Service
Local SEO services priced by location
Google Business Profile management and local ranking work from $300/mo for one location, with GBP posts, citation work and a monthly rank grid counted per tier.
In one line
Local SEO services aim at map results and location-based queries rather than national rankings, from $300/mo. Here it covers Google Business Profile optimization, a counted number of GBP posts each month, citation work, and a rank grid showing where a business ranks across its service area.
Local SEO services and what each tier costs
These local seo services are billed at the price shown, with no scoping call in the way. Profile audit within 5 business days.
Every tier is billed monthly, and the scope is fixed by a brief you agree before anything is invoiced.
This search returns a local pack plus national agencies whose pages describe the service and hide the price. Almost none publish per-location pricing, which is the number a multi-location buyer needs.
Starter
1 location
$250/mo billed yearly
- GBP audit + optimization
- 4 GBP posts/mo
- Citation check
- Monthly rank grid
- Not included: Review generation campaigns
- Not included: Multi-location management
Growth
Up to 3 locations
$542/mo billed yearly
- Everything in Starter
- 8 GBP posts/mo
- Citation building, 20/mo
- Review response drafting
Scale
Up to 10 locations
$1,167/mo billed yearly
- Everything in Growth
- Per-location rank grids
- Local landing pages
- Quarterly strategy review
Everything each tier includes and excludes
The same list that drives the price cards, laid out so the tiers can be read against each other. Exclusions are printed because an unstated exclusion is what turns a good month into an argument.
Starter
1 location
Included
- GBP audit + optimization
- 4 GBP posts/mo
- Citation check
- Monthly rank grid
Not included
- Review generation campaigns
- Multi-location management
Growth
Up to 3 locations
Included
- Everything in Starter
- 8 GBP posts/mo
- Citation building, 20/mo
- Review response drafting
Scale
Up to 10 locations
Included
- Everything in Growth
- Per-location rank grids
- Local landing pages
- Quarterly strategy review
Which tier you actually need
Tiers here are separated by location count, because that is what actually drives the work: every location has its own profile, its own citations, and its own rank grid.
All three local seo services run the same process and the same reporting. What changes between them is volume.
Starter
One location or one service area, with a profile that exists and is verified but has never been worked on properly.
You are on this tier when: You have one pin on the map and nobody has audited the categories since the profile was created.
Growth
Two or three locations, where citation consistency across them has started to drift and reviews need answering.
You are on this tier when: You are finding conflicting addresses or phone numbers on directory sites, or reviews are going unanswered for weeks.
Scale
Up to ten locations, where per-location measurement and local landing pages are the difference between growth and noise.
You are on this tier when: An averaged rank number across your locations has stopped telling you anything useful.
Your primary category should be the most closely aligned with what you want to rank for.
Why this matters
What a local SEO month actually contains
Local work lives or dies on the profile and the citations behind it, both of which are countable. Here is the month in counts rather than in promises about the map pack.
How a month actually runs
Order, brief, production, delivery, report. The same four steps every month, so a second month can be compared against a first.
- 1
Day 1 to 5
Profile audit
Categories, services, hours, attributes, photos and duplicate listings. The audit lands within 5 business days.
- 2
Week 2
Corrections applied
Fixes made on the profile and any incorrect citations flagged for correction.
- 3
Ongoing
Posting and citations
GBP posts at the tier’s cadence, citation work from Growth upward, review responses drafted for you to send.
- 4
Month end
Rank grid and report
The grid, the changes made, and what runs next month.
Why review generation is excluded
We draft responses to reviews and we do not run campaigns to solicit them. Incentivised or gated review solicitation breaches Google’s prohibited and restricted content policy, and the risk lands on your profile rather than on ours.
Responding well to the reviews you already have is legitimate, useful, and included from Growth upward.
This is one of several places on this site where the honest answer is a smaller scope rather than a bigger invoice.
The business with 500 reviews can outrank the business with 5,000 reviews... It is called review recency.
Why this matters
What actually moves map rankings
- Primary category accuracy, which is the single highest-leverage field on the profile
- Proximity, which nobody can change, and which is why the grid matters
- Consistent name, address and phone data across the citations that exist
- Activity on the profile: posts, photos, answered questions, responded reviews
Two of those four are administrative and get fixed in the first fortnight. The rest is cumulative, which is why this is sold monthly rather than as a one-off cleanup.
A typical local SEO retainer
- Price
- Quoted per business
- Ranking proof
- A single average position
- GBP posts
- "Regular posting"
- Reviews
- Generation campaigns upsold
- Multi-location
- Custom quote
The Super Panel
- Price
- Published per location band
- Ranking proof
- A grid across the service area
- GBP posts
- A counted number per month
- Reviews
- Response drafting only, and it is stated
- Multi-location
- Up to 3 at Growth, up to 10 at Scale
The top of this search is a map pack, and we are not in it
Search this term and the first three results are not pages. They are businesses: agencies with phone numbers, opening hours and near-perfect ratings on dozens of reviews.
