SEO packages: what is actually inside a monthly plan?
Published Canadian packages for a small business run about $500 to $1,500 a month, and the most cited guides put the sensible floor at $1,000. Ours is $299 CAD a month with hosting inside it. That is not a third of the work for a third of the price. It is a shorter list, and the lines we left off are the ones Google’s spam policy names.
This page does three things. It puts the published ranges in one table with their dates. It reads a typical package line by line, so “10 keywords” and “5 backlinks a month” mean something before you sign. And it shows the $299 list next to what it deliberately excludes, so you can decide whether the missing lines are ones you wanted.
Updated 2026-08-28 · every price read off its source on that date
SEO pricing in Canada, in one table.
All figures CAD as each source states them, read 2026-08-28. Neither published range starts below $500, and the second source says outright that under $500 you should ask what you are really getting, naming automated backlinks, low-quality content and no strategy. That warning is right. It is also the exact list we do not sell.
| Source | Small business | Growing | Competitive or enterprise | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Canada, “How Much Does SEO Cost?” | $1,000 to $1,500 / mo | local SEO $1,000 to $5,000 / mo | $5,000 to $10,000 / mo | 2025-12-11 |
| A Canadian SEO agency's published cost guide | $500 to $1,500 / mo | $1,500 to $5,000 / mo | $5,000 to $15,000+ / mo | 2026-04-01 |
| Velogics, Hosting + SEO | $299 / mo, hosting included | same plan | same plan | live on /pricing |
What each line in an SEO package actually means.
A package is a list of lines. Most of them mean less than they look, and two of them are things Google says will hurt you.
| The line | What it usually means | Ask this |
|---|---|---|
| “10 keywords” or “25 keywords” | The number of search terms whose position the agency will report. It is a reporting limit, not a promise about any of them. Rank is per query and per location; a business can sit 3rd for one phrasing and 40th for the same words reversed. | Which terms, who chose them, and what volume was measured for each before they went on the list. |
| “5 backlinks a month” | Links placed on other sites in exchange for money, goods or a reciprocal link. Google's spam policy defines link spam as creating links primarily to manipulate rankings, and lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes and using automated programs to create links as examples. | Where each link will be placed, whether the site owner was paid, and whether the agency will put that answer in writing. |
| “4 blog posts a month” | A content quota. A quota published onto a site Google is not fully crawling adds to a queue it is not clearing. On a small site the usual reason pages are not indexed is crawl paths and internal links, and more pages do not fix that; they wait in the same queue. | Whether a page is written because a measured search term needs one, or because the calendar says four. |
| “Weekly Google Business Profile posts” | Posting to the profile. Google's page on local ranking names relevance, distance and prominence as the factors and does not mention posts. Posting is worth doing for the person reading the profile; it is not a ranking line. | What else is done on the profile: ownership, categories, services, verification, review replies. |
| “Monthly report” | Anything from a screenshot to a real read of Search Console and a rank tracker. | Whether the report arrives in a bad month, and whether it says what was done as well as what moved. |
| “Setup fee” | A one-time charge for an audit and initial fixes, commonly a few hundred dollars. | What the audit produces that you keep if you leave after month one. |
| “12-month agreement” | A lock-in. Some work does take months; a contract is a different thing from a timeline. | What you keep on leaving: the site, the profile, the content, the accounts. |
| “Guaranteed page one” | Nobody outside Google sells a position. The burden of proving a performance claim sits with the business making it; the statute is quoted on our cost guide. | For the guarantee in writing, with the term, the location and the remedy. |
Read a package against that table and most of the price is in three lines: the links, the content quota and the ads. Remove those three and the number changes a great deal. The statute behind the last row is quoted on what SEO costs, and the profile work behind the fourth is on what Business Profile management includes.
What a $299 monthly SEO plan includes, and what it leaves out.
What the Hosting + SEO plan contains, read off the pricing page on 2026-08-28, and beside it what it deliberately does not contain, with the reason each line is missing rather than forgotten.
So the comparison is not $299 against $1,000 for the same list. It is a list of eight lines against a list of eleven, where the three missing lines are the two Google names and the one we do not do. If you want links bought and ads run, we are the wrong provider and the $1,000 packages are priced for that work.
- Managed hosting with SSL, backups, security monitoring and updates
- Two content edits or small changes a month, with priority support
- On-page and technical SEO
- Local search and Maps 3-Pack optimization
- Google Business Profile management
- Local citations and authority building
- Monthly ranking reports
- A listed profile on the Ottawa Service Directory, our own homeowner directory, where placement cannot be bought
Not sold, and why
Link building, outreach backlinks, directory submission packages, off-site blog and forum posts
Link schemes under Google's spam policy whatever the line is called. Links are earned by publishing something worth citing, and the guides on this site are that attempt.
