MSP SEO Costs And Pricing

You have heard that SEO can generate consistent inbound leads for MSPs, but you are unsure how much to invest, how long it takes to see results, or whether the return justifies the effort. Many MSPs start SEO with optimistic expectations and limited clarity, only to become frustrated when rankings and leads do not materialize as quickly as promised.

SEO can be a powerful growth channel for managed service providers, but only when it is built on a solid technical foundation, supported by high quality content, and given enough time and investment to compound. Unlike paid advertising, SEO is not about quick wins. It is about building a sustainable marketing engine that can consistently reach a large chunk of your total addressable market on a consistent basis.

SEO is one of the more difficult marketing channels to tackle, but it is also the highest rewarding and often account for 40-70% of inbound lead volume. It’s the foundations for which all other inbound marketing channels build off of.

In this post, you will learn what MSP SEO actually costs, what different investment levels can realistically deliver, and why execution matters just as much as budget. By the end, you will understand how to approach SEO with clear expectations and a strategy designed for sustainable, long term growth.

What’s A Minimum Budget for Starting Out With MSP SEO?

Our minimum recommended SEO investment for MSPs is $3,000 per month. This level of spend allows enough room to produce high quality content that will expand the keyword footprint of your website and help you begin building authority in a market. At this level you’re likely on a content production only plan and a dash of local SEO and Google Profile optimization/management.

Below this spend level it is very difficult to find quality resources that can move the needle and your SEO efforts will tend to suffer from one of these problems.

• Keyword stuffed content that ranks but doesn’t generate leads
• Location + service name spam that eventually leads to keyword cannibalization and ranking collapse after an initial surge
• Resources with little to no knowledge of the MSP sector
• SEO agencies that aren’t actually doing anything but showing you monthly reports and making false promises (you get what you pay for)

SEO resources are among the most expensive and difficult to procure in the marketing space because it requires strong understanding of web development, a strong understanding of marketing, MSP specific industry knowledge, AND search engine optimization knowledge. Even when outsourcing to control costs, these offshore resources are among the most expensive.

The goal with a starter budget for MSP SEO should be to see a trickle of inbound lead flow within 6-12 months and close as much MRR as you are investing within 12 months. If you are spending $3,000/month, a reasonable goal should be to close $3,000 new MRR + project revenue from SEO within 12 months.

What’s A Competitive Budget For MSP Search Engine Optimization?

$3,000 is again a minimum viable budget. For best results, we recommend spending more in the $4,000 to $6,000 per month range. This spend levels allows for both content production, distribution, leveraging SEO software, and taking care of more advanced SEO tasks.

A content only type plan is good enough to start out with and should be able to help you spark your lead flow, but if you want to more meaningfully penetrate a market and crack the top 10 competitors in a vertical, you’ll need to raise your spend level to work on both content and SEO activities like technical SEO, local SEO, on-page optimization, internal and external linking, and tracking against competitors using specialized software like SEMRush or AHrefs which have their own hard costs.

Most MSPs don’t come out the gate with this sort of budget so this is typically what a year 2+ investment in SEO looks like. Since you should already have some foundations in place at this spend level a good goal should be to close 2x in new MRR what you are spending. So if you are spending $5,000/month in SEO spend, you should be closing $10,000 in new MRR or more within 12 months from shifting to this stance.

Scaling Up MSP SEO Budgets With Link Building

If you’ve been doing SEO for a while you’ll eventually hit a point of diminishing returns on content production and optimization. You really can’t progress much further past a certain point without link building. It’s at this point that you generally need to start allocating budget specifically for that activity which is likely going to raise your spend level into the $7,500-$15,000/month or more budget range.

What you need to spend to continue progressing is much more difficult to assess because it’s largely going to depend on market competition in your targeted segments, how well your previous SEO efforts have performed, how long you have been doing SEO, how influential your executive team is, and a range of other factors. You should have had some organic link growth up until this point and how to scale up further is largely going to be determined by what your backlink profile looks like at the time you decide to invest in link building.

A weaker backlink profile is going to allow you to spend less and still move the needle, because the types of links you need to increase your authority are cheaper. As your backlink profile strengthens, you will need to procure more expensive links and at higher volumes to continue increasing your domains authority. Contact an MSP SEO Agency like Tortoise and Hare to help you evaluate your link building needs.

This type of spend plan is going to be more what a mature later stage MSP would be investing in. SEO has historically been an efficient long term channel, and while AI is currently putting things in flux, AI is still largely an extension of traditional organic search. If you get to this point in your SEO journey you should be closer to 3x or more in what are spending in MRR + project revenue. For instance if you are spending $10,000/month on SEO, you should be closing $30,000 new MRR + project revenue at a minimum.

At this stage SEO should be a higher leverage activity and closing $50,000 MRR + project revenue or more is certainly within the realm of possibly. SEO is an expensive long term investment, but is known for it’s efficiency in terms of cost per lead after a period of compounding. At this stage you should be reaping rewards from cumulative efforts over a period of years.

The Risks Of Underfunding Your MSP’s SEO Efforts

MSPs are a low spending vertical relative to many other industries. This often means their budgets can’t get them in the door with quality agencies and that leads them to look for shortcuts and try to shop for and try to directly manage offshore SEO providers to pinch pennies.