That block is a local pack, and it is awarded to businesses with a verified physical presence. This is a global remote service with no storefront, no address and no profile of its own, so it cannot appear there and does not pretend it can.
It is worth knowing what you are choosing between: a local agency you could visit, or a remote provider that publishes its prices. Both are legitimate, and they are not the same purchase.
What the price buys at each tier
Cost per location, worked out
Short answer
Starter is $300 for one location. Growth works out at roughly $217 a location across three, and Scale at $140 a location across ten. The unit falls because profile work overlaps between locations.
Citations, category research and the reporting format are largely shared once the first location is set up, which is a genuine efficiency rather than a discount.
Local SEO pricing is usually quoted as one monthly retainer with no location count beside it, which makes two quotes impossible to compare. The published price here is per tier and the location cap is on the card.
What does not share is the profile itself. Each location needs its own posts, its own photos and its own grid, which is why the count is capped per tier rather than sold as unlimited.
Who owns the Google Business Profile
You do. The profile stays in your name and under your ownership, and we work with access rather than possession. Cancelling ends our access, not your profile.
This is the single most important question to ask any local SEO provider, and none of the pages ranking above this one addresses it.
A provider that creates or owns your profile owns your local presence. Recovering it is possible and it is not quick.
The same applies to name, address and phone consistency across directories, to your service areas, and to the categories themselves. A local SEO company should be editing those assets, not holding them.
The ownership position is part of what cancelling Local SEO & GBP means in the terms.
What local SEO pricing includes, and what sets the number
The monthly figure buys a defined scope, not a block of hours.
At the Starter price of $300 that scope is one Google Business Profile audited and rebuilt, four GBP posts written and published each month, a citation check, and a monthly rank grid.
A quiet month and a busy month cost the same, because the deliverables are counted rather than timed.
Three things set the number, and only three. The first is how many locations the profile work has to cover, which is the cap printed on each card.
The second is whether citations are checked or actively built: checking is a Starter task, building twenty a month starts at Growth. The third is how the reporting is cut, either one rank grid for the business or a separate grid for every location.
Two items sit outside the Starter price and are not folded in quietly. Review generation campaigns are excluded, and so is multi-location management.
If either is what you need, the tier above is the honest answer rather than a surcharge on this one.
How the local SEO pricing packages differ once you divide by location
The three local SEO pricing packages are priced per tier, and the useful comparison is the per-location unit rather than the headline.
Growth at $650 covers three locations and Scale at $1,400 covers ten, so the unit keeps falling while the scope per location holds.
Paid yearly, ten months are charged instead of twelve, which puts Growth at $542 a month and Scale at $1,167. The billing term changes the invoice and nothing in the scope.
The price also does not move with results. It is the same each month whether the rank grid improves or holds, because charging more for a good month would mean charging for luck.
If a tier stops fitting, the change is a move between published tiers, not a renegotiation.
Nothing above is a quote. It is the same published number on the cards, explained.
What the reviews rule actually forbids, and what it allows
Two things get said about the FTC reviews rule, and both are wrong. One is that every negative review must stay up. The other is that any review can quietly be taken down.
The rule sits between them. What section 465.7(b) forbids is misrepresenting that the reviews on display are most or all of those submitted, while filtering by rating or sentiment. Withholding under criteria applied equally to every review is expressly permitted.
Those criteria are listed: defamatory or obscene content, someone else’s personal information, content that is clearly false, a review the seller reasonably believes is fake, or one wholly unrelated to what is sold. A neutral moderation policy is lawful; a sentiment filter presented as a complete review set is not.
For a small business this is a policy question, not a technical one. Whether you are a service area business, a clinic, a restaurant, a trades operation or a multi-site brand, what is included in the work here is drafting responses and keeping the policy even. It is not deciding which customers get heard.
What this does not say: The permitted criteria are those listed in the section. A policy that is neutral on paper but applied selectively is not protected by the exception.
What review suppression looks like from the customer’s side
A documented first-hand account, not a market pattern. Individual consumers' own accounts of what happened to them after posting reviews, gathered during the FTC investigation and recited in the complaint's Consumer Complaints section.
The rule describes suppression in the abstract. A federal complaint filed in 2024 describes what it looked like to the people it happened to, which is more useful.
One consumer posted a negative review and his spouse received a text. Another removed reviews in exchange for a refund.
One received threatening emails from an entity styling itself as the company’s legal department. Another wrote and rewrote a review until a version survived removal.
These are allegations, unproven when filed, and they are recited by the Commission from what individual consumers reported during its investigation. What they illustrate is the reason a uniformly positive review profile is weak evidence rather than strong.
