Outsourcing SEO: what it costs and what to watch

You ask for three proposals. The first costs 299 euros per month, the second 995 and the third 2,500. They describe roughly the same thing: keyword research, technical optimisation, content and a monthly report.

That is the real problem with outsourcing SEO. Not that it is expensive, but that you cannot see from the outside what you are buying.

So I did two things. I collected the public prices of nine Dutch providers, 27 observations in total, and I looked up what Google itself advises when you hire an SEO. That last page is one almost nobody cites, even though it contains a list of warning signs that can save you a lot of money.

No names in this article, only amounts and patterns. I describe the market, not my colleagues.

What Google itself advises

Google has a documentation page titled “Do you need an SEO?”. It was last updated on 5 June 2026, and it is meant for people who want to hire someone.

Google names eight questions you should ask an SEO. In Google’s own words:

“Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?”
“Do you follow the Google Search Essentials (previously known as Webmaster Guidelines)?”
“What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?”
“What’s your experience in my industry?”
“What’s your experience in my country/city?”
“What’s your experience developing international sites?”
“How long have you been in business?”
“How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?”

Since the update of 5 June 2026 there is a second set of questions, under the heading about assessing advice and tools. Those are about AI, and the first one is the most important on the whole page:

“Do they cite official Google documentation as supporting evidence for their recommendations?”
“If they have advice on optimizing for AI experiences (also known as ‘AEO’ ‘GEO’ services), is their advice aligned with Google Search’s official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features?”

So ask for the documentation an advice rests on. If someone cannot give you that, it is an opinion. Ask straight away how you will see the result of that AI work later on; how you do that is in my article on measuring citations in ChatGPT.

One thing has disappeared from that page, and it is fair to mention it. For years there was a timeframe on it: four months to a year before you see any effect. That sentence is gone. In the update of 5 June 2026 Google itself noted that it was removing outdated examples from existing documentation, and “four months” no longer appears on the current page.

What Google still says about lead time, in the SEO starter guide: “Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months.”

So if someone promises you four months, they are quoting a sentence Google has removed.

Eleven warning signs I take from that page

Google does not set these out as a list; it is a running piece about what to watch for when you hire an SEO, with positive advice in it as well. These are the eleven signs I take from it, with the quote added where Google is sharp.

Someone who shows no interest in your business. “If they’re not interested, find someone who is.”
A guarantee of the first position. “If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else.”
Tools that claim to be approved by Google. “Be wary of tools that claim to be ‘acceptable’ or ‘approved’ by Google Search.”
Unsolicited email from agencies you have never spoken to.
Google compares that email to “‘burn fat at night’ diet pills”.
Claims about a special relationship with Google or a “priority submit”. “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
Secrecy about what exactly is being done. “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.”
Misleading content in your name. Pay attention to this one: “Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.”
Server changes that are not explained.
A link to the agency on your site. “You should never have to link to an SEO.”
Link packages and submitting to thousands of search engines. “These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines, at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.”

Point 8 is the one people underestimate. If an agency you hired fills your site with pages that only exist to play Google, then that is your site and your risk. Google calls that scaled content abuse, and the spam policies describe it as “many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users”.

Google also says what can happen then: “which may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index”.

One more piece of advice from that same page, about the audit that is often the starting point: at that stage, give read access to Search Console only, no write access. Literally: “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access)”.

What SEO costs in the Netherlands

I collected this myself on 22 September 2026: 27 publicly published prices at nine Dutch providers, a mix of agencies, solo providers and freelancers. Only prices the provider puts on its own site, so no estimates about the market.

What	What I found (Dutch market, in euros)
Hourly rates providers publish themselves	75 to 100 euros, with one outlier of 12.50 euros
Monthly fees, entry level	119 to 995 euros per month
Highest package per provider	469 to 4,500 euros per month
Median of all monthly fees found	around 500 euros per month
One off audit	1,200 euros in the only observation with its own price
Setup costs, where they apply	199 to 495 euros one off

Next to those own prices, quite a few providers publish ranges for what SEO work costs in the market. For a freelancer those run from 40 to 150 euros per hour and for an agency from 80 to 200 euros per hour. Those numbers have no visible method, so I use them as a general impression and not as a figure.

A few notes on my own inventory, so you know what you can do with it. Five of the nine providers say explicitly whether the amount excludes VAT; the rest say nothing about it, and with a 21 percent difference that is not a detail. Four of the nine require a contract of six or twelve months. And the spread within a single provider is sometimes larger than the spread between providers.

Convert the monthly fee into hours

This is the calculation that settles the whole discussion, and it is exactly the question you should ask.

The same amount means nothing without the hours behind it.

Of the nine providers I checked, one publishes how many hours you get per month. At that provider the entry package costs 119 euros for one hour of work per month. The highest package, 469 euros, stands for six hours.

Convert that and this comes out: 119 euros per hour at one hour, and around 78 euros per hour at six hours. That fits exactly in the range providers name for their own hourly rate, 75 to 100 euros. It also gives you a yardstick for every other proposal, because you can divide those the same way.

An agency that charges 100 euros per hour can work around three hours for 299 euros per month. Three hours is: running a report, changing a few titles, sending an email. For 1,500 euros per month it is fifteen hours, and then something can really happen.

