Google recommends asking. An answer without a timeframe is half an answer.
- What's in the report and how often does it arrive? Rankings, Search Console clicks and enquiries generated are three different things: ask which you'll see.
- Who writes the content and who publishes it? If you write it, the retainer buys advice and editing, not production.
- Is link building monitoring or acquisition? If it's acquisition: how many links, from what kind of sites, at what extra cost.
- Are the accounts in my name? Search Console, GA4, Tag Manager and the Business Profile must stay yours when the contract ends.
If you're writing the request for proposal yourself, the structure to use is in our guide to the SEO RFP.
Warning signs to watch for
The ranking guarantee. Google rules it out in writing: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google" (Search Central). Anyone who promises it is selling something they don't control.
Success rates on keywords chosen by the provider. 70% of clients on page one is worth as much as the keywords it's measured on. Ask which ones they are and how much traffic they bring.
Search engine submission sold as a valuable item. According to Google's SEO starter guide, "the vast majority of sites listed in our results are found and added automatically as we crawl the web". Submitting a sitemap through Search Console takes a few minutes and costs nothing. If that item takes up a prominent line in the package, read the rest carefully.
The "complete" package with no quantities. Content, links, technical work and reporting inside a retainer of a few hundred pounds means, once you do the maths, a few hours spread across everything. A narrower service with the quantities in writing is better.
Agency, freelancer or in-house
The same list of activities weighs differently depending on who carries it out. A freelancer costs less per hour but usually covers one or two areas; an agency brings together technical, editorial and analytical profiles; an in-house hire knows the product better than anyone but often works alone. The pros and cons, with costs, are in our comparison of in-house SEO and agencies.
Frequently asked questions
Usually an initial audit, technical SEO, keyword research and on-page optimisation, content, link building and regular reporting. Local, ecommerce and international SEO, migrations and optimisation for AI search are added depending on the type of site.
It depends on the hours it contains. The six UK pricing guides on page one of Google UK for how much SEO costs state monthly retainers from £300 to over £25,000; the Bark marketplace gives £400-1,500 a month and £40-100 an hour.
No. Google says so in its own documentation: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Usually every month. Of the 16 Italian offers we read, 4 state a monthly report, 1 monthly or quarterly and 1 every two months; the other 10 don't say.
No. Google finds most sites automatically as it crawls the web. To speed up indexing, submitting the sitemap through Search Console is enough, and it costs nothing.
It depends on what's written down. A package can only be compared if it states quantities (pages, hours, content); a tailored service makes sense when the site has specific problems, as long as the quote still states the hours.
The item no price list can write down
The 16 pages list activities. None lists decisions. Yet in an SEO service the most valuable part is often the one that stops doing something: the pages not to write, the keywords to drop, the content to merge or remove.
We saw it on an Italian site that was buying a low-cost package: 9% of impressions came from articles on "what https means" and "what hashtags are", for a company that provides consulting to dental practices. The service worked every month, with its articles and its report, and took the site in the wrong direction. A quote can't put judgement in a table, but you can ask whoever sends it what they would remove from your site first. If you want that answer for your own site, start from our SEO service or look at the projects where we've given it.
