Recovery work is priced differently from most SEO because the scope is unknown at the start. You are buying a diagnosis first, and only after that can anyone say what fixing it costs. Providers who quote a recovery price before looking are quoting a package, not your situation.
Why it is priced in two parts
- Diagnosis is bounded and quotable. Establishing what happened and why is a defined piece of work.
- Remediation is not, until diagnosis is complete. A directive fault is an hour; a failed migration is weeks.
A sensible engagement therefore starts with a bounded diagnostic and prices the remainder once the cause is known. See traffic drop audit.
What drives the cost
How long ago it happened
The single largest factor. A decline caught in week two is cheaper to reverse than the same decline caught in month eight, because signals decay and competitors take the positions. Delay costs more than any other variable.
Whether the cause is mechanical or competitive
- Mechanical faults such as directives, redirects or indexation are comparatively cheap to identify and fix.
- Competitive or quality causes are expensive, because the remedy is genuine improvement rather than a correction.
Evidence availability
Missing analytics history, no archived crawl and no change log all add reconstruction time. On a post-migration recovery, rebuilding the old URL inventory is frequently the largest single cost, and it is entirely avoidable by capturing it beforehand. See pre-migration audit.
Site size and implementation
Large catalogues cost more to analyse. Whether you have developers to implement the fix, or need it done for you, changes the figure substantially.
How many things were changed already
Sites where several remediation attempts have already been made are more expensive, because those changes have to be untangled before the original cause can be seen.
Comparing recovery quotes
- Is diagnosis separately scoped, or bundled into an open-ended retainer?
- What happens if the cause turns out to be simple? A good arrangement costs less in that case.
- Who implements the fix?
- What is the monitoring period afterwards, since recovery is confirmed over weeks?
- Any guarantee of recovery is disqualifying. Nobody can promise it.
What recovery does not buy
Worth being explicit. Recovery restores what was lost to a fixable cause. Where a decline reflects genuinely stronger competitors or a changed results page, the previous position may not be recoverable at any price, and an honest diagnosis says so rather than selling remediation.
Frequently asked questions
Can you quote before diagnosing?
Not honestly. The cause determines the work, and the range between a directive fault and a failed migration is enormous. A fixed price quoted in advance is a package rather than a scope.
Is recovery more expensive than prevention?
Substantially. A pre-migration audit is bounded work; recovering from a migration that went wrong involves diagnosis under uncertainty with revenue decaying throughout.
What if you cannot find the cause?
It happens, particularly where evidence is missing or many changes shipped together. A good diagnostic will say what was ruled out and what remains uncertain rather than picking a plausible answer.
How long does recovery take to pay back?
Where the cause is mechanical and caught early, quickly, because the traffic returns. Where it is competitive, recovery is an investment in improvement rather than a repair with a payback date.
Consulting CTA
If you have lost traffic and need the cause established before committing to remediation, book an SEO consultation.