Google Algorithm Recovery Cost: What Actually Sets the Price

Why a fixed price would be dishonest here

Two sites can lose the same percentage of traffic on the same day and need completely different amounts of work. One has a canonical tag pointing every page at the homepage, which is a two-day fix. The other has eleven years of accumulated thin content and no author accountability anywhere, which is a four-month project.

An agency quoting a flat monthly fee before diagnosis is pricing an average. If your problem is the canonical tag, you are subsidising someone else’s four-month project. If your problem is the eleven years of content, the flat fee buys you a fraction of what you need and the engagement quietly underdelivers.

That is why every engagement here starts with a free diagnosis. Not as a lead magnet, but because a scope cannot be priced until it is known.

The six things that actually set the price

Factor	Cheaper end	Expensive end	Measurement (how to place yourself)
Number of causes	One clear cause	Three overlapping causes	Run the 60-point audit and see how many sections fail
Type of cause	Technical, manual action, click displacement	Site-wide quality or helpful content demotion	Technical is days; site-level composition is months
Site size	Under 200 pages	Thousands of pages	Content work scales with the number of pages that need touching
Prior damage	Nothing changed since the drop	Months of guesswork already applied	Reconstructing what was done costs real time
Who implements	Your team executes the roadmap	I execute everything	In-house implementation is usually cheaper and faster
Sector	General commercial	YMYL: health, finance, legal	YMYL is judged against the highest standard, so the bar is higher

The first two rows dominate. A single technical cause on a small site and three overlapping causes on a YMYL site with 4,000 pages are not the same service with a different number attached. They are different projects.

You can place yourself on most of these rows before contacting anyone. The 60-point audit checklist tells you how many causes are in play. The page scope analyzer tells you whether the problem is site-wide or one section, which is the single largest cost variable.

The four ways to engage

• Preliminary diagnosis. Free, within 48 hours. Why: You get the likely cause, the update it correlates with, and an honest answer on whether paying anyone is worth it. Some of these end with me saying you do not need me, which is a real outcome rather than a line in a sales page.
• Full recovery audit. One-time fee, priced by scope. Why: Complete diagnosis with root cause, affected page groups and a prioritised roadmap. For teams that can execute, this is often all that is needed.
• Implementation. Project or monthly, priced by scope. Why: Either I execute the roadmap or your team does with my oversight. Consulting costs less than full implementation and usually moves faster, because your team knows your codebase.
• Post-recovery monitoring. Monthly, optional. Why: Only worth it for sites where organic traffic drives meaningful revenue. For everyone else, the free alerts and the tools cover most of it.

Working out what it is worth to you

This is the calculation that actually matters, and you can do it without me. Recovery is worth paying for when the traffic you lost is worth more than the work costs, over a period you can wait out.

• Work out the monthly cost of the drop. Why: Lost visits multiplied by your organic conversion rate multiplied by your value per conversion. The traffic loss calculator does this and also shows the cumulative figure, which is the number that settles budget conversations.
• Apply a recovery factor of around 70 percent. Why: Full recovery happens in roughly three engagements in ten. Five in ten reach 60 to 90 percent. Building the business case on full recovery is building it on the less likely outcome.
• Compare against the cost of buying that traffic instead. Why: Recovery is a one-off cost against an indefinite ad spend, which is usually why it wins over any period longer than a few months.
• Factor in the wait. Why: A core update demotion cannot be reassessed until the next core update, which has averaged 82 days. If your business cannot survive four months at current traffic, recovery is the wrong plan and you need a paid traffic bridge alongside it.

If that calculation comes out small, say so when you get in touch. I would rather tell you not to spend the money than take it.

Pricing red flags in this industry

Recovery attracts desperate buyers, which attracts bad pricing practices. Five to watch for, whoever you end up hiring.

• A guaranteed recovery or a guaranteed timeframe. Why: Google decides when core updates run and how sites are reassessed. Nobody can guarantee an outcome they do not control, so a guarantee is either meaningless or hedged in the contract.
• A quote before any diagnosis. Why: The scope is unknown at that point. The number is an average, and averages are wrong for almost everyone.
• Per-keyword pricing. Why: Algorithm demotions are site-level or template-level. Pricing by keyword misdescribes the problem, which usually means the seller does not understand it.
• Twelve month lock-ins on a recovery. Why: Recovery has a defined end: the cause is fixed and the next reassessment happens. A long lock-in converts a project into an annuity.
• Cheap link packages as the proposed fix. Why: Since 2016 Google ignores links it does not trust rather than penalising you for them, so buying links rarely addresses a demotion and can create a second problem.

What costs nothing

A fair share of the enquiries I get resolve at this stage, which is the intended outcome rather than a leak in the funnel.

The drop analyzer finds your exact break date and tells you whether you lost rankings or lost clicks. The date checker matches it against every confirmed update since 2020. The index bloat ratio and the E-E-A-T rubric cover the two most common site-level causes. All thirteen are on the tools page, none require a signup, and none upload your data.

If those give you a clear answer and you have a team that can act on it, you have just saved the cost of an audit.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Google algorithm recovery cost?

It depends mostly on how many causes are in play and whether the problem is technical or site-wide. A single technical cause on a small site is a fraction of the cost of a site-wide quality project on a large YMYL site. The diagnosis is free, and the quote comes after it rather than before.

Why will you not publish a price list?

Because the honest range is wide enough that any single figure would mislead most readers. A published price is an average, and pricing an average means overcharging the simple cases and underdelivering on the complex ones.

Is the free diagnosis really free?

Yes, with no obligation and no signup. You get the likely cause, the update it correlates with, and a straight answer on whether a paid engagement is worth it for your situation.

Do you charge monthly or per project?

An audit is a one-time fee. Implementation can be a project or monthly depending on scope. Monitoring is monthly and optional. Recovery has a defined end point, so it is not structured as an open-ended retainer.

Do you offer a guarantee?

No. Google decides when reassessment happens and against what standard, so nobody can guarantee a ranking outcome. What is committed to is the diagnosis, the roadmap and an honest assessment of whether recovery is realistic, including when it is not.

Is it cheaper if my team does the work?

Usually, and often faster too, because your developers know your codebase. That is what the consulting engagement is for. It only works if the team genuinely has capacity, because a roadmap nobody executes costs money and delays the next reassessment.