How much does an SEO strategy cost in 2026?

SEO strategy: how much does it cost?

Between €1500 and more than €3000 per month for an SME. Yes, that’s a wide range.

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For an SME, an SEO strategy (also called organic search or natural referencing) typically costs between €1,500 and more than €5,000 per month, depending on your site size, number of languages, keyword competitiveness and the depth of support.​

The goal of this article is to break down each component of that budget so you can define a realistic SEO budget for your company in Belgium or France.​

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation. The price of an SEO strategy depends on many factors: strategy depth, your provider’s experience and rates, the time spent on execution, the tools used and, increasingly, how your content feeds both traditional search engines and AI systems. That’s why it’s essential to define the objectives you want to reach with SEO before talking about numbers.​

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What to define before starting an SEO strategy

Before discussing budget, you need to clarify one essential point: your goals. Starting from those goals, your provider can build a proper brief and an SEO strategy tailored to your B2B context.​

Key questions to ask yourself:

• Do you want to generate more qualified traffic (leads, demo requests, quote requests)?
• Do you want to convert more visitors into customers through better content experiences (service pages, testimonials, case studies)?
• Do you want to strengthen your authority in your target market (Belgium, France, Europe) and be cited as an expert, including inside AI-generated answers?

A good SEO partner will ask the right questions to understand your objectives, audience and direct and indirect competitors. Another crucial factor is your website’s current state (performance, structure, content, tracking).​

PS: if your website needs a redesign or migration (for example to Webflow), start by estimating the cost of a new website.

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What is the purpose of an SEO strategy in 2026?

In one sentence: to be visible wherever your customers are looking, whether on Google or inside AI answers that rely on web content.​

A solid SEO strategy helps you:

• Attract qualified traffic on the key queries in your market (problems, solutions, comparisons, pricing).
• Position your brand as a reference, thanks to in-depth content that’s hard to copy, either by competitors or by AI alone.​

The impact is fairly easy to measure: for a given query, what is your position before vs after launching your SEO strategy, and how many leads does it generate? SEO remains one of the most effective levers to improve online visibility, but it’s a long-term strategy: expect 3–6 months to see the first meaningful results, and 6–12 months for strong, stable gains.​

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What changed in SEO pricing between 2025 and 2026

In 2026, SEO prices are not exploding, but the value focus is shifting: less emphasis on raw “content volume” and more on strategy, subject-matter expertise and the ability to feed both Google and AI systems.​

Concretely, for a B2B SME:

• A realistic minimum budget is still around €1,500/month if you want to see real impact.
• More ambitious projects (multiple countries, multiple languages, several service lines, strong competition) often sit between €3,000 and €5,000/month, or more.

Cost drivers that matter more than before:

• Designing expert-level content specifically for SERPs and AI answers (guides, comparisons, case studies).
• Strategy and ongoing steering (data, prioritisation, experimentation) instead of isolated one-off SEO tasks.​

The cost of the 3 SEO pillars

An effective SEO strategy works on all three pillars in parallel:

• Content creation (value-add).
• Website authority (link building).
• Technical configuration (performance, indexation).

Each pillar comes with its own tactics, price levels and complexity. Some companies work with different vendors per pillar, others centralise everything with one SEO/Webflow agency.​

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How much does an SEO audit cost (Belgium and France)?

How much does an SEO audit cost?

A comprehensive SEO audit usually ranges from €1,000 to €5,000 for an SME, depending on your website size, number of languages and how deep the analysis goes (technical, content, backlinks, data).​

In both Belgium and France, a full “360°” audit for a B2B site with 20–300 pages will most often land between €1,500 and €5,000. This analysis uncovers your site’s strengths and weaknesses page by page, your current rankings and how you compare to competitors.​

What you can expect as a deliverable:

• A full report on your current rankings and the keywords your pages are visible on.
• A map of your SEO competitors and missed opportunities.
• A page-by-page technical review and a prioritised roadmap across the three pillars.​

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Pillar 1 – Content creation

Keyword research cost

How much does keyword research cost?

Keyword research typically costs between €500 and €2,000, depending on how many markets (Belgium, France, other countries) and how many topics you need to cover.​

Good content is simple to define: it answers your users’ real questions. Everything starts with understanding your audience, their language and expectations. That research phase helps define which keywords and topics you should target.

In 2026, proper keyword research goes far beyond a flat list of terms: it includes search intent analysis, topic clustering and the integration of conversational and voice queries.​

What you can expect as a deliverable:

• A prioritised keyword list for your business and markets.
• Search volumes, ranking difficulty and the intent behind each query (informational, comparison, transactional).

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Website copywriting cost

How much does web content writing cost?

For quality B2B content, copywriting typically ranges between €65 and €100 per hour. In practice, many projects are priced per page (for example, €300–€800 for a well-optimised strategic page, depending on complexity).​

AI can help with ideation and first drafts, but you can’t fully outsource writing to AI if you aim for top positions on competitive queries. The key ingredients remain: smart structure, strong H1/H2s, depth, concrete examples and copy aligned with your personas’ language.​

Your readers are tired of generic, AI-generated content (you probably are too). What matters more than ever today: your expertise, real-life stories, opinions and advice – all the things an AI cannot truly replace.

What you can expect as a deliverable:

• SEO-optimised content where each page addresses a clear topic and intent.
• Pages that work for both search engines and humans… and that can also be picked up by AI models that rely on web content.

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Blog article writing cost

How much does a blog post cost?

For B2B, a well-crafted blog article typically costs between €300 and €600, depending on topic complexity and the writer’s level of expertise.​

What matters is not hitting a specific word count or keyword density, but answering a precise question better than your competitors. To stay relevant and keep ranking, your blog posts need regular updating.

What you can expect as a deliverable:

• Articles targeting very specific queries (problem, solution, comparison, pricing, etc.).
• Qualified traffic discovering your offers through useful content instead of only through your homepage.

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Pillar 2 – Site authority and link building

How much does link building cost?

The cost of acquiring quality backlinks typically looks like this:

• €30 to €100 for basic links (directories, listings, smaller media).
• €200 to €500 and up for premium links on sites with real audience and authority.​

A healthy link-building strategy combines:

• Strong internal linking between your pages and articles.
• External links from relevant, trustworthy websites aligned with your B2B niche.​

In 2026, search engines are even better at detecting artificial patterns and toxic links, especially in B2B verticals.​

What you can expect as a deliverable:

• Stronger authority and better ability to rank for competitive keywords.
• Key pages climbing the rankings thanks to credible external trust signals.

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Pillar 3 – Technical performance

How much does technical SEO cost?

Implementing technical recommendations generally costs between €300 and €700 for targeted optimisations on an SME site, and more for structural overhauls or complex migrations.​

Typical technical work includes: page speed, URL structure, sitemaps, meta tags, indexation, multilingual setup, Core Web Vitals, crawlability and more. Technical performance needs ongoing attention, as search engine requirements keep evolving.​

What you can expect as a deliverable:

• Better technical “health scores” in your SEO tools.
• Faster pages, easier to understand for crawlers and more pleasant for your users.

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SEO pricing in Belgium vs France (B2B)

For B2B SMEs in Belgium, a complete SEO strategy (audit, content, link building, technical) usually falls between €1,500 and €4,000/month, depending on digital maturity and competition.​

In France, ranges are similar: many B2B players start around €1,500/month, with a common upper range of €5,000/month for highly competitive sectors or multi-site projects.​

• Experienced freelance SEO: typically €1,500–€5,000 for an initial audit or action plan, then a monthly retainer from a few hundred to several thousand euros.
• SEO / Webflow agency: structured monthly retainers from €1,500 to €5,000, with more capacity for content, link building, analytics and experimentation for marketing teams.​

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Reporting and rank tracking

How much do reporting and rank tracking cost?

In most cases, reporting is included in your SEO strategy. This is where your agency shows what has been achieved and what results were generated.​

It’s a critical step to:

• Understand which pages and keywords are driving your traffic and leads.
• Track how your rankings evolve over time and how you compare to competitors.

SEO reporting frequency varies (monthly, quarterly, twice a year), but the key is to have clear KPIs (traffic, rankings, leads, revenue) to guide your marketing decisions.​

What you can expect as a deliverable:

• A detailed report on how your pages perform in the SERPs.
• Clear visibility on ranking evolution and overall site health, with documented actions taken during the period.

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Conclusion: how much does an SEO strategy cost?

A successful SEO strategy combines several complementary tactics and techniques. Each element – SEO audit, on-site optimisation, blog content, link building, performance tracking – plays a unique and essential role, and together they deliver far more impact than any single tactic alone.​

That’s why SEO is most often sold as a package bundling multiple services from this article. Grouping them not only gives you better overall results, it also creates a more coherent, efficient and cost-effective approach. In practice, a budget of around €2,000 per month is a solid starting point for an SME that wants a serious, results-oriented SEO strategy in 2026.​

This investment can become highly profitable for your brand, and its importance is now hard to ignore. Feel free to get in touch to discuss your specific needs and receive a tailored quote for your SEO project.