SEO rates in Ireland, and what a monthly retainer costs

Almost every SEO quote is one of three shapes, and knowing which one you are reading is what makes two figures comparable.

A monthly retainer buys continuous work. Technical fixes, new or rewritten pages, monitoring and a report, repeating for as long as you keep paying. It suits a business that keeps competing for the same searches as somebody else.

A fixed-price project has a scope and an end date. Rebuilding a site's page structure, recovering indexing after a migration, rewriting a set of service pages. Nothing renews when it finishes.

A one-off audit is for deciding rather than doing. You get the problems ranked by impact, the evidence behind each, and the fix. You can hand that to your own developer, to another agency, or back to us.

Hourly and day rates exist as well, usually with freelancers. Easy to compare on paper, hard to budget for, because the total only exists once the work is over.

Retainers vary, but the components are standard enough to check a quote against.

Technical work: indexing and crawling, page speed, titles and meta descriptions, heading structure, structured data, internal links, and language tags if you sell in more than one country.

Keyword and intent mapping: deciding which page answers which search, so two of your own pages do not end up competing for the same one.

Content: new pages, and rewriting pages that already exist but are aimed at nothing in particular.

Local visibility: your Google Business Profile, the way your name, address and phone number appear everywhere else, and the reviews attached to them. For a business serving one county, this is often the part that produces enquiries first.

Measurement, and a written report you can check yourself.

Normally outside the fee: design and new page templates, migration to a different platform, paid advertising, photography, translation, and development inside a platform somebody else built. Ask for those to be named on the quote rather than assumed.

Whatever the figure is, it is invoiced in euro and it is the amount you pay. Nothing is added afterwards.

Inside the monthly work: the technical list above, one page per commercial intent, rewriting what already exists before adding anything new, and a report built from your own Search Console property. Every number in it comes from a tool you own, so you can check us without asking us first.

The report shows impressions and clicks by query, average position by query and page against the previous month, indexing errors, queries appearing for the first time, and the pages we touched.

Quoted separately, every time: design work, migrations, paid media, photography and translation.

Not every site needs a retainer from month one. If the technical base is broken, paying for content on top of it every month means paying twice.

An audit is enough when you are about to rebuild or migrate and want to know what to protect. When traffic has dropped and nobody can say why. When you have a developer who can implement but not diagnose. Or when a previous supplier has left and you want to know what was actually done.

An audit is not enough when the site is technically sound and the real gap is that your competitors publish and you do not. No report fixes that.

Before any of it, there is a free automated scan on our site: 27 checks in four areas, indexing, meta tags, speed and structured data, with a score on the spot. It is a scan, not an audit. It tells you where to look; the paid audit is a person reading the site and deciding what matters.

Searches about SEO rates in Ireland mix two questions. One is what an agency charges for the service. The other is what an SEO specialist earns as an employee. They are not comparable, and treating them as if they were is how budgets go wrong.

An agency fee covers more than one person's hours: the technical work, the writing, the tools, the reporting, and the time that goes into deciding what to do before anybody does it. A salary covers one person, full time, with everything an employer carries around that person.

If you are choosing between hiring and outsourcing, the useful comparison is not rate against rate. It is whether you have enough SEO work to fill a role every month, and whether somebody in the building can direct that person once hired. If neither is true, you are paying a salary for a partly used skill set.

The honest lower bound is the point where the fee pays for real hours. Below roughly two days of work a month there is no time to research, implement, write and measure, so the money goes on reporting that somebody was busy.

A small budget spent well looks different from a small budget spread thin. Fewer targets, chosen for commercial intent rather than search volume. Work on the pages you already have before adding more. And the steps taken in the order that produces enquiries soonest: fix what is technically broken, give each service its own page instead of one page listing everything, make the Google Business Profile agree with the site, then publish. If the budget only covers one of those a quarter, take them in that order.

We do not sell link packages, we do not place links on sites that exist only to sell them, and we do not run reciprocal schemes. If a quote you are comparing includes a monthly quota of links, ask where they come from before comparing the price against ours.

Links matter. Bought ones carry a risk that lands on your domain, not the supplier's, and undoing that costs more than the visibility it bought.

What we do instead is slower: work that makes a page worth linking to, credit links from client sites where the client agreed in writing, and the listings your business is entitled to.

Mechanically this is an ordinary cross-border arrangement inside the single market. We invoice from Romania, in euro, by bank transfer, monthly, and we need your full company details to issue the invoice, the same as any other EU supplier.

The tax treatment of that invoice for an Irish company is confirmed in writing on your quote, before anything starts, rather than in a general sentence on a page that cannot know your situation. For a build rather than a retainer, read how we invoice a website project for Irish clients.

Practically, the month looks the same wherever you are: one point of contact, calls in English, a written summary after each, and access to the same reporting we work from.

Related pages: how we invoice a website project for Irish clients