Studios ask about SEO cost because they have been burned by retainers that produced reports and no enquiries. The honest answer is a range, not a menu. Scope, competition, the state of the site, and whether implementation sits in-house all change the number. Anyone selling one package for every game, label and production company is selling a product, not a diagnosis.
We are Shinobi, a Quezon City studio of Bright Forge SEO, the parent company. We do not publish Shinobi fees here. We also do not publish Bright Forge rate cards. What follows is how the Philippine market usually talks about money, and how a studio should read it without buying theatre.
Public industry commentary in 2026 still clusters around cheap freelance retainers at the low end, mid-market agency months in the tens of thousands of pesos, and senior or specialist work that looks closer to international rates. Treat those as market bands, not quotes.
01
What You Are Actually Buying
SEO cost is not a line for “being on Google”. It is diagnosis, technical repair, on-page work, content that supports money pages, local or international targeting, and authority work if the category needs it. A studio that only needs a crawlable portfolio is not the same buyer as a publisher with ten thousand catalogue URLs.
If the proposal cannot name the pages, the next 90 days of work, and how you will know it landed, the fee is for activity. Activity is cheap. It is also how six months disappear.
Implementation time is part of the cost. If your developers cannot ship title and template changes, you are paying an SEO team to wait. If you have no one to answer reviews or update GBP, local work stalls.
02
Freelance, Specialist, Agency
A strong freelancer can be enough for a small studio with a simple site and a patient owner. The risk is coverage: holiday, illness, and no second pair of eyes on a migration.
An agency retainer buys process, more than one discipline, and someone to replace a sick specialist. It also buys account time you may not need. Studios with one decision-maker often waste that layer.
A specialist studio like ours is for creative and technical sites where the design cannot be thrown away. You pay for judgement on rendering, media, launches and catalogues, not for a blog calendar aimed at dentists.
White-label sits in another column: the agency faces the client, we do the work. That is priced as delivery, not as a public package.
03
Bands, Not Promises
Philippine public writing still cites monthly SEO retainers from a few thousand pesos for thin packages up through ₱25,000 to ₱40,000 at the low professional end, ₱50,000 to ₱120,000 for fuller campaigns, and ₱150,000 or more when the work is senior, competitive or multi-market. Dollar equivalents get quoted for export clients. None of those figures is a Shinobi quote.
Audits are often a separate fee. Migrations are not a month of “content”. Link buying as a cheap add-on is how studios inherit spam. If a quote is far below the bands and promises page one, assume the work is automated or unsafe.
Build cost is separate from SEO cost. A new site can include the technical floor. Retrofitting a canvas-heavy portfolio later is usually more expensive than doing it in the template the first time.
04
What Changes The Number
Competition for the name and the category. Number of languages and markets. How broken the current templates are. Whether Google Search Console already exists. Whether the studio will implement or expects the SEO team to queue every heading change.
Game launches compress time. Fashion catalogues expand URL count. Production companies often need template work more than volume. Each of those is a different month.
Do not compare a ₱15,000 “package” that sends a PDF with a programme that rewrites service templates and measures enquiries. They are not the same product.
05
How To Brief Without A Rate Card
Send the live URLs, the CMS, who can deploy, the markets, and what a good enquiry looks like. Ask the supplier to name the first pages and the first checks. Ask what is out of scope. Ask who writes, who designs, and who presses deploy.
Google’s SEO Starter Guide is free. Paying someone to paste it into a deck is not a fee worth defending.
If you want the work scoped against a live creative site, start with SEO services and request a review. We will talk about scope. We will not put a fake cheap number on this page to win a search.
A studio should buy a thesis and a review date, not a promise that month six will ring the phone by magic. ## Contracts, Time And Who Presses Deploy
Monthly retainers hide the real cost if the studio cannot deploy. Count internal hours. A mid-market fee plus a blocked developer queue is more expensive than a higher fee with a ship date.
Fixed-price diagnostics are easier to compare than retainers. Ask what the diagnostic excludes. Many cheap audits exclude implementation, copy, design and stakeholder workshops, then sell those back by the hour.
Six-month lock-ins are common in the Philippine market commentary. They are not a law. If the first 30 days cannot produce a thesis and a live change, the remaining five months are inertia.
Content volume is a cost centre. A studio that needs template repair should not be paying for four blogs a week. A publisher with a catalogue might need writing more than another crawl.
Migrations, new domains and replatforms are project fees. Stuffing them into a “package” is how launches slip.
International work in UK, US or AU markets is not the same band as a single-city local SEO job, even if both are sold from Quezon City. Say which market the fee is for.
If a vendor will not state whether VAT, contractors or tools are included, stop. Hidden tool markups are how cheap retainers become medium ones without extra work.
06
What A Sensible First Invoice Covers
A first invoice should buy access setup, a crawl, a Search Console read, a page map, and written priorities. If it only buys a login workshop, you paid for onboarding.
Retainers should name hours or outcomes, not vibes. Hours without outcomes become timesheets. Outcomes without access become fiction.
Studios with lumpy cash flow can buy a project, then pause. That is cleaner than a cheap month that nobody implements.
07
Reading A Quote Without Getting Played
Ask whether content, development, photography, GBP posts and link outreach are inside the fee. Each of those can double a number.
Ask who owns the writing. If the studio must supply all copy, the SEO fee is for structure and QA, not for words. That can be fine. It should be explicit.
Ask for examples of live pages they changed, not logos. Logos are cheap. Live HTML is not.
If two quotes differ by a factor of ten, they are not quoting the same job. Bring them back to the same URL list before you compare pesos.
Currency talk in the Philippines mixes peso retainers and dollar export invoices. Confirm which you are being sold. Confirm whether the number is monthly or a one-off diagnostic.
A good quote is boring. It names pages, hours or sprints, and a review date. Excitement is usually a rank promise. We will not write one here, and you should not buy one elsewhere.