How much does SEO cost?

We don't sell SEO as a separate retainer. Technical and on-page SEO ships built into every website at launch, and ongoing SEO runs through your Cortex AI credit plan, scoped per market. Most clients invest from a few hundred dollars a month up to about $3,000/mo per market and service category, depending on how aggressive they want to be.

How much does AEO / AI search optimization cost?

AEO — answer-engine optimization, so you get cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — is part of the same Hydra OS stack (structured content, schema, and entities), included in your growth plan rather than billed separately. AEO blogging that compounds your AI-search presence is $30 per published post at the cadence you choose.

How much does blogging and content cost?

AEO blogging is $30 per published post — pick your cadence (for example, daily Monday–Friday). Standalone page copy and buildout is $16 per page. Every piece is written, fact-checked, marked up with schema, and internally linked on the Hydra OS engine.

How much does Google Business Profile / local SEO cost?

AI Local — daily Google Business Profile optimization plus the new AI mapping engines — is $600/mo per market (per location/GBP).

How much does AI chat, text, and online booking cost?

AI Conversions — two-way text, AI web chat, and online booking across all 14 lead channels, booking straight into your field-management software or Google Calendar — is a flat $500/mo, month-to-month.

How much do backlinks and press releases cost?

Authority & Reputation (PR Link Building) is $600 per editorial link per month (adjust the quantity any time, month-to-month), with one press release included every 12 active months. Done-for-you Press Releases are $500 per release à la carte.

How much does a fully done-for-you AI marketing setup cost?

AI Consulting (done-with-you) starts at $2,000/mo. A fully autonomous, done-for-you Multi-Agent Solution (MAAS) starts at $25,000 one-time plus $2,500 per system connection plus token usage. Everything is month-to-month with no long-term contract.

Services · Website Design

Website design that's decoupled, static, and yours.

Q: How much does a website cost?

A professional, fully-optimized website from CI Web Group is a one-time build from $2,500 (Lean Launch) up to $235,000 (Multi-Location Franchise) — the same packages as Get Started. Most growing single-location trades operators land on Starter Build at $19,500. Ongoing maintenance starts at $250/mo and scales with the package. There is no website subscription: you own the site, domain, and data, and the build can be financed over 6, 12, or 18 months.

A statically generated front end built by our UI/UX team and AI design agents — fast, fully customizable, and shipped optimized. Run more than one version of your design and swap the whole look on demand. (The Hydra OS AI brain and content writing are separate services.)

Book a strategy session Explore the build map See pricing

Three services, not one bill

Website design is separate from the engine that markets you.

Most agencies blur design, content, and marketing into one fuzzy retainer. We don't. Your website design is a discrete, one-time build. The AI brain that grows your traffic and the words that fill the pages are their own services — so you only pay for what you actually need.

This service

Website Design

A decoupled, statically generated front end — the look, layout, and feel of your site. Highly customizable, built by our UI/UX team and AI design agents, and shipped fully optimized.

Separate

Hydra OS™ — the AI brain & marketing engine

Cortex, Synapse, and the autonomous agents that publish content, build SEO, and drive growth day after day. Your design can run on Hydra OS, but the engine is its own subscription.

Separate

Content writing

The words — service pages, city pages, and blog copy — are a separate scope. We design the vessel; copy and ongoing publishing are quoted on their own.

Decoupled by design

One set of content. As many looks as you want.

Because the design is decoupled from your content, the front end is just a skin over a stable core. That means we can build more than one version of your design and swap the entire look in and out — without touching a word of your content or risking your SEO.

Seasonal

A warm fall palette, a holiday hero, a spring refresh — schedule a whole alternate look and swap it in and out by date.

Your team wins the Super Bowl

Drop in a celebration version of the site the morning after. Same content, a brand-new face — live in minutes.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Go pink for October across the entire site — banners, accents, and hero — then revert automatically.

Weather-aware

Rain on the radar? The background and messaging can shift to match the conditions your customers are actually living in.

Highly customizable design elements — backgrounds, palettes, heroes, accents, and motion — can all be themed, scheduled, and rotated. Your site stays current with your business and your community, automatically.

The static advantage

Why a static site just wins.

Speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor. A statically generated site is the fastest, safest, most reliable way to put your business in front of people and AI engines.

