The two numbers nobody talks about in SEO

Every SEO price you're quoted is half a number. The other half sits on your side of the table, uninvoiced, and it's the bigger half.

A hundred and twenty-nine a month for the tool. Four thousand for the agency. Custom-quote-call-us for the enterprise platform. Every one of those prices is only the half you can see.

The half they quote: a tool reads your site, checks Search Console, and hands you a list. Broken schema on product pages. A thin page that should be three. A keyword ranking 12th that could rank 6th with 200 more words. The tools are good at finding this. That's what the invoice buys.

The half they don't: somebody has to actually do all of it. Read the list, decide what's real, open the CMS, edit the page, re-test, then do the same fix on the next page. That somebody is on your team, a marketer or developer at $75 to $120 an hour, loaded. Call it $95. Nobody puts that on a slide.

Does the enterprise tier make the labor go away? No. Go up to $30,000 to $150,000 a year and the labor number doesn't drop. You pay a hundred grand for a much prettier version of the same list, and your team is still opening the CMS one page at a time.

It's structural. These tools have no write access to what actually renders your site. A systemic problem, every product page emitting the wrong schema, gets reported once and fixed N times, by hand, by you. A crawler finds a flaw across ten thousand URLs in four seconds, then watches you fix them one at a time for three weeks.

So what is the real price? Before you sign anything, do the thing they hope you won't. Take the service fee, honestly estimate your team's hours acting on what they sell you, multiply by your loaded hourly cost, add it. Whatever you land on, that's the real price. The first number was only ever half of it.

The first number was only ever half of it. When we run Beacon on a client's site, the fix list comes with an honest read of the labor behind it, not just the invoice.