Ask five providers in Cairo what SEO costs and the answers will differ by a factor of ten. That is not because four of them are lying. It is because the word covers everything from a freelancer editing meta descriptions to a team rebuilding a site architecture, and nobody says which one they are quoting for. Here are the bands we actually see in this market, and what sits inside each.
How much SEO costs in Egypt, in four bands and in pounds
A freelancer or a junior in a small shop runs roughly EGP 5,000 to 15,000 a month. At that price you are buying a few hours a week of execution against somebody else’s plan. It can work for a simple local business with one location and one service. It will not move a competitive category.
A small agency or a two person specialist team is roughly EGP 15,000 to 40,000. This band buys a real audit, monthly technical fixes, four to eight pages of content and a report someone actually reads before sending. It is where most Egyptian SMEs land and it is honest value when the scope is written down.
An established agency retainer sits around EGP 40,000 to 120,000. Here you get senior strategy time, a content team rather than one writer, digital PR, and someone whose job is arguing with your developers until fixes ship. Bilingual programs, e-commerce catalogs in the thousands of URLs, and regulated categories live at the top of that range or above it.
Project work prices separately. A serious technical audit runs EGP 25,000 to 70,000 depending on site size, and a migration with redirect mapping and post launch monitoring is usually a similar figure again. Paying for an audit before committing to a retainer is the cheapest way to test an agency, and we recommend it even when the client ends up hiring somebody else.
What actually moves the number
Six variables explain nearly every quote. Competition in the vertical, because real estate and private education need several times the link investment of a niche industrial supplier. Site size, since a 40 URL brochure site and a 12,000 SKU store are different jobs entirely. Languages, because doing Arabic and English properly is close to double the content cost and people consistently budget for one. Developer access, which is the quiet one: if every fix queues behind a third party build agency in another country, the retainer buys fewer outcomes per month and both sides get frustrated. Link ambition. And measurement, since building server side tracking and clean attribution is real engineering time that has to come from somewhere.
The currency question nobody puts in the proposal
Since the float in March 2024 the pound has settled in the high forties to the dollar, and almost every tool this work depends on is priced in dollars. Crawlers, rank tracking, backlink indexes, log analysis and hosting all bill in foreign currency, so a retainer signed at a pound figure two years ago now funds materially less than it did. Ask any prospective agency two direct questions: are tool costs inside the retainer, and what is the review mechanism on price. A provider holding a fixed pound figure across a long contract is not being generous. They are quietly reducing what you receive.
How to tell whether a price is fair
Divide the retainer by the senior hours you will genuinely get and see whether the number still looks like a bargain. Ask for the split between strategy, technical, content and links, and be suspicious when content is ninety percent of it. Then compare against your media budget, because a business spending EGP 250,000 a month on ads and EGP 20,000 on organic has made a decision about compounding assets without noticing. If you want that comparison run on your own numbers before you commit, our SEO agency services begin with a scoped audit rather than a retainer.