Sub-100ms speed

Pages are pre-built to plain HTML and served from a global CDN edge — there is no database query and no server to render on the fly. The page is simply already there.

Core Web Vitals, by design

Tiny payloads and no render-blocking CMS mean fast LCP, near-zero CLS, and snappy INP out of the box — the metrics Google ranks on.

Un-hackable surface

No database, no PHP, no plugin soup. There is nothing live to exploit, so the entire class of CMS vulnerabilities and forced security patching disappears.

Instantly indexable

Crawlers and AI answer engines get complete, semantic HTML on the first request — not an empty shell waiting for JavaScript. That is what gets you cited.

Infinite, cheap scale

A static file at the edge handles a traffic spike from a TV ad or a storm the same way it handles one visitor — no origin to overload, no surprise hosting bill.

Always-on reliability

Nothing to crash. With no application server in the request path, your site stays up when a database-driven competitor's would fall over.

CSR · SPA · SSR · SSG

How a page gets built decides how fast it loads.

The acronyms matter. Where the HTML is assembled — on the visitor's device, on a live server, or once at build time — is the single biggest driver of speed, SEO, and reliability. Here is the honest comparison.

Model	How it renders	First load	SEO / AEO	Verdict
CSR Client-Side Rendering	Browser downloads a near-empty page, then JavaScript builds it on the device.	Slow — blank until a large JS bundle loads and executes	Weak — crawlers and LLMs often see an empty shell	Worst for a marketing site
SPA Single-Page Application	One big app loads, then re-renders content client-side as you navigate.	Heavy first paint; fast in-app clicks afterward	Fragile — depends on hydration and crawler JS support	Great for apps, wrong for sites
SSR Server-Side Rendering	A live server renders HTML for every single request, on demand.	Good HTML, but TTFB rises with server load and distance	Strong — but only as fast and reliable as the server	Better — at real infrastructure cost
SSG Static Site Generation — Hydra	Every page is pre-built once at deploy and served as a file from the edge.	Fastest possible — the HTML already exists, no server work	Best — complete semantic HTML on the first byte	The Hydra static site

Hydra builds your site with SSG — the page is generated once and served as a static file from the edge. There is no server to wait on and no JavaScript required just to see the content, which is why it's the fastest and most index-friendly of them all.

WordPress · Webflow · Hydra

A bloated CMS, a better CMS, and no CMS at all.

WordPress is a database-driven CMS — powerful but heavy. Webflow is the better CMS — cleaner and faster, but still a hosted platform with ceilings. The Hydra static site removes the CMS from the request path entirely.

WordPress

Good

Bloated CMS

A database renders every page through PHP on each request, propped up by caching plugins. Powerful and familiar — but heavy, slow without constant tuning, and a perpetual security and maintenance burden as plugins, themes, and core drift apart.

•Database + PHP rendered per request
•Plugin & theme vulnerabilities to patch forever
•Needs caching layers just to feel fast

Webflow

Better

Hosted visual CMS

A real step up — cleaner output, a visual builder, and decent performance on a managed host. But you are still inside a hosted CMS: platform limits, per-site pricing, ceilings on custom logic, and meaningful vendor lock-in when you want to do something it doesn't.

•Cleaner code than WordPress
•Still a hosted CMS with platform ceilings
•Custom logic and scale hit vendor limits

Hydra Static

Best

Decoupled SSG

Content is decoupled from presentation and the whole site is generated to static files served at the edge. Sub-100ms, nothing to hack, instantly indexed, and fully customizable down to the pixel — with the freedom to run multiple swappable designs on the same content.

✓Decoupled content + static delivery at the edge
✓No database, no server, no plugin attack surface
✓Fully custom design with swappable versions

Our framework · Astro

Built on Astro — the web's fastest framework.

Hydra OS is built on Astro — the modern web framework engineered for the world's fastest content-driven sites, and trusted by the largest companies on the internet. It's the engine under your decoupled static design, and the reason your site outruns a WordPress or Webflow build.

Real-world Core Web Vitals — % of sites passing

Astro66%
WordPress48%
Gatsby47%
Next.js30%
Nuxt28%

Source: Astro, based on real-world data from the HTTP Archive and the Chrome UX Report. Astro passes Core Web Vitals on more sites than WordPress, Gatsby, Next.js, or Nuxt. Want to verify any of this yourself — on our sites or anyone else's? The Lighthouse & Page Speed buyer's guide shows you exactly how to run and read the tests.

