Ask three people what SEO costs in Nigeria and you'll probably hear three different numbers, anywhere from ₦40,000 a month to over ₦1 million. Both ends can be real. The price depends on what's actually being done, who's doing it, and how much your site needs fixing first. Here's what the market charges in 2026, what we charge, and how to tell whether a quote is worth paying.
The short answer
Most small and medium businesses in Nigeria pay between ₦100,000 and ₦500,000 a month for ongoing SEO, according to Nelium Systems' 2026 pricing guide. One-time work, like an audit or a fixed optimisation project, is priced separately. Here's how the published ranges break down:
| Type of SEO work | Typical price in Nigeria | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer, monthly | ₦100,000 – ₦300,000 | Awele SEO (2025) |
| Small agency, monthly | ₦150,000 – ₦500,000 | Awele SEO (2025) |
| Established agency, monthly | ₦300,000 – ₦1,000,000+ | Awele SEO (2025) |
| Local SEO, monthly | ₦100,000 – ₦250,000 | Awele SEO (2025) |
| One-time SEO audit | ₦50,000 – ₦250,000 | SmartSEO (2026) |
| One-time on-page SEO | ₦80,000 – ₦500,000 | SmartSEO (2026) |
| One-time technical SEO | ₦150,000 – ₦700,000 | SmartSEO (2026) |
Audits vary the most. Nelium Systems puts them at around ₦150,000 for a small site and over ₦600,000 for a large or e-commerce site, well above SmartSEO's range, because a 500-product store simply takes longer to check than a five-page service site.
What Vyllan charges
We publish our prices because you should be able to compare before you talk to anyone. For SEO specifically:
- Free audit: a plain-English, priority-ranked report on your site, Google listing and social media, within 24 hours. Request one here.
- SEO Sprint: ₦300,000 – ₦950,000, one-time. A 2 to 3 week technical and on-page project, with a before-and-after report and a 90-day outlook.
- Full Growth Retainer: ₦750,000 – ₦1,500,000 a month, 3-month minimum. Ongoing SEO plus paid ads and social media under one plan, with ad spend billed separately.
The Sprint sits in the same range as the one-time technical and on-page work above. The Retainer sits higher because it covers three services, not just SEO.
What actually drives the price
- The size of your site. Five service pages take far less work than an online store with hundreds of products.
- How much is broken. A site with indexing errors, duplicate pages or slow load times needs repairing before any ranking work pays off.
- How competitive your searches are. Ranking for "lawyer in Abuja" is a different job from ranking for a niche service in one neighbourhood.
- How many services and locations. Each one needs its own keyword research and usually its own page.
- Whether content is included. Writing new pages and articles is often the biggest ongoing cost in any SEO retainer.
- Who does the work. A freelancer costs less than an agency, but you're relying on one person's time and range.
One-time project or monthly retainer?
A one-time project makes sense when your site has never been properly set up for search: the foundation is the problem, and fixing it once gets you most of the benefit. A monthly retainer makes sense when you're in a competitive market, need new content regularly, or want someone watching your rankings and fixing problems as they appear.
Many businesses do both, in that order: fix the foundation once, then decide whether ongoing work is worth paying for based on what the first project actually moved.
Red flags when you're comparing quotes
- Guaranteed first-page or #1 rankings. Nobody outside Google controls its rankings. A guarantee usually means shortcuts, or a keyword nobody searches for.
- Very cheap "full SEO" packages. Nelium Systems points out that a year of ₦40,000-a-month packages adds up to ₦480,000 with little to show for it, and Awele SEO warns that SEO under ₦150,000 a month often relies on tactics that can hurt your rankings.
- No clear list of deliverables. If you can't see what will be done each month, you can't check whether it was.
- They keep your accounts. You should own your Google Search Console, Google Business Profile and analytics from day one.
- Reports full of numbers with no explanation. We've written about how to read a marketing report if you're not sure what yours is telling you.
What you should get for your money
Whatever you pay, any serious SEO engagement should give you:
- A technical audit with issues ranked by how much they're likely costing you
- A keyword map showing which page should rank for which search
- A list of the changes actually made, not just recommended
- Before-and-after numbers from Google Search Console
- An honest timeline: for competitive searches, 3 to 6 months is realistic, and longer for a brand-new site
Five questions to ask before you pay for SEO
- What exactly will you do in the first 30 days?
- Which searches are you targeting, and why those?
- How will I see progress, and how often?
- Will I own every account and all the content you create?
- What happens to my site if we stop working together?
The bottom line
Good SEO in Nigeria doesn't have to cost ₦1 million a month, but it rarely costs ₦40,000 either. Start by finding out exactly what's wrong with your site, then pay for the work that fixes the biggest problem first.
Founder, Vyllan
Wisdom founded Vyllan after running SEO, paid ads, social media and outreach for live, paying clients across several brands and agencies.