Eli Schwartz on the $10K-a-Month SEO Consultant Floor
Eli Schwartz thinks no SEO consultant should charge a client under $10,000 a month. He got to that number by accident.
He once had a max of $1,000 a month. Then he quoted Blue Nile $10,000, expecting them to counter at $5,000, and they asked how to make out the contract.
Today he sells 15-minute calls for $495. He says a change to one title tag took nine months at Tinder and ranked within 12 hours.
I watched his conversation with Tim Soulo on the Ahrefs Podcast, because his answer applies to anyone who sells SEO for a living. His math for a $1M solo practice is worth seeing.
The math for a $1M consulting practice
Eli is the author of Product-Led SEO. He ran SEO at SurveyMonkey before going solo, and he has consulted for Tinder, Coinbase and LinkedIn.
His math is short. A million a year is a little over $80,000 a month. At $10,000 per client, that is a bit more than eight clients. At $5,000, it is about 16. He knows plenty of consultants with more than 16 clients, and he says the low price is their mistake.
He doesn't claim you get there in year one or even year two. His point is that with good work and retention, the number isn't hard to reach. $10,000 a month is $120,000 a year per client, and he thinks an SEO who provides real value should cost at least that.
At the top end it gets bigger. He knows of solo consultants paid more than $100,000 a month by a single client. One example was a public company losing millions a month in SEO value. A consultant who can fix that is worth six figures a month, and this one did fix it.
If you want to see where that sits against the market, our breakdown of how much SEO costs has monthly prices by service type.
→ The price follows the size of the problem you solve. Your hours have little to do with it.
How one wrong guess became his baseline
Around 2017 or 2018, Eli was working full time at SurveyMonkey and consulting on the side. Scribd was paying him $1,000 a month, which was his ceiling. Before that he had done some consulting at $100 an hour.
Then someone from a private equity group found him on LinkedIn and asked if he could help Blue Nile, the diamond retailer, which had lost about 80% of its traffic.
He wanted $5,000 a month. Small businesses had always cut his quote in half, so he said $10,000 and waited for the counteroffer. They said great and asked if the contract should go to him or to an LLC.
He worked hard for that fee. He met with them once or twice a week and shipped a pile of deliverables. It also became his floor.
→ He only learned what a big company would pay because he guessed too high.
What $10,000 a month buys
Tim Soulo pushed on this. Eight clients in a 40-hour week leaves about five hours per client. Who pays $10,000 for that?
Eli's answer is that the range is very wide. At one end, a junior SEO delivers keywords, content briefs and reports. At the other, a specialist needs an hour a week, or even an hour a month, and can get a C-suite to redirect a whole product roadmap.
He gave two examples from his 15-minute calls, which cost $495, close to $2,000 an hour:
- A funded startup founder walked him through a plan built on spam, AI content and bought backlinks. Eli redirected him in 15 minutes and saved him tens of thousands he was about to spend.
- An agency had told a client that part of the site couldn't be fixed. In one hour he found a robots noindex in the code. That saved the $20,000 a month the client was paying that agency.
He says he would never pay $500 for 15 minutes himself, then adds that most of his calls return far more than that.
→ One hour of judgment can be worth more than a month of reports, and clients will pay for it once they believe you have it.
The folder that shows what you are up against
This is my favorite detail from the conversation. A consultant comes in as part of the team. Eli has had an @coinbase.com address, and email accounts at LinkedIn and Tinder. Clients often hand over the whole SEO folder in Google Drive, including rival proposals.
At Blue Nile, that folder showed they had been paying a huge agency $50,000 a month on a multi-year contract. That agency had steered them into translated sites for the wrong countries, which he says is what he took down to bring the traffic back.
At Tinder, the folder held proposals from reputable agencies to buy links for five figures a month, for a brand that had no need to buy links.
So when $10,000 sounds insane, remember what it is compared against. Big companies are often already spending several times that on the wrong plan.
→ Your competition at this level is usually a retainer nobody has questioned in years.
How he lands big clients
He gives three routes, and all of them are available to someone who isn't famous yet.
Personal brand. He went on the YC podcast unprepared, and only found out it had aired when his LinkedIn inbox filled up. It brought inbound from G2 and from WordPress, among others.
Social proof. He borrows this from Robert Cialdini's book Influence. If Blue Nile trusted you, the next brand worries less. That works so well that one brand keeps leading to the next, even though he says he often added more value for startups than for the household names. If you have a friend at a big company, solve one problem there and get permission to write it up.
Get in through a big company. Tim says landing a big client from nowhere is hard, and in-house experience gives you the track record. Eli's advice for people with no SEO experience surprised me: get hired in sales, the easiest door into any company, then move toward SEO. It is what he did himself at QuinStreet.
When he sits down with a big brand, he says he has one job. He has to convince them he can solve the problem they will bring to their boss or investors. Sounding smart doesn't do that.
→ Your first big logo pays you twice: once in fees and again in every pitch afterward.
Eight clients, five hours each: where Distribb fits
Tim's five-hour number is where most consultants hit a wall. If those hours go to keyword lists, briefs and reports, you are the junior SEO at the bottom of Eli's range, whatever you charge. You also have no time left for the calls and the personal brand that bring the next client.
This is what we built Distribb's white label SEO to take off your plate, and the page says it plainly: it is for agencies, operators and consultants. You add each client site, and Distribb runs the recurring work under your brand:
- Keyword research for each site, done automatically.
- Up to 90 articles a month per site, published to the client's CMS, each with its own cited research.
- Real backlinks from real businesses through the exchange, with no cold outreach from you, plus link outreach to the "best of" lists they should be on.
- Distribution to YouTube, Instagram, Medium and Quora.
- Reporting from Search Console and an AI visibility tracker, on one screen.
You bill your own rate and keep the margin. It costs $97 a month per client site on Pro. Accelerator is $495, which happens to be what 15 minutes of Eli's time costs, and it includes a human reviewing every piece. Prices per site drop 10% from 2 sites, 20% from 6 and 30% from 10, with no setup fee and no long-term contract.
Against a $10,000 retainer, that leaves your five hours for what clients pay the big number for: finding the noindex tag and telling the board why the plan needs to change.
For another route to the same goal, read how Steve Toth built a seven-figure SEO agency with no sales team.
Nine months for one title tag
Tinder's homepage title tag didn't contain the word "dating" or "date". The company wanted to rank for dating. So Eli asked to add it.
It took nine months. Legal, comms, PR and the international leads each had to approve it, and each meeting meant giving the same pitch again. On a site he owned, he would have changed it in the first hour.
Once it went live, it took about 12 hours to rank for "dating". A dating startup making the same change might wait years for that result.
That is his point about advice. Big brands can do almost nothing quickly, and they win fast when they do. Startups can do anything in minutes, and then wait months or years for it to work. So a plan written for one will fail the other.
→ Before you copy any SEO tactic, ask what size of company it worked for.
Why he would not prioritize ChatGPT
Tim brought up a sarcastic comment Eli left on LinkedIn, under a claim that Perplexity recommendations depend on ranking in Brave's top 10. Eli's question was what a business is meant to do with that. Most AI search advice stops short of the bank account.
His wider view: Google was nervous when ChatGPT launched, and it isn't now. When a business says its leads from ChatGPT grew 10X, he assumes it lost a similar amount somewhere else. A hotel gaining from ChatGPT probably lost from TripAdvisor. Reading has moved from blog posts to AI answers, so the same referrals are arriving by another road.
Tim asked for specifics on getting his podcast recommended. Eli's answer, which frustrated Tim on air, was to build the business. Lists and citations count, he said, as long as they are real ones earned on real platforms. He told one AI tool founder who asked how to become a giant in the category the blunt version: "Put 10 years into building a business."
→ AI visibility is mostly the result of a real business that people talk about, so work on that business first.
Prompts are not keywords
This is the section I would send to any agency reporting on AI visibility.