Astro Islands

Interactive components hydrate in isolation, so pages ship almost zero JavaScript and stay lightning fast.

Server-first rendering

Pages are rendered to lightweight HTML, not assembled in the browser — the fastest path to first paint and SEO.

Zero JS by default

Astro strips away everything you don't need and ships only the JavaScript a page actually uses.

Optimized images

Modern formats and zero layout shift built in — a Core Web Vitals win on every page.

View transitions

Native, app-like page transitions without the weight of a single-page-app framework.

Content-driven by design

Built to work with your content from any source — exactly what a marketing site needs.

Trusted by the largest companies in the world

Porsche
IKEA
Google
NordVPN
Trivago
The Guardian

The same framework powering sites for the world's biggest brands powers your business — see more on astro.build.

The brain behind Hydra

Pinto. Ferrari. Tesla.

Repainting a WordPress site doesn't make it fast. A static decoupled site is fast — but blind. Hydra OS is fast and has a brain: a vector database, RAG, CAG, autonomous agents, and a human team of trades-marketing experts — all reasoning over 20 years of North American home-services data.

Page load

0.4s

Same edge-delivered speed — without giving up intelligence.

AI discoverability

High

Structured for LLM retrieval — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews.

Autonomous actions

1,200/mo

Agents observe, retrieve, decide, and ship — every day.

Central Intelligence Engine

Your Website

Click a node

Vector DB, RAG, CAG, Agents, and the human Experts who manage them — tap any node to see exactly what each layer does for your site.

“Static-fast. Vector-smart. Agent-driven.”

Optimized on day one

We ship it fully optimized — not a blank canvas.

Every site goes live with the technical SEO done. No waiting on a separate optimization phase, no plugins to bolt on later — the structured, machine-readable foundation is built in from the first deploy.

✓Technical SEO foundation (clean, semantic, crawlable HTML)
✓Title tags & meta descriptions on every page
✓Open Graph tags for rich link previews
✓Twitter / X cards
✓Structured data (Schema.org JSON-LD)
✓Smart internal interlinking
✓XML sitemap & robots configuration
✓Canonical URLs & clean information architecture

Live Speed Comparison

WordPress

3.5s

avg. load time

0s1s2s3s4s

Webflow

1.8s

avg. load time

0s1s2s3s4s

Hydra OS AI

<100ms

instant delivery

0s1s2s3s4s

Based on Google PageSpeed Insights averages for WordPress & Webflow sites vs. Hydra OS static architecture.

HTML Code-to-Content Ratio

Same page. Same content. Wildly different amounts of code. Less code = faster load, better SEO, fewer vulnerabilities.

WordPress1,500+ lines

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-US" prefix="og: https://og
p.me/ns#">
<body class="wp-singular page-template-def
ault page page-id-12740 wp-custom-logo wp-theme-hv
ac101 wp-child-theme-hvac101-child theme-hvac1
01 woocommerce-no-js group-blog elementor-d
efault elementor-kit-15434 elementor-page eleme

Webflow600+ lines

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!-- This site was created in Webflow. htt
ps://webflow.com -->
<!-- Last Published: Wed Feb 25 2026 02:4
7:02 GMT+0000 -->
<html data-wf-domain="example-webflow-hvac
-site.com"
  data-wf-page="689ad41b54cf5d3d8d9c6e87"
  data-wf-site="687a76c410483eb87cffa339"
  lang="en"
  data-wf-collection="689ad41b54cf5d3d8d9c
6e83"

Hydra OS AI69 lines

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" class="scroll-smooth" dir
="ltr">
<body data-site-id="561" class="font-sans
antialiased">
  <main>
    <article>
      <section class="relative min-h-[70v
h]
        flex items-center overflow-hidde
n">
        <div class="container-custom relat

Compliance & security

Bank-grade protection, built in.

Active

PCI DSS Level 2

Meets PCI DSS Level 2 controls for sites handling card and lead data — validated annually.

In progress

PCI Level 1

Pursuing the highest PCI tier so customer data meets the strictest payment-industry standard.

