SEO services
What the work actually is, what it should cost, and the questions worth asking before you hand it to anyone.
Why bother with it
Everything else you can spend on stops the moment you stop paying. Turn the ads off and the phone goes quiet that afternoon. Stop buying leads and there are no leads. Search is the one channel where the work you paid for last year is still working this year, and where a competitor cannot take your position overnight by raising a bid.
That is the whole case for it, and the cost of it is time. It is slower than everything on this list and it is the only thing on it you end up owning.
What SEO is made of
Every agency lists these. Almost nobody explains them, so here they are with what usually goes wrong underneath each one, which is the part that tells you where you probably stand.
Technical
Whether pages load quickly, work on a phone, and can be crawled and understood. None of it is visible to a customer and all of it is a ceiling on everything else.
Usually wrong because Usually a slow theme carrying a decade of plugins, or a site built so that the text only appears after the code runs.
On-page
A page per service you sell, written in the words customers use, with the headings, titles and internal links pointing at the searches that actually produce work.
Usually wrong because One services page listing nine things, competing with nine businesses that each gave their thing a page of its own.
Content
Answering the questions people ask before they buy, with real specifics in them: prices, timelines, what is included, what goes wrong. Specific is what gets quoted, linked and cited.
Usually wrong because Blog posts written for a keyword rather than a person, which rