SEO Cost Calculator for India
Estimate a realistic monthly and first-year SEO budget before you ask for quotes. Choose your market, competition, content volume and add-ons; the ranges update instantly.
Estimated monthly budget
These are Indian market ranges taken from our SEO pricing guide, not a Brainguru quote. Real proposals vary with the keywords, the site and the deliverables, so use this to sanity-check quotes and set a budget.
What Each Line of Your SEO Budget Pays For
An SEO quote bundles several kinds of work. Seeing them separately makes it easier to compare proposals that price the same job very differently.
Base retainer
Keyword research, on-page optimisation, technical fixes, reporting and strategy. Driven by how broad your market is and how hard your industry is to rank in.
Content
New articles and pages, priced per piece. Researched or expert-reviewed content costs more and is usually what earns rankings in competitive topics.
Link building
Outreach, digital PR and partnerships that earn links from relevant sites. Directory and paid-link packages are cheaper and risk a Google penalty.
AI search (GEO)
Making your brand easy for ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews to understand and cite: entity facts, answer-ready pages, crawler access.
One-off setup
An audit and clean-up before growth work starts. Skipped on healthy sites; essential after a migration or years of neglect.
First-year total
Setup plus twelve months. SEO compounds slowly, so this is the number to approve — not one month's fee.
Get a Useful Estimate in 4 Steps
Describe the market you need to win
Local means customers in one city; All of India means national keywords; e-commerce adds product and category pages at scale; international adds countries and languages.
Be honest about competition and site health
If the first page of Google for your main keyword is full of large brands or marketplaces, choose High. If your site has indexing errors, slow pages or a recent redesign, choose Needs fixes or Major clean-up.
Set content volume and add-ons
Four researched articles a month is a common starting point for SMEs. Add link building if competitors have many more referring domains than you, and GEO if buyers research in AI assistants.
Use the range to judge quotes
Quotes far below the low end usually leave out content or links; quotes far above should list extra deliverables. Our SEO pricing guide explains what each tier should include.
Questions to Ask Any SEO Provider
- Exactly what is delivered each month? Number of pages optimised, articles, links, and hours — in writing.
- How are links earned? Ask for examples. Bulk directory submissions and paid guest posts can harm rankings.
- Who does the work? The pitch team is often not the delivery team. Ask who writes the content and who fixes technical issues.
- What is measured? Rankings alone can be gamed. Ask for organic leads or sales, tracked in your own Google Analytics and Search Console.
- What happens if you leave? Content, accounts and reports should belong to you.
Want to see what is wrong with your site before you budget? Run it through the free Website SEO Analyzer, then read about our SEO services if you would like help.
SEO Cost in India: Frequently Asked Questions
Most Indian businesses pay between ₹15,000 and ₹1,50,000 a month. Local and early-stage businesses usually sit at ₹15,000–30,000, growing SMEs at ₹30,000–75,000, and competitive industries such as finance, legal, e-commerce and SaaS at ₹75,000 or more. Enterprise programmes start around ₹1,50,000.
From the market ranges in our SEO pricing guide for India: the four retainer tiers, ₹2,000–12,000 per article for content, and ₹25,000–1,50,000 for one-off technical audits and clean-ups. Link building and AI-search work are estimated as a share of the retainer so they scale with the size of the job. They are market ranges, not a Brainguru price list.
Two quotes for the same-sounding scope can differ by three times, because they include different deliverables, different people and different link-building methods. A range is honest; a single number would be false precision. Use the low end as the floor for credible work and ask any quote above the high end to explain the difference.
Usually, yes. The calculator prices a freelancer at 60–80% of an agency for the same scope, because a freelancer has fewer people, tools and review steps. The trade-off is capacity: one person rarely covers technical SEO, content and outreach equally well, so check what the freelancer will not do.
Work done once before growth work starts: a technical audit, fixing crawl and indexing problems, cleaning up thin or duplicate pages, or handling a site migration. A healthy site may need little or none; a site with years of accumulated problems can need ₹75,000–1,50,000 of clean-up first.
If buyers in your market research in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews, yes. GEO work — clear entity information, answer-ready content, citations and crawler access — overlaps with good SEO, so the calculator adds it as a smaller share of the retainer rather than a second full budget.
Plan for at least three months before judging movement and six to twelve months for meaningful traffic, which is why most Indian retainers run six to twelve months with a three-month minimum. The first-year figure in the calculator is the budget to plan for, not a monthly commitment you can stop after four weeks.
Have a Budget? Let's Scope the Work.
Tell us your market and goals and we will explain which SEO work is worth paying for first — and which is not.
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