Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the SEO work personally. No junior handoff, no account manager middle layer.

What Siege Media actually costs, per their site, June 2026

Before I argue I am a better choice for anyone, I want to be precise about what their price is and what it buys, because most “cheaper than” pages on the internet either fabricate competitor numbers or quote outdated ones. Everything in this section comes from publicly available information on siegemedia.com and their published pricing guides as of June 2026.

Per their site, Siege Media’s content marketing minimum is $8,000 a month. They ask for a 12-month contract because SEO is a long-term channel, and they include a 30-day out clause to grant flexibility if budgets or strategies change. Their content strategy deliverables, per their published pricing, range roughly between $12,000 and $30,000 for an end-to-end engagement depending on whether you already have a solid content design in place. Per their public pricing guides, integrated programs that bundle SEO, GEO, content, design, and digital PR sit in the $15,000 to $45,000-plus per month range, with Siege operating at that tier.

They are also explicit about who they work with. Per their site, they evaluate engagements on projected ROI and prefer clients with the potential for 400%-plus returns, which usually means an established business with revenue to amplify rather than a pre-revenue startup or a small local services shop. Their public case studies feature brands like Asana, Zillow, TripAdvisor, and Wise. They report having generated $100 million-plus in client value across their portfolio (per their site).

That is a serious agency. I am not going to tell you they are overpriced for what they deliver, because for the buyer they are built for, they probably are not. What I am going to tell you is that the buyer they are built for is a very specific shape, and if you are not that shape, their floor is the problem long before the work quality is.

What $1,500 a month flat actually buys with me

My SEO program is $1,500 a month, flat rate, same number every month, no contract, cancel any month and keep everything I built. That number is on my public pricing page, and it is the same whether you are in San Diego or Singapore. A lead-built website is a separate $500 one-time, a landing page is $300 one-time, and those are also flat and published.

For that $1,500 a month, you get me, Mandeep Singh, doing the actual work. Not pitching it, not selling it, not handing it to a junior. The monthly scope covers technical SEO fixes, on-page optimization, content briefs and copy for your money pages, internal linking, schema and AI citability work, Google Business Profile management when local search matters, monthly reporting, and a direct call with me. No account manager layer, no project coordinator forwarding messages, no four-stakeholder approval chain inside the agency before anything ships.

What I do not bundle in is a digital PR team chasing top-tier publication links, a dedicated illustrator producing custom infographics every week, and a strategist running content briefs across five verticals at once. Those are real things Siege Media delivers per their site, and if you need them, you need them, and my price will not magically expand to cover what their team of 60-plus delivers. This is the honest trade.

Side-by-side: Sprout Sage versus Siege Media (per their site, June 2026)

The table is honest because honesty is the entire premise of the comparison. If you read it and your gut says “I want the team of 60,” you should hire them. If your gut says “I want one accountable senior person and my $1,500 back if it does not work,” that is what I sell.

When Siege Media is the right call (and you should not hire me)

I am going to spend a full section telling you when not to hire me, because I would rather you hear it here than on a 30-minute audit call that wastes both of our afternoons. There are at least four scenarios where Siege Media or a peer like them is the right answer and a founder-led $1,500-a-month program is the wrong one.

You have a real content engine budget, $96,000-plus a year, already approved. If your CMO has signed off on six figures of SEO spend, the integrated team Siege Media fields per their site is a different category of output than I can match. They publish more, they design more, they pitch more links to higher-tier publications, and they do it across multiple workstreams at once. At that budget tier, you are not paying for SEO labor, you are paying for compounding throughput, and a one-person operation cannot match a 60-person operation on throughput. I will not pretend otherwise.

You need integrated content, design, and digital PR under one roof. Per their site, Siege Media’s pitch is that SEO, content strategy, custom design, and PR run as one program with one strategy, which means your infographic, your blog post, and your link campaign all reinforce each other. That coordination is real, and it is hard to replicate by stitching together separate freelancers. If your brand needs that kind of integrated motion, the premium is buying the integration, not just the labor.

You are an established brand that needs to look like one. A Series B SaaS company hiring its first SEO agency cannot show up at a board meeting and say “we hired one guy in India for $1,500 a month.” Internal politics are a real factor in vendor selection at scale, and a brand-name agency on the invoice is sometimes worth the premium for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO output. I am not the right answer there. Hire the agency the board has heard of.

You want a 12-month plan with a fixed roadmap and quarterly business reviews. Per their site, Siege Media’s model is a 12-month commitment with structured planning. If your operating cadence is annual planning, quarterly roadmaps, and structured QBRs, that is how their machine is built and you will get value out of it. My cadence is monthly, scope-flexible, and oriented around the next 30 days. Different cultures, different fit.

If any two of those describe you, I genuinely think you should book a call with Siege Media and not me. I would rather lose your business to the right answer than win it and underdeliver against the wrong expectations.

When I am the right call instead

Here is the inverse, and the larger market by raw count. There are far more small and mid-sized businesses in the world than there are companies with $96,000 of approved SEO budget, and most of them still need SEO done well.

You are a small to mid-sized business that cannot justify $8,000 a month yet. Maybe you are doing $500,000 to $5 million in revenue, SEO is one channel of several, and you need it to work without becoming the dominant line item in your marketing budget. Per Siege Media’s site, their floor functionally rules you out as a client. My floor is built exactly for you, and the work product, on-page SEO, technical fixes, content for your real money pages, schema, internal linking, is the same shape of work, just at the volume your business actually needs.