Built-in

Zero CMS attack surface

Pre-rendered static HTML on a hardened CDN — no database, no admin login, no plugins to exploit.

Compliance & legal

We keep you compliant — and brought in a real law firm for the legal part.

ADA demand letters, PCI fines, A2P carrier blocks, missing privacy policies — the boring stuff that sinks contractors quietly. We handle the technical compliance ourselves, and we've negotiated a partnership with a law firm to cover the legal docs for our clients. We're not attorneys and don't pretend to be — that's the whole point of having one on call.

ADA / WCAG 2.2 AA

Accessibility baked in — keyboard nav, contrast, ARIA, screen-reader tested. Lawsuit-grade, not checkbox-grade.

PCI compliance

Payment flows architected to keep you out of scope. Tokenized, hosted fields, no card data touching your server.

A2P 10DLC

SMS messaging registered and compliant so your texts actually deliver and you stay off carrier blocklists.

Legal notices, handled

Privacy policy, terms, cookie consent, CCPA/GDPR notices — through our partner law firm, so real attorneys (not us) keep them current as laws change.

The interactive build map

Everything we can build — and what moves the number.

One diagram, three passes. Walk the anatomy of a Hydra site layer by layer, pick a design package and a size, then add capability from the component catalog — and watch the investment re-price with every choice. Real packages, real catalog prices, nothing invented.

yourbusiness.comStarter

Tap any layer to read what we can build there. The hero deepens with your design package; the page mesh grows with your size; components clip into their layer with a count badge.

Hero & brand system

Scales with your package

The design layer itself — art direction, brand engineering, and the decoupled skins that make one set of content wear as many looks as you want. This is what your design package buys.

What we can build here

✓Bespoke brand heroes — up to dimensional 3D brand art
✓Swappable seasonal, event, and weather design versions
✓Custom sections, motion, and interaction detail
✓Design versions scheduled by date and swapped on demand

On the investment: The design package is the lever: $2,500 (Lean Launch) to $235,000 (Multi-Location Franchise) one-time — the same Get Started packages — with monthly maintenance that scales with the build.

Lever 3 · Add components

87 on the live catalog · $5 = 1 credit

Every component below is a real SKU from the component store — add any of them at launch or at any time after. Selections clip into their layer on the diagram.

0 selected

One-time build

$23,500

Starter design $19,500 · 250 pages $4,000

Monthly care

$550/mo

Maintenance for the Starter tier — no website subscription; you own it.

AI credits in play

1,200

1,200 design credits

Price it for real Shop the components

This map is an honest estimate from our published packages and the live component catalog — exact pricing, bundle savings, and 3–18-month financing are locked in during your strategy session. The Hydra OS marketing engine and ongoing content are separate services, so your design budget goes entirely to your design.

Human hours + AI credits

Priced on the design, not a subscription.

A professional website costs between $2,500 and $235,000 as a one-time build — the same Lean Launch through Multi-Location Franchise packages as Get Started, priced by design depth and design credits. Most growing single-location operators land on Starter at $19,500. Maintenance starts at $250/mo and there's no website subscription — you own it.

Lean

$2,500

250 credits

Lean Launch — straight NEO Agent design, Value AI lane, 10% SEO, and a 10-page new-content envelope to get live on Hydra.

✓NEO Agent design (no human designer)
✓Value AI lane · 10% SEO
✓Maintenance $250/mo

Essentials

$4,500

450 credits

Essentials Build — branded design customization, Standard AI, 25% SEO, and a 25-page new-content envelope.

✓Branded customization
✓Standard AI · 25% SEO
✓Maintenance $350/mo

Starter

Popular

$19,500

1200 credits

Starter Build — most popular. Custom home & service heroes, Standard AI, and 100% SEO, AEO, GEO EEAT optimization.

✓Custom home & service heroes
✓100% SEO / AEO / GEO EEAT
✓Maintenance $550/mo

Premium

$32,500

2000 credits

Premium Build — key pages designed from scratch with motion and brand systems for competitive metros.

✓Full-custom key pages + motion
✓100% SEO / AEO / GEO EEAT
✓Maintenance $650/mo

Signature

$55,000

3500 credits

Signature Build — bespoke storytelling with custom illustration and animation for multi-market brand leaders.