So this is the question I would ask anyone who makes you a proposal: how many hours are in this, and what will those hours go to? If someone cannot or will not say, you are buying a subscription and not work.

Watch the other side of that calculation. A low monthly fee is not automatically bad and a high one is not automatically good. Where it goes wrong is when the amount and the promise do not match. Anyone who promises twenty keywords onto the first page in a competitive market for 299 euros per month is promising to do that in around three hours per month. That gets stuck arithmetically.

Where it goes wrong in practice

Three things I run into most often, and all three are in the documentation I quoted above.

Promises about positions. In my inventory I saw one provider that gives part of the money back if at least ten keywords are not in the top 3 after six months. That sounds fair, but it is still a position promise, and Google says this about it: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”

In the Netherlands there is a legal side to it as well. For business clients, article 6:194 of the Dutch Civil Code applies (misleading advertising to businesses). For consumers the law literally mentions “van het gebruik te verwachten resultaten” (the results to be expected from use), and the burden of proof lies with the provider. Whoever promises a result has to be able to show it.

Link packages. A fixed number of backlinks per month is the clearest signal that something is off. Google’s spam policies list under link spam, among other things, “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” and “using automated programs or services to create links to your site”. What is allowed is in there too: paid links are permitted as long as they carry a nofollow or sponsored attribute.

City pages in bulk. I saw packages with fifty, a hundred or two hundred city pages as a bonus. If only the city name differs on those pages, then that is exactly the example Google names in its spam policies.

And then the reviews, because that is what you look at when you choose. If a provider shows reviews on its own site, there has been an information duty since the Omnibus Directive. In the Dutch Civil Code it is article 6:193e paragraph 3: information about whether and how a trader makes sure reviews come from real customers is “essential”. That is a legal term in Dutch consumer law, and the consequence is simple: that information has to be there. The ACM, the Dutch consumer and markets authority, adds that you may not present reviews in a misleading way, and names this explicitly: do not remove only the negative reviews while the positive ones stay. If nowhere on the site says how reviews were checked, ask about it. If you get no clear answer, weigh that in your choice.

When outsourcing pays off, and when it does not

I sell SEO, so read this with that in mind. Even so, the answer is not always yes.

Outsourcing pays off if you have a site that already works and brings in customers, and you structurally do not get around to it. Or if things are stuck technically and you do not know why. Or if you are in a market where your competitors do spend money on it.

Outsourcing does not pay off if your site is not standing yet, because then you are paying someone to work on a foundation that still has to be laid. Technique first, then ongoing optimisation; everything that falls under that is in my article on technical SEO.

It also does not pay off if your budget does not match your ambition. Two hours per month in a market with ten serious competitors gets you almost nothing. In that case a one off audit with a plan you carry out yourself is often smarter than a small subscription that runs for years.

And watch the calculation from the other side: what you spend on SEO, you do not spend on your site itself. What a website costs in the Dutch market is something I looked into separately.

In short

Google has its own page about hiring an SEO, with a list of questions and eleven warning signs. Use that list before you sign anything.
Always ask for the official documentation behind an advice. Google now advises that itself, including for advice about AI visibility.
In my inventory of 27 public prices at nine Dutch providers, monthly fees run from 119 to 4,500 euros, with a median around 500 euros. Their own hourly rates sit at 75 to 100 euros.
Only one of the nine publishes how many hours you get. Convert every monthly fee into hours and ask what those hours go to.
Position promises, fixed link packages and city pages in bulk are the three signals to walk away from. All three are in Google’s documentation or spam policies.
You are responsible yourself for what a hired agency does on your site. Google says that literally.

Frequently asked questions

What does outsourcing SEO cost in the Netherlands?

In my inventory of publicly published prices on 22 September 2026, the entry level ran from 119 to 995 euros per month, with a median over all monthly fees found of around 500 euros. Hourly rates providers publish themselves sit at 75 to 100 euros. Watch out for VAT and for contract length; those differ a lot.

How long does it take before SEO delivers results?

There is no reliable number for that, and Google removed its own timeframe of four months to a year from the documentation in 2026. What is still there is this: some changes work within hours, others only after months. Anyone who gives you a hard deadline is filling in a blank.

Is an SEO agency allowed to guarantee a position in Google?

Nobody can deliver on that, and Google warns about it explicitly. In the Netherlands there is a legal risk on top of that, because with misleading advertising the burden of proving the claim is correct lies with the provider.

Is a small SEO subscription worth it?

That depends on the hours in it. Convert the amount: at a rate of around 100 euros per hour, 299 euros per month is about three hours of work. For a small, local site that can be enough to keep up. In a competitive market it is too little to shift anything.

What should I watch out for with an SEO audit?

Google advises giving read access to Search Console only at that stage, and no write access. Beyond that, ask what you get concretely, how many hours are in it and whether the findings point to official documentation instead of to a tool score.

Sources

All sources consulted on 22 September 2026. The price inventory is from the same date and consists of 27 publicly published prices at nine Dutch providers.

Do you want to know where you stand first?

In a free GEO scan I look at your findability in Google and in AI answers, and at the technique underneath. You get the findings with the source next to them, so you can check them yourself. If you want help after that, SEO and GEO shows exactly what is in each package, and what an SEO and GEO subscription covers per month.