r/Business_in_China • u/MaysonAi • 8h ago
SEO pricing in Singapore is fairly public now, GEO pricing basically isn't — here's what I've pieced together
Someone asked me about this last week and I realised the answer splits into two halves, one of which I can actually back up and one I can't, so figured I'd write it out.
SEO side there's decent public data. Singapore retainers land roughly between S$800 and S$5,000 a month, and the SME band that keeps coming up across different agency guides is S$1,500 to S$3,000. One-off audits somewhere in the S$800 to S$3,500 zone, hourly consulting around S$100 to S$250. Local service businesses tend to sit lower, ecommerce and B2B higher, competitive lead gen higher still.
The thing I'd want anyone to understand before comparing quotes: a S$500 retainer and a S$5,000 retainer aren't the same thing priced differently, they're genuinely different services. Below about S$800 you can't really fund content and technical work and links at the same time, so something gets dropped, and usually what you get is tool output dressed up as a report.
GEO is where it gets murky. There isn't a public benchmark yet, the service is too new and nobody's settled on how to price it. So if someone tells you the market rate for GEO, they're quoting a number that doesn't exist. I'd be sceptical of confident pricing claims here for another while yet.
What I can say is the cost logic. It's a layer on SEO rather than a replacement. The overlapping bits are content quality, technical health, site structure, general accessibility — if you're already doing SEO none of that is new spend. What's actually additional is content shaped to get quoted rather than ranked (question-answer structure, direct factual statements — marketing prose ranks okay but doesn't get cited), building mentions on third party sources models pull from, and monitoring. That last one is the sneaky cost because there's no mature tracker, so it's people manually querying across platforms and phrasings and logging what comes back. That time adds up.
Practical upshot: if you're doing neither yet, scoping both together tends to be cheaper than doing SEO and then bolting GEO on later, because the foundation is shared.
Also, for anyone in SG, PSG can offset part of the SEO side if your provider is an approved vendor. Worth asking, plenty of people don't.
And the frame I find more useful than chasing market averages — what's one new customer actually worth to you. If lifetime value is five grand then two grand a month breaks even at one customer. That maths tells you more than any pricing guide.
Anyone here been quoted for GEO specifically? Genuinely curious what numbers are floating around because I've not seen enough to know if there's a pattern forming.