One local SEO package: $500 a month, website included
Almost every local SEO package page ends at a "request a custom quote" button. This one starts with the price: $500 a month, $0 upfront, the website included, and after 12 months you own the site.
The package covers the website itself along with Google Business Profile management, a review system, citation cleanup, location content, and lead tracking. I'm Tim Speciale, I run Better Off Growth from Maryville, Tennessee, and I built it for the service businesses I work with in Blount County and across East Tennessee, including local SEO for contractors and local SEO for HVAC companies. Before you buy from me or anyone else, here is what a local SEO package should contain and what the market actually charges for one.
What a local SEO package should include
Strip the branding off any credible vendor's proposal and the same six items should be underneath. Hold this list against every quote you collect, including mine.
- Google Business Profile work. Categories, services, photos, posts, Q&A, and the monthly management that keeps the profile accurate and active.
- A review system. A repeatable way to ask every customer at the moment the job closes, plus human responses to what comes in. Recency beats lifetime count.
- Citations, cleaned and consistent. Your name, address, and phone matching across Google, Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, Yelp, and your industry's top directories. Cleanup once, then monitoring. A 300-directory blast is old SEO sold at current prices.
- Website work. A substantial page for each core service and each town you serve, LocalBusiness schema, crawlable contact details, and load speed. The map pack reads your site for relevance.
- Tracking tied to leads. Calls, form fills, and direction requests, with sources attached. Rankings are an input.
- Reporting you can read in five minutes.
Where proposals go wrong is pricing deliverables as counts. If a package promises 20 citations and 4 posts a month, ask which outcome each count maps to. Counts are how a package hides thin work. The full do-it-yourself version of this work is in Local SEO for Small Business; this page is for owners who would rather hand it off.
What my package includes
The package is my Digital Foundations plan: $500 a month, $0 upfront, 12-month term.
- A hand-coded website built on Astro and served from Cloudflare's edge: static files, no WordPress, no page builder, no plugin patch cycle. Google's mobile performance test scores this site 94 (August 2026).
- Hosting, maintenance, and content updates for as long as you subscribe.
- Google Business Profile setup and monthly management.
- A review request system your crew can run from a phone.
- Citation cleanup and ongoing monitoring across the major directories.
- A page for each core service and each town you serve, written by me with actual local knowledge rather than a city name swapped into a template.
- A new page or post every month, targeting a search your customers actually make.
- A quarterly check-in where we look at the numbers together and decide what the next quarter's work should be.
- Lead capture and a dashboard showing every call and form fill and where each one came from.
After month 12 the site is yours to keep, an arrangement I call Digital Equity. If you leave early, the buyout is the remaining months at full rate. I put that here because most subscription web vendors make you email them to find out. If you only want the website with none of the SEO work, that exists too at $250 a month; the pricing page has both side by side.
What I won't sell you
Bulk citation submissions. Three hundred directory listings impress in a report and move nothing. You need the major platforms correct and consistent, and then you need the vendor to stop billing you for volume.
Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. A ranking guarantee is either a keyword nobody searches or a promise the vendor has no way to keep, and either way it tells you how they sell.
A $99 discount tier. After tools and overhead, a sub-$200 retainer buys an hour or two of actual labor a month, which forces templated audits and thin content. What SEO retainers actually cost, with survey data and sources, is in how much SEO costs for a small business. If $500 a month is out of reach right now, do the Google Business Profile and review work yourself with the free playbook above and come back for the site later.
What happens in months one through twelve
Month one is build and cleanup. The new site goes up, the Google Business Profile gets completed and categorized, citations get fixed, and the review system starts running on your next closed job.
Months two and three are when indexing and early movement show. My own tracking backs this up: a Blount County landscaping client came to me effectively invisible online, with a Facebook page, no Google Business Profile, and a website an old vendor had stopped updating, and had indexed, ranking service pages in about 60 days. Plan on the window I quote every client: measurable movement inside 60 to 90 days.
Months four through nine are compounding. Reviews accumulate with recency, location pages mature, and the map pack starts producing calls. I tell clients to expect revenue traction in months six to nine, and I put that expectation in writing at kickoff. By month twelve you have a working local lead channel and, under Digital Equity, you own the site it runs on.
How you'll know it's working
You get two things every month: a live dashboard showing calls, form fills, and direction requests, each with its source, and a short plain-language note from me on what happened and what comes next. The dashboard is always on, so you can see what the $500 produced in any given month without waiting for the note. Behind both I watch four numbers: map pack position for your money keywords, Google Business Profile calls and directions, review count and recency, and organic leads. The mechanics of the first one are in How to Rank Higher on Google Maps, and if you're in Blount County, local SEO in Maryville, TN covers what this looks like at home.