✓Bespoke storytelling
✓Illustration & animation
✓Maintenance $800/mo

Studio

$78,000

5000 credits

Studio Build — dedicated design capacity for multi-brand or multi-market operations.

✓Dedicated design capacity
✓Multi-brand / multi-market
✓Maintenance $1,000/mo

Flagship

$155,000

10000 credits

Flagship Build — category-defining single-brand builds with 100% SEO, AEO, GEO EEAT end to end.

✓Category-defining flagship
✓Largest single-brand builds
✓Maintenance $1,250/mo

Franchise

$235,000

15000 credits

Multi-Location Franchise — one brand system across every location with dedicated build resources.

✓Franchise-scale rollout
✓Per-market optimization
✓Maintenance $2,000/mo

Website design is a one-time build investment. Content writing and the Hydra OS™ AI brain & marketing engine (Cortex, Synapse, and the autonomous agents) are separate services — so your design budget goes entirely to your design.

Book a strategy session Build your package

Pricing FAQ

How much does it cost?

Straight answers on what a website, SEO, AEO, content, and the rest actually cost — no "request a quote" wall. Everything is month-to-month with no long-term contracts.

A professional, fully-optimized website from CI Web Group is a one-time build from $2,500 (Lean Launch) up to $235,000 (Multi-Location Franchise) — the same packages as Get Started. Most growing single-location trades operators land on Starter Build at $19,500. Ongoing maintenance starts at $250/mo and scales with the package. There is no website subscription: you own the site, domain, and data, and the build can be financed over 6, 12, or 18 months.

Timeline & investment

Live in weeks. Financed if you want.

1–4

months to build

Measured from onboarding completion to ready for review.

3–18

month financing

Spread your one-time build investment over a plan that works for you.

What shapes your price

Three things move the number.

Custom design credits

More credits buy a more custom, bespoke build; fewer keep it lean and fast to launch.

Content approach

Transfer your existing content as-is, or re-write it for performance (scales with page count).

Website size

More service, city, and blog pages mean a larger build — and a larger site to design.

Note: ongoing hosting, maintenance, and the Hydra OS engine are billed separately — see Hydra OS.

Website design is separate from the engine that markets you.

Website Design

Hydra OS™ — the AI brain & marketing engine

Content writing

One set of content. As many looks as you want.

Seasonal

Your team wins the Super Bowl

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Weather-aware

Why a static site just wins.

Sub-100ms speed

Core Web Vitals, by design

Un-hackable surface

Instantly indexable

Infinite, cheap scale

Always-on reliability

How a page gets built decides how fast it loads.

A bloated CMS, a better CMS, and no CMS at all.

WordPress

Webflow

Hydra Static

Built on Astro — the web's fastest framework.

Astro Islands

Server-first rendering

Zero JS by default

Optimized images

View transitions

Content-driven by design

Pinto. Ferrari. Tesla.

We ship it fully optimized — not a blank canvas.

Live Speed Comparison

HTML Code-to-Content Ratio

Bank-grade protection, built in.

PCI DSS Level 2

PCI Level 1

Zero CMS attack surface

We keep you compliant — and brought in a real law firm for the legal part.

Everything we can build — and what moves the number.

Header & navigation

Hero & brand system

Trust & proof layer

Conversion & booking tools

Education & answer engine

Local & service-area mesh

Operations & back office

The multi-page mesh

Technical foundation

Priced on the design, not a subscription.

Lean

Essentials

Starter

Premium

Signature

Studio

Flagship

Franchise

How much does it cost?

How much does a website cost?+

How much does SEO cost?+

How much does AEO / AI search optimization cost?+

How much does blogging and content cost?+

How much does Google Business Profile / local SEO cost?+

How much does AI chat, text, and online booking cost?+

How much do backlinks and press releases cost?+

How much does a fully done-for-you AI marketing setup cost?+

Live in weeks. Financed if you want.

Three things move the number.

Custom design credits

Content approach

Website size

The mechanics, step by step

Strategy before pixels

Design on the shared design system

Built static, decoupled from the brain

Assembled from proven Build Components

Launched with the measurement clock running

How we think about this work

The catalog components behind this service

Service Area Pages Generator

Sticky Mobile Action Bar

Grow the brand,
scale the platform,
or power your network.