Eli's search behavior starts with a question, then runs through a string of follow-ups. Looking for a hotel, he asks about a neighborhood, then if it is safe, then how it compares with another. A tool tracking "best hotel in Miami" sees none of that, and he says that long conversation is where the conversion happens.
He mentions hearing of companies paying around $10,000 a month for this kind of tracking. A hotel cares about revenue per room. A green dashboard doesn't answer that question. Paid marketers are never proud of simply being number one, he says. They look at LTV and CAC. AI visibility should be held to the same business metrics.
His prediction is a swing back. He puts interest in AI at about 90% today and thinks it should be closer to 10%. Most AI visibility will turn out to be a reflection of SEO work, so the real question is whether what you already do gets you 90% of the way there, and whether the last 10% earns its cost.
I agree with most of this, and I run a product that tracks AI visibility. Distribb's tracker is part of the plan, which is how I think it should be: a cheap signal next to Search Console clicks. Prompt tracking has real uses, such as seeing who gets cited instead of you. If you want to compare options, here are the best AI visibility tools we compared. Just don't let a prompt count replace signups and revenue in the report your client's CEO reads.
→ When the CEO asks why revenue fell under a green dashboard, the dashboard won't defend you.
What I'm taking from Eli
Quote the number that scares you. Eli doubled his target to leave room for a counteroffer, and nobody countered.
Pick clients who have the problem. $10,000 is a lot for a startup, and small next to a company losing 80% of its traffic.
Sell the answer to a question someone must take to their boss. Should we buy these Reddit citations? Which tool plan do we need? Those are the conversations big clients want.
Write up one big win. Get permission, then publish it. Social proof compounds faster than any cold outreach.
Match the advice to the company's speed. Budget nine months of meetings at a big brand and years of patience at a startup.
Report in revenue. Use AI visibility metrics as supporting evidence, and lead with money.
Watch the full interview
The episode is "How to Land Your First $10K-a-Month SEO Client" on the Ahrefs Podcast, about an hour long. Tim pushes back throughout, and the argument over how specific AI visibility advice can get is worth hearing in full.
FAQ
Who is Eli Schwartz?
Eli Schwartz is an SEO consultant and the author of Product-Led SEO. He ran SEO at SurveyMonkey and has consulted for brands including Tinder, Coinbase, LinkedIn, Quora and Blue Nile. His book Product-Led SEO came out of a CEO asking why he couldn't just hire someone on Fiverr.
How much should an SEO consultant charge per month?
Eli says $10,000 a month should be the floor for a client. That is his opinion, and it assumes clients with big enough problems to justify the fee. What you can charge depends on your skill and the value you deliver, and he says he has seen more than $100,000 a month paid to solo consultants.
How many clients do you need to make $1 million a year as an SEO consultant?
You need a little more than eight clients at $10,000 a month, or about 16 at $5,000. Eli doesn't expect that in the first or second year. He says consistent results, retention and new clients get you there, and his own practice grew through a mix of podcasts and referrals.
How do you get your first $10,000 a month SEO client?
Quote that price to a company with a costly problem. Eli's first came through LinkedIn from a private equity contact, for Blue Nile. He recommends building a personal brand, doing one notable piece of work you can reference, and gaining in-house experience at a recognized company.
Should I track prompts for AI visibility?
You can, but not as your main metric. Eli argues real AI searches are long conversations a tracker can't see, so prompt rankings don't show where money is made. He would hold AI visibility to the same measures as any channel: signups, revenue, LTV and CAC.
Can a solo SEO consultant serve eight clients alone?
Yes, if the recurring work doesn't sit on your desk. Eight clients leaves about five hours a week each. White labeling the content, links and reports through Distribb, at $97 to $495 a month per site, keeps those hours free for strategy.
If you sell SEO, raise your floor
Eli's jump from $1,000 to $10,000 came from one quote to one company with a costly problem. To make that quote believable, your hours need to go to judgment and away from production. See how white label SEO with Distribb handles the production under your brand.