A blog post quota
Pages are written when a measured search term needs one and not otherwise. A page fifty people a month search for still meets the same quality bar as one with five thousand; what volume decides is which page is written next, never whether a thin one ships.
Google Ads, display, YouTube or Bing ads management
Not a service we offer. We read the ad market to price the organic opportunity, which is a different thing.
Press releases, email newsletters, stock photography, A/B testing
Not offered. Saying so beats a tick we cannot honour.
A separate setup fee
The only one-time line we publish is the website build, from $499.
Why a shorter SEO package wins for a local business.
First, for most local service businesses the market is a handful of terms, not a long tail: one head term, a small cluster of phrasings around it, and then a tail of ten searches a month each with no advertiser bidding on them. Pull the Google Ads volumes for your own trade and city and you will usually find the same shape. There is nothing for twenty blog posts to rank for; one page has to win one term, and a content quota on that market is spend with nowhere to land.
Second, the leads for a local service business are in the map results, and the map results follow the Business Profile and its reviews, not the blog. That is the single most important thing to understand about local search and it is the subject of the Maps guide. A package heavy on content and links is spending on the smaller half of the opportunity.
None of this makes $299 buy what no price buys: a ranking, reviews, time, or demand that is not there. That list is on the cost guide and it applies to every package on this page, including ours.
Bring the package you were quoted
Call and Ana, our AI receptionist, will book twenty minutes. We read the package against the table above and tell you which lines are work, which are reporting, and which are the two Google names, whoever is selling it. If the right answer is the $1,000 package, we say so.
The work itself, month by month, is described on SEO in Ottawa.
The questions a package does not answer.
1Is a $299 a month SEO plan too cheap to work?
It is too cheap to include link buying, a content quota and ads management, which is what fills a $1,000 package, and it does not include them. It is not too cheap for the technical work, the page structure, the Business Profile, the citations and a monthly report, because those are the same work at any price; they scale with the site, not with the fee. Whether it works for you depends on your market and the reviews you hold, and we measure both on the free call before quoting.
2What does “10 keywords” in an SEO package actually mean?
It means ten search terms will appear in your report. It does not mean ten terms will rank, and it says nothing about whether anyone searches them. Ask for the measured monthly volume next to each term before it goes on the list. We have found terms on package lists that no advertiser bids on and nobody searches, and terms that looked like demand but were rank-tracking bots.
3Are backlinks included in your SEO plan?
No purchased or placed links, ever. Google's spam policy lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes and automated link creation as link spam, and a penalty costs more than any link is worth. What the plan does include is a real listing on our own Ottawa Service Directory, where placement cannot be bought, and guides written to be cited. Links that arrive that way are the only kind we want on a client site.
4How many blog posts a month are in the plan?
None as a quota. A page is written when a search term we have measured needs one, and it is written to the same standard whether fifty or five thousand people search it a month. When a planned seasonal page measures 20 searches a month, the right call is to put the season on a page Google already crawls rather than mint a new URL for it. That is the opposite of a quota, and it is the call we make more often than not.
5What is in the monthly SEO report?
Positions for the tracked terms from a rank tracker, Search Console impressions and clicks for the month, what shipped, what is blocked and on whom, and what is planned next. It arrives in a bad month with the bad number in it. A report that only shows movement is a brochure, and the month it goes quiet is the month you should ask why.
6Do you sell a one-time SEO package?
No. The only one-time line we publish is the website build, from $499. SEO is monthly because the profile, the citations and the report are monthly work, and the SEO portion of every plan is month to month, so the way to try it for one month is to buy one month. There is no twelve-month agreement to sign and nothing to buy out if you leave.
This page quotes two published Canadian price ranges and two Google policies. Each is dated below so the figures can be checked against the source on the day you read this rather than the day we wrote it.
- Shopify Canada, “How Much Does SEO Cost? Simple SEO Cost Breakdown, by Service”
Published 2025-12-11, read 2026-08-28. Source of the $1,000 to $1,500 a month small-business figure, the $1,000 to $5,000 local SEO range and the $5,000 to $10,000 enterprise range, all CAD as stated.
- A Canadian SEO agency's published cost guide, “SEO Cost in Canada (2026)”
dcmarketing.ca/seo-cost, published 2026-04-01, read 2026-08-28. Source of the $500 to $1,500, $1,500 to $5,000 and $5,000 to $15,000+ ranges and of the line that under $500 a month you should ask what you are really getting. Not linked, because this site does not link competitors' sales pages; the URL is here so you can check it.
- Google Search Central, “Spam policies for Google web search”
Read 2026-08-28. Source of the link spam definition and its examples, including buying or selling links for ranking purposes and using automated programs or services to create links, and of the scaled content abuse definition.
- Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google”
Read 2026-08-28. Source of the three named factors, relevance, distance and prominence. The page does not mention posts or posting frequency.