How do I choose an SEO agency in Nigeria?

Last updated 7 October 2026. Written by Oyekola Obajuwon, founder of Growveloper, a growth studio in Lagos that builds the website, the marketing and the follow up for owner run businesses in Nigeria, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Choose an SEO agency in Nigeria on what it will do each month and whose name the accounts are in, not on the price. Four published price lists charge ₦150,000 a month for four different jobs. Ask Google's own interview questions, keep Search Console in your business's name, and walk away from guaranteed rankings.

SEO means search engine optimisation: the work that gets your site shown when someone types what you sell into Google. In Nigeria that really does mean Google. StatCounter's search engine figures for Nigeria put Google at 98.28% of searches in September 2026, with Bing at 1.41%. So the agency you hire is working on one engine, and Google has written down what it thinks you should ask them.

How much does an SEO agency cost in Nigeria in 2026?

The price lists we read start at ₦150,000 a month and run past ₦750,000. That number is where most comparisons stop. It is where this one starts, because four providers publish the same entry price, and here is what each one says it buys.

The full lists are on Awele SEO's pricing page, Shield Agency's Lagos pricing, Kolonell's Lagos local SEO prices and NimahBuilds' SEO pricing. Higher up, Awele charges ₦350,000 a month for a package with three blog posts and ₦750,000 and up for five or more. Shield runs ₦250,000, ₦400,000 and ₦600,000. Kolonell charges ₦300,000 for four articles plus link building and ₦500,000 for eight articles, PR and technical work.

Why do SEO packages at the same price differ so much?

Because they are not the same product. Look across the table again. One ₦150,000 buys foundation work and no writing. One buys four optimisations of content you already have and a single link. One buys two new articles and ties you in for six months. One buys an audit and fixes on five pages, and does not say whether you pay it once or every month.

Four published price lists charge the same ₦150,000. They are not four prices for one service. They are four different services that happen to cost the same. None of them is wrong. Each is the right buy for a different site, which is why the first question is not "which agency" but "which job does my site need first".

Our own marketing retainers start at $1,500 a month, the figure published on our local services page. That is well above every naira list here. If what your site needs is the foundation work in the first row, several of these providers will do it for less, and the questions below work just as well on them.

What should I ask an SEO agency before I hire it?

Google answers this itself. Its page Do you need an SEO?, last updated 5 June 2026, lists the questions to ask. Among them:

The questions, in Google's words

• "Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?"
• "What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?"
• "What's your experience in my industry?"
• "What's your experience in my country/city?"
• "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?"

The country and city question matters more here than almost anywhere. Ask for a Nigerian site they have worked on that you can find on Google yourself, today, on your phone, by typing what that business sells and where.

The answer that ends the conversation

Google is blunt: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." The same page says to beware of anyone who claims to guarantee rankings, a "special relationship" with Google, or a "priority submit". It also says something every owner should read twice: "Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire." If the agency gets your site penalised, it is your site.

If the proposal also sells AEO or GEO, short for answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation, Google's page asks whether that advice is aligned with its official guidance on generative AI features. Our piece on generative engine optimization explains what those words should mean in practice.

Who should own the Search Console and Google accounts?

Your business, every time. We call this the login test: before you sign, ask in whose name the agency will set up Google Search Console, Google Business Profile and Google Analytics, and accept only one answer.

Search Console is Google's free tool that shows which searches your site appears for and how often people click. Its help page on permissions is short and decisive: "You can grant permissions to other users only if you are a property owner." Whoever verifies the property first holds the keys. If the agency verifies it from its own account, the record of how your site performs in Google sits with them, and when the contract ends, so can the record.

Google's hiring page goes further for the audit stage: "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)."

The same rule applies to the domain itself. Our guide to choosing a web developer in Lagos covers what the .ng registry says about who owns a domain.

Are backlinks in an SEO package a red flag?

Not by themselves, but a monthly count should prompt one question: how will the links be earned? A backlink is another site linking to yours, and good ones come from being worth linking to: a supplier listing, a local news story, a directory you belong in. Google's spam policies, last updated 28 August 2026, list "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes" as link spam, including "Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links".

So when a package promises a number of backlinks each month, ask where last month's links for another client came from, and ask to see them. An agency doing honest outreach will show you. If the answer is vague, remember whose site carries the risk.

What should an SEO agency do first for a small business site?

Whatever the site is missing, and that is often not articles. When we audited Baye Business Solutions, a Lagos cloud services company of about 25 people, the business offered eight categories of service and the website had no page for any of them. "Microsft365" was misspelled in the navigation. The Backup and Recovery link pointed to an unrelated domain. There was no analytics at all.

An agency selling two articles a month could have written for that site for a year. The articles would have had nowhere to send the reader. The first job was a page for every service the company actually sells, and tracking to see who arrived. The rebuild delivered both: eight service pages and more, a blog the team could publish to themselves, and analytics that showed, for the first time, who visited and where they dropped off.

So before you choose between price lists, open your own site on your phone and ask: is there a page for each thing I sell, in the words a customer would type? If not, the package with the audit and on-page fixes is the right first buy, whoever sells it. Our local SEO checklist sets out the order for a service business.

How long does SEO take to work in Nigeria?

Months, and anyone who promises weeks is describing something else. The Nigerian pages we read agree on a range. Kolonell says first results appear in two to four months depending on the package and asks for a six month minimum. Our own marketing page says SEO "takes 4-6 months for meaningful rankings".

Google itself gives no fixed timeline and refuses to promise a position. What a good agency can promise is the work: which pages it will fix, which it will write, and what you should see in Search Console as it lands. Ask for that list in the proposal, by month.

What should a monthly SEO report show me?

Four things you can check yourself. How many people clicked through to your site from Google searches that were not your business's name. Which pages they landed on. How many of them called, messaged or filled in a form. And the list of changes the agency made that month, which Google's own question above already asks for.

Then check the first number in your own Search Console, because a report can be accurate about a site that is not being measured. For about three weeks in September 2026, our own Google Analytics recorded nothing: the cookie banner sent visitors' consent in a format Google Tag Manager did not read, and every visit arrived marked as declined. Nothing on the site looked broken. We tell that story in full in our piece on improving your website's conversion rate. A report built on that data would have shown a quiet month that never happened.

If you want a second opinion on a proposal you already have, there is a free call. We will tell you if one of the naira packages is the right buy.

Before you compare prices, decide which job your site needs first, then hire the agency whose ₦150,000 buys that job, with the logins in your name.