If you have never bought SEO before, the proposals all look the same and the prices do not. Here is what you are actually paying for.
What SEO consists of, without the jargon
Four activities, in the order they usually matter:
- Keyword research. Working out what your buyers type, which of those searches lead to money, and which are realistically winnable.
- On-page optimisation. Making one specific page the best answer to one specific search. Titles, headings, copy, internal links.
- Content. Writing the pages that do not exist yet for searches you should own.
- Links. Earning references from other sites, which is still how Google separates two pages of equal quality.
Underneath all four sits the technical layer: if Google cannot crawl, render and index the page, nothing above matters.
Why businesses here outsource it
Not because it is secret knowledge. Because it is a full-time job with a toolset that costs more per month than most businesses want to spend, and because the feedback loop is slow enough that mistakes are expensive to discover in-house.
The other reason is breadth. A single person rarely writes well, reads a log file and runs outreach. Agencies exist because the work needs three different kinds of specialist and none of them is busy full-time on one account.
What SEO costs in Dubai
Retainers in this market broadly land in three bands. Small local businesses with one location and a modest site tend to sit at the lower end. Established SMEs competing in a real category sit in the middle. Ecommerce and multi-location businesses sit at the top, because the work scales with the number of pages and locations.
What moves the number:
- Competition. Real estate, legal and clinics cost more than a niche B2B category, because everyone is bidding for the same positions.
- The state of the site. A site that needs a technical rebuild absorbs months before any content work starts.
- Scale. Four hundred product pages is a different job from twelve service pages.
- Content volume. Writing is the cost that scales most directly with ambition.
Any agency that quotes before crawling your site is quoting an average, and you will be the one who finds out whether your site was above or below it.
Retainer or project
A project suits a defined job with an end: a migration, a technical audit, a content rebuild of one section. A retainer suits the ongoing part, because positions are defended continuously.
Many businesses start with an audit as a project, implement it, and only then decide whether a retainer is worth it. That is a reasonable way to buy.
Written by the SEO team at Dubyte AI Solutions, Dubai Silicon Oasis. Ask us about your own site.