That would be like me trying to hire and manage a cyber security professional directly that’s across the world. I would have no idea who is good, who is bad, and there would be a high risk I hire the person who interviews the best and makes the best promises rather than someone with real talent. This would eventually lead to my business getting hacked and all the headaches and expense that comes with.

I have personally seen MSPs waste years and thousands and have to go through 2,3,4,5 versions of their website, burn through multiple vendors, destroy their backlink profiles, give up on successful efforts too early, and largely bungle the most important inbound marketing channel and fail to grow their business from it.

I know a lot of people reading this are going to look at the numbers in this article and say “but I saw that SEO costs $500/month on Reddit! No way I’m paying $5,000!” And hey, you might get lucky by finding an up and coming contractor who hasn’t realized their value yet and get a good year or two out of them.

But that is rare and you’re more likely to dig yourself a hole that is going to require a full website rebuild to fix, gets you a Google penalty, or other negative consequence while you waste years of time and money before having to essentially start over from square one and spend at the level that gets you in with agencies that have both MSP industry knowledge AND SEO chops.

What Am I Actually Paying For When Hiring An MSP SEO Expert?

That’s a good question and the answer is going to vary significantly from agency to agency. Let’s start with the basics.

• Copywriting
• MSP Industry knowledge

It used to be very difficult to be able to hire SEO’s who could write quality marketing copy, that has alleviated to some extent with AI, but also created some new problems with “AI slop”. The difficult part is almost always finding people who have industry knowledge and I can’t tell you how many sales calls I’ve gotten on over the years where someone has told me they hired a local agency they’ve been working with for a year or two and come to the conclusion they just “don’t understand our business”.

I’ve been working in the MSP industry for more than 7 years and I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface on all the ways a potential prospect can discover an MSP and engage with them. I’ve learned a lot of othe fundamental ways to “generate leads” and I spend most all of my time at this point on how to think about how to consistently generate GOOD leads.

We’ve got 6-10 good examples on landing page copy that have already been proven to generate across a range of MSP sub-domains like servers, networks, end user computing devices, IT, cybersecurity, data backups, and more and those are just the absolute basics. The rabbit hole goes much deeper when you start probing deeper into the fingers of just the cybersecurity sub discipline. Start diving into compliance regulations, NIST frameworks, vendor brands, and a generalist agency doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of competing in this area of marketing, even if they can put together a nice looking brand and some good social media posts for you.

SEO is an area where it’s almost impossible to hide gaps in knowledge with pretty visuals like you can in so many other areas of marketing.

But let’s just say you can find someone who’s got the industry knowledge to help you connect with customers and can write persuasive enough copy to convince them to reach out and contact your brand. Let’s layer on some web development needs such as:

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• WordPress
• WordPress Page Builders
  • Beaver Builder
  • Elementor
  • Divi
  • WP Bakery
• About a half dozen SEO plugins
• Photoshop and basic photo editing
• Schema.org structured data

That will be a good start for them to help you build some landing pages as long as they’ve also got the web design experience to make something look good outside of prebuilt templates.

Then we start getting into the list of some of the 200 known ranking factors that will help them do on-page optimization of landing pages and blog content as part of post-processing.

Once you get to this point you’ve hit where 90% of SEOs aren’t progressing past, and quite frankly most are struggling to be able to do. Realistically you’re already looking at a small team of people working together to even get to this point.

But now you start diving into the complex world of technical SEO to optimize load speeds which requires an understanding of:

• Web hosting
• CDNs
• Caching
• More advanced JavaScript knowledge
• Conversion tracking
• QA testing

And that’s just so you can start optimizing for things like:

• First Contentful Paint
• Largest Contentful Paint
• Cumulative Layout Shift
• Interaction To Next Paint
• Time To First Byte

You’re essentially hiring software developers when you get to this level and people who can do this stuff without breaking anything are minimum 6 figure hires on their own in the U.S.

Then you start getting into SEO at scale skills with things like programmatic SEO for bulk page generation, SEO crawling tools for analyzing large website like Screaming Frog and a host of other SEO tools, many of which are as complex as a CRM to use and have their own hard costs.

Why Hire Tortoise and Hare For Your MSP SEO Efforts?

Tortoise and Hare is a boutique search engine marketing agency that specializes in generating leads from search engines (and by extension AI platforms) for MSPs and related B2B tech organizations. Running Google Ad campaigns and Search Engine Optimization campaigns are the core of what we do. We work on a high touch exclusive basis with one MSP per city or niche vertical to help them conquer their market.

We have helped clients become top competitors in search results in cities like Philadelphia, Phoenix, Washington D.C. and more and help our clients bring in 10-50k new MRR + project revenue per year from search engines.

Learn more about an SEO Strategy Project.

Conclusion

Truly skilled SEOs that can move the needle in the MSP space are web developers, marketers, analytical thinkers, and have deep industry knowledge. Again SEO as a channel typically accounts for 40-70% of inbound lead volume is the foundation of your inbound pipeline.

Getting the right people in place to help you build these critical foundations isn’t something you want to underfund if you want to meaningfully grow your MSP. Apply for a free consultation today to learn more.