It is also why proximity to the searcher, and distance from the searcher, matter more here than review counts do. Rank tracking through a grid rather than a single position is what shows that, and tools like BrightLocal exist because a single position hides it.
None of this is visible in a directory listing. Semrush Agency Partners and the rest rank providers on profile completeness rather than on review conduct, which is one more reason a productized service states what it does instead of pointing at a badge.
What this does not say: These are consumer accounts as pleaded by the Commission, unproven at filing and summarized rather than quoted in full.
What local SEO packages cover, tier by tier
Local SEO, one of the eight lines here, runs from one location at Starter to ten at Scale, with the profile work, the posting cadence, citation building and the rank grid all counted rather than described.
What we cannot show you, and what to check instead
The three businesses in the map pack above this page carry 5.0 ratings on 35, 164 and 47 reviews between them (all observed 2026-09-06). There is nothing comparable here, and none of it will be invented.
What can be checked instead is on this page: the price per location, what is excluded at each tier, who owns the profile, and a rank grid you can read without anyone interpreting it for you.
- Ask any provider what one location costs, not what the bundle costs
- Ask who the Google Business Profile is registered to
- Ask whether reviews are responded to or generated
- Ask to see a rank grid rather than an average position
How billing works, and what cancelling changes
Billed monthly in advance. There is no minimum contract and no notice period, so cancelling stops the next renewal. The profile, its posts and its photos stay yours.
Nothing is removed from a profile because a retainer ended. The work already published stays published.
When local SEO is the wrong spend
Local SEO does nothing for a business with no service area, no verified profile it can access, or a category where customers never search geographically. Review generation campaigns are also excluded at every tier, deliberately.
- You have no physical location and no defined service area.
- Nobody can get owner access to the Google Business Profile.
- You want us to solicit reviews at volume. Review generation campaigns are excluded at every tier.
- You need multi-location management on Starter. That starts at Growth.
Questions before you order
Profile suspended, or unsure whether you are even eligible for one? Describe the setup before you order. Eligibility is a yes or no question, and it is cheaper to answer it first.
How much should I pay for local SEO?
Here it is $300/mo for one location, $650 for up to three, and $1,400 for up to ten. A fully managed provider ranking on this term publishes $1,299/mo, and an agency directory lists its companies from $5,000.
What does one location cost?
About $300 at Starter, roughly $217 a location at Growth, and $140 a location at Scale. The unit falls because citations, category research and reporting are largely shared once the first location is set up.
Are reviews included, or generated for me?
Neither generated nor bought. Review generation campaigns are excluded at every tier because incentivised reviews sit against platform policy and put the profile at risk. Drafting responses to real reviews is included from Growth.
Who owns the Google Business Profile, me or you?
You do. It stays in your name and we work with access rather than possession, so cancelling ends our access rather than your profile. Ask any provider this before anything else.
Is there a setup or onboarding fee?
No. The monthly figure on the tier is the only number.
Is there a minimum contract or a notice period?
Neither. Billing is monthly, cancelling stops the next renewal, and nothing already published on the profile is removed.
Can you get me into the map pack?
No one can promise that. Proximity to the searcher is the strongest map ranking factor and it cannot be bought. What these tiers work on is everything that can be changed: categories, completeness, posts, citations and review responses.
Can I rank outside my physical service area?
Only to a limited degree, and less than most providers imply. A business physically closer to the searcher starts ahead. Local landing pages at Scale help with the web results; they do not move the map pack.
What is a rank grid and why does it beat a single position?
A grid shows your position at many points across a geographic area rather than one averaged number. Averages hide exactly the variation local SEO is trying to change. Per-location grids come with Scale.
Do citations still matter?
Less than they once did, and they are still worth being correct. Inconsistent name, address and phone data across directories is a drag rather than a lever, which is why Starter checks them and Growth builds them.
Sources cited on this page
| Source | Cited for |
|---|---|
| Google’s prohibited and restricted content policy for reviews | Cited for the review generation exclusion. |
| Google’s guidelines for representing your business | Cited for profile accuracy requirements. |
Start Local SEO & GBP from $300/mo
Pick a tier and send the order. You get a brief form and a start date within one business day, and nothing is charged until that brief is agreed.
Entry point $300/mo. Cancel any time. No long contracts.
Still deciding?
Read how the process runs end to end: order, brief, production, delivery, report.
How it worksLocal work is priced per location: the local SEO tiers, and the organic retainer for everything that is not the map pack.
Sources
| Google's guidelines for representing your business | Google Help, read 2026-09-06 |
|---|---|
| Google's prohibited and restricted content policy for reviews | Google Help, read 2026-09-06 |
Each link was opened on the date shown. Where a figure is illustrative rather than measured, the page says so beside it.