The honest bands
SEO pricing in India swings from ₹5,000/month scams to ₹2,00,000/month enterprise retainers, and the pitch quality is inversely proportional to the price transparency. Here is what senior SEO work costs from this desk, published plainly:
| Scope | Honest band (INR) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO audit (one-time) | ₹28,000 – ₹1,13,000 | Full crawl, CWV field data, schema, indexation, prioritized fixes |
| Monthly retainer, execution | ₹17,000 – ₹85,000 | 10–25 hours/month: fixes, content direction, monitoring |
| Hourly, senior | ₹1,900 – ₹3,300 | The India band behind the published benchmarks |
| Migration SEO (replatform safety) | ₹68,000 – ₹2,26,000 | URL maps, redirects, staging checks, post-launch monitoring |
These bands price senior execution. Budget SEO at ₹8,000/month and you are buying automated reports, not engineering.
What a real audit contains
- Full crawl with indexation analysis: what Google actually sees vs what you think it sees.
- Core Web Vitals against field data, not lab scores.
- Schema and structured data review.
- Content-versus-intent mapping on your money pages.
- A prioritized fix list with effort estimates, written so a developer can execute it.
The guarantee question, settled
Nobody honest guarantees rankings. Google's own documentation says nobody can guarantee placement. What can be promised: correct technical foundations, content aligned to search intent, measurable improvements in crawl health and Core Web Vitals, and transparent reporting. If an Indian agency promises page-one results in 90 days, ask them to put the exact keywords and dates in the contract. Watch what happens.
Red flags in Indian SEO quotes
- Ranking guarantees with no named keyword list in writing.
- 500 directory submissions and 20 articles per month: link schemes that age badly.
- Proposals with no audit: work without diagnosis is guessing with a retainer.
- Owned PBN "network access" mentioned as a selling point.
- Reporting that shows traffic graphs but never a single technical change.
How to evaluate any quote
Ask three questions: What will you change on my site, concretely? How will we measure that it worked? What happens if we stop paying after three months? Honest answers name specific fixes, a measurement plan, and leave your site better than they found it regardless. The SEO services page lists exactly what this desk executes, and the cost calculator builds your project's context first.