You want one accountable person, not a relay race. Founders running 10-to-100-person companies often tell me the same thing about prior agency experiences: the senior strategist sold the work, then a junior wrote it, then an account manager fielded the questions, then nobody could explain why traffic dropped. With me you have one phone number, one inbox, one face on the Zoom call, and the person who quoted the work is the person doing it. That structural advantage is worth more than most price gaps.

You have been burned by a contract before. If your last SEO agency required a 12-month commitment and you spent months three through twelve trying to get out of it, you know what I am talking about. My program has no contract, ever. You can leave on the 31st of any month and the only thing you owe me is whatever month you used. The 30-day out clause inside a 12-month contract that Siege Media offers per their site is a reasonable compromise for a premium-tier buyer. For a small business with a tight runway, “no contract” is not a compromise, it is the requirement.

You want pricing you can actually plan around. $1,500 a month, every month, same number. No scope creep invoices, no quarterly true-ups, no surprise digital-PR add-ons. My pricing page is the same pricing page you would see if you were a Fortune 500 company asking, and the number does not move based on what your domain looks like. That predictability is itself a feature.

What I actually do for $1,500 a month

Concrete, so you can compare apples to apples against any agency quote, premium or otherwise.

Technical SEO baseline. Indexation audit, crawl errors, site speed pass, schema implementation, internal link structure, canonical and redirect cleanup, mobile and Core Web Vitals review. I run the audit on month one, ship the fixes across months one and two, and re-audit quarterly. This work is invisible to your customers and decisive for Google.

On-page and content. Briefs and copy for your money pages, the ones that actually convert, written or rewritten with the keyword research, intent match, and on-page SEO that 90% of agency content quietly skips. I publish less per month than a Siege Media-sized team does, by definition, and I select harder for what gets the slot. A page that ranks and converts is worth ten pages that do neither.

Internal linking and topical structure. This is where most small-business SEO programs leak rankings, and it is also where I get a disproportionate share of my wins. Internal links that flow authority from your blog into your money pages, hub pages that consolidate topical coverage, and cross-links between related services and locations. Boring work, large impact.

Local and Map Pack work when relevant. If your business has a service area, Google Business Profile management, review velocity, and Map Pack grid scanning come standard inside the $1,500. A premium content agency typically does not run your GBP because it is not their model. I do, because for most small businesses that profile is the highest-leverage asset on the table.

AI citability and GEO. Schema, FAQ structure, answer formatting, and on-page work aimed at being cited by AI search experiences. This is increasingly where the click trends are heading, and the work overlaps heavily with traditional SEO, so I bundle it in rather than charging a separate “GEO retainer.”

Monthly reporting and direct call. One real conversation a month with me, not an AM. Rankings, traffic, leads if we are tracking them, what shipped, what is next, what the data is actually saying. Thirty minutes that is worth more than any slide deck.

What I do NOT do (and what that means for you)

The honest list of what is not included, so you can plan accordingly.

I do not run dedicated digital PR campaigns chasing tier-one publication links. Per their site, that is a Siege Media specialty, and a real one. If your strategy depends on five or six high-DA earned links a quarter, hire them.

I do not have an in-house illustration or video team. Custom illustrated infographics, original photography, and video production are not in my scope. I will work with assets you provide and use clean, licensed stock when appropriate.

I do not run paid media inside the SEO retainer. If you want Google Ads, Meta Ads, or LinkedIn Ads managed, I either refer you out or quote that work separately. SEO and paid are different disciplines and bundling them dilutes both.

I do not take on competing clients in the same micro-vertical and geography. If I am working with one medspa in your city, I am not signing the second one across town, full stop. Premium agencies often have larger client books and run more sophisticated conflict policies; mine is the simple version, which is “no, I will not.”

Honest timelines, regardless of who you hire

This applies whether you hire me at $1,500 or Siege Media at $8,000-plus per their site. SEO timelines are a function of starting domain authority, content gap, competitive intensity, and seasonality, not vendor price.

If a vendor at any price tier promises page-one results in 30 days, walk. The honest answer is always a range, and the range is wider than the marketing copy suggests.

The track record, public and checkable

Per their site, Siege Media reports $100 million-plus in client value generated and a public client list including Asana, Zillow, TripAdvisor, and Wise. That is a real, verifiable enterprise track record, and I would not try to claim equivalence.

My track record is also public and checkable, just at a different scale. 37 five-star reviews on Upwork. Top Rated Plus status, which Upwork awards to the top tier of vetted freelancers. 97% job success score across 222 completed jobs. 9 years doing SEO and content work myself. You can verify all of it on my reviews page and on my public Upwork profile in minutes.

The difference between those two track records is scale, not seriousness. A senior solo operator with 222 completed engagements and 97% client satisfaction is a different category of vendor than a 60-person agency with a Fortune 500 client list, and the price reflects it. Both can be the right answer. The right answer is the one whose scope matches your scope.

A note on related comparisons

If you are evaluating multiple premium SEO and content agencies side by side, the same logic applies across most of them. I have written the equivalent honest comparison against another category leader at cheaper SEO agency than Neil Patel Digital, and the answer is structurally the same: there is a real, valid buyer for the premium offering, and a real, valid buyer for the founder-led one, and they are usually not the same company.

What unifies the founder-led case is the same three things. One accountable senior person, no contract lock-in, and pricing you can plan around. What unifies the premium-agency case is also three things. Integrated team output, brand-name credibility for internal politics, and a structured 12-month operating model.

Frequently asked questions