SEO costs in Switzerland.

As a market orientation, Swiss agencies typically charge a small or medium-sized business between CHF 300 and CHF 2,000 a month, depending on competition, catchment area and scope. At DLM Digital, local SEO starts at CHF 300 a month and full-service SEO — technology, content and authority work — at CHF 800 a month. A one-off SEO audit with a prioritised action plan starts at CHF 1,500. There is no ceiling: corporations competing nationally pay five-figure retainers, but that is a different starting position from a business serving one region. What matters is not the absolute figure but its relation to the value of an enquiry. If a new client contributes CHF 5,000 in margin, a retainer of CHF 800 a month pays for itself with two extra jobs a year.

Ongoing SEO support with us starts at CHF 300 a month for local SEO and CHF 800 a month for full-service SEO. The difference is scope, not quality. Local SEO covers the Google Business Profile, local keywords, citations and reviews — the work that pays off fastest for a business with a regional catchment area. Full service adds technical optimisation, Core Web Vitals, ongoing content production, GEO for AI search and authority building. A monthly retainer is always a booking of capacity: you are paying for a defined number of working hours, not for a ranking. We disclose how many hours go into which measure. If an agency cannot or will not tell you that, treat it as a warning sign.

Local SEO starts at CHF 300 a month at DLM Digital. That covers setting up and maintaining the Google Business Profile, researching and optimising for local search terms, consistent NAP data (name, address, phone) across every directory, citations in Swiss directories such as local.ch and search.ch, a review strategy and monthly reporting. For most Swiss SMEs local SEO is the cheapest effective entry point, because local competition is manageable and a well-run Google Business Profile brings enquiries comparatively quickly. A directory subscription for CHF 99 a month is something else entirely: automated listings without editorial care. That is an address subscription, not local SEO.

SEO is working time, not a product. Almost the entire price comes from hours worked by people: keyword and competitor research, technical analysis and repair, writing copy, rebuilding page structures, maintaining the Google Business Profile, reading data and adjusting course. There is no licence to buy and very little worth automating — the parts that can be automated are precisely the parts that no longer work. In Switzerland, salaries and therefore hourly rates sit above the European average. A retainer of CHF 800 a month amounts to a few working days per quarter. If a quote looks expensive, the useful question is not why it costs so much, but how many hours you get and what those hours are spent on.

No. At that price there is no working time in the package. For orientation: CHF 99 a month buys considerably less than one hour from a Swiss specialist. What such packages actually deliver is automated directory listings, generic text blocks and a report that lists rankings without context. In practice that moves nothing, yet it costs you around CHF 1,200 over a year — roughly the price of a one-off SEO audit that at least leaves you with a concrete plan. If your budget really is CHF 100 a month, our honest advice is to save for a year, then commission a single audit and implement it yourself. That beats twelve months of automated directory entries.

A one-off SEO audit starts at CHF 1,500 at DLM Digital. It covers a full analysis of the technical side (load time, Core Web Vitals, crawlability, indexing, structured data), of content, site structure and backlink profile, plus a competitor analysis and an action plan prioritised by effort and expected impact. A GEO audit, which examines how your company shows up in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, also starts at CHF 1,500. The audit is deliberately written so that you can implement it without us — with your own team or with the web agency you already work with. For companies with internal capacity that is often the most economical entry point: buy clarity once instead of paying a retainer for years.

A one-off GEO audit starts at CHF 1,500; an ongoing GEO mandate starts at CHF 2,500 a month, combined with full-service SEO from a single team. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — means making sure your company still gets named when Google writes the answer itself in AI Overviews, or when someone asks ChatGPT first. The foundations overlap heavily with good SEO: clear answers in the opening sentences, clean Schema.org data, one consistent company entity across every platform. That is why GEO is not a bolt-on product with us but already part of full-service SEO. A separate GEO mandate only pays off if AI visibility is business-critical for you and needs to be measured and steered intensively.

A clean conversion tracking setup costs between CHF 800 and CHF 2,500 as a one-off with us, depending on how complex your website, your forms and the connected systems are. Without tracking you cannot judge whether SEO is working: you see rankings and visitor numbers, but not which search terms actually produce enquiries and jobs. That is the most common reason SEO budgets get burned in practice — the work is aimed at keywords with high search volume instead of keywords that bring customers. So we recommend setting tracking up before the first retainer month, not after it. It usually pays for itself simply because you stop ineffective measures earlier.