Because at three hundred dollars a month there isn’t enough labor in the budget to do the work. That’s arithmetic rather than an opinion about anybody. This is the long version of a question on the page about the search work itself, and the short answer there’s the same one.
What follows is the arithmetic, what actually gets delivered at that price, and the one situation where a cheap package is genuinely the right buy.
Do the sum yourself
Three hundred dollars is somewhere between two and four hours of competent labor, once you’ve paid for the software. A rank tracker, a citation tool and a reporting platform take a bite before anybody has done anything. What’s left buys a few hours a month.
Now list what those hours are supposed to cover. Keeping the map listing current. Building and cleaning citations. Writing pages that answer what buyers ask. Watching what competitors do. Chasing reviews. Replying to them. Noticing when Google changes something and working out whether it matters to you.
That isn’t three hours of work. It’s the reason the price only makes sense if most of it isn’t happening.
What three hundred a month actually buys
One of three things, and it’s worth knowing which you’re being sold.
Automation. Software submits your details to a few hundred directories, most of which nobody has ever visited, and a report arrives showing the submissions as an achievement. The listings are real. Their effect on your phone is close to nothing, and a proportion of them will have your details slightly wrong, which is actively unhelpful.
The cheapest available hands. The work is real but it’s done by somebody with no knowledge of your market, working from a checklist, at a wage that makes the price possible. You get activity. You rarely get judgment, and judgment is the whole job.
Nothing much at all. An initial setup, a monthly report generated by software, and silence. This is more common than people expect, and it survives because the reports look busy and the client has no way to tell the difference.
It isn’t only us saying so
Search for what SEO should cost and you’ll find the same warning without our name on it. The published guidance is broadly consistent: budget somewhere between fifteen hundred and three thousand a month for a small business, and treat anything under about three hundred as a risk rather than a bargain. The word that keeps appearing next to the cheap end is “risky”, and it isn’t about wasted money.
It’s about tactics. Work priced below what it costs to do properly tends to get done improperly, and some of the shortcuts are the kind that cause real damage rather than merely nothing.
The part that isn’t just wasted money
Cheap work can leave you worse off than no work.
Mass directory submissions and bulk listing edits are exactly the pattern that gets a Google Business Page suspended. It’s why MegaVoxx won’t sell a cheap version of this at any price: the damage lands on the client, and it outlasts the saving. Not because anybody meant harm, but because a run of automated changes looks like manipulation from the outside, and the system doesn’t distinguish.
Getting reinstated is an appeal with evidence, and it takes weeks. Sometimes months. The listing is invisible in the meantime, which is a worse position than the one you started in and considerably more expensive to fix than the fee you saved.
Three questions that sort it out in one call
You don’t need to understand any of this to protect yourself. Ask these, and listen for whether the answer is specific.
“How many hours a month is this, and who does them?” A straight answer names a number and a person. A vague one is the answer.
“Rank me for what, exactly, and how many people search it?” A guarantee to rank for something nobody types is a promise that can be kept and is worth nothing. Ask for the search volume.
“What will exist at the end of month one that I can look at myself?” Not a report. Something on your listing or your website that you can see on your own phone without anybody sending you anything.
The twelve-month term is part of the design
A cheap monthly fee and a long contract go together for a reason. Search work takes months to show anything either way, and a twelve-month term is long enough that by the time you’re confident nothing is happening, you’ve paid for most of it.
The term isn’t there to protect the work. It’s there to make sure you find out slowly. That’s why there isn’t one here, and why sixty days’ notice is the whole of it.
When cheap is the right answer
When the work is genuinely small and you know exactly what you’re buying. A one-off listing setup, a citation cleanup, a single page written properly: those are real jobs at real prices and there’s nothing wrong with buying them piecemeal.
The problem isn’t a low price. It’s a low price attached to an open-ended promise of ongoing work, because that’s the combination that can’t be true.
And if the budget genuinely is three hundred a month, spend it somewhere it works. Reviews decide more, and so does answering your phone. Ask us which one you need first: we’ll tell you, and we’ll tell you if the answer is neither.
What we won’t do is put a number on it before we’ve looked at your business. Anybody who will is guessing, and a guess at three hundred a month is how you got here.
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