What Local SEO Actually Costs In Canada In 2026

The rough bands

• Under CAD $200 a month. Usually automated. A tool posts to your profile and a dashboard reports numbers. Occasionally fine for a very small business, but nobody is looking at your listing.
• CAD $400 to $900 a month. Profile management done by a person. Posts, review replies, review requests, listings cleanup, monthly ranking reporting. This is where most owner run businesses should be.
• CAD $1,000 to $2,500 a month. Adds website work, content, and often paid ads management. Worth it when the website is the bottleneck rather than the profile.
• Above CAD $3,000 a month. Multi location, or agencies with large overheads. Rarely necessary for a single location business.

One off work

A profile setup and optimisation done properly is typically CAD $300 to $800 as a one off. A new website built for local search runs CAD $1,500 to $5,000 depending on how many service pages it needs. Citation cleanup on its own is usually CAD $200 to $500.

How to judge a quote

1. Ask what happens in month one specifically. A real answer lists tasks. A vague answer means a tool.
2. Ask who writes the review responses. If the answer is software, expect your patients to notice.
3. Ask what the reporting looks like. You want ranking positions before and after, not impressions.
4. Ask about the contract length. Twelve month lock ins exist to protect the agency, not you.
5. Ask who owns the profile. The answer must be you. If an agency creates it under their own account, leaving becomes expensive.

What it should be worth

Work backwards from one customer. If a new client is worth CAD $2,000 to you and your close rate on enquiries is one in three, then six extra enquiries a year covers a $450 monthly retainer. Whether that is achievable depends on your market size, but it is the calculation to run before signing anything.

The honest caveat

Nobody can guarantee a Google ranking. Anyone who does is either inexperienced or not telling you the truth. What you can reasonably expect is a defined list of work each month and honest reporting on whether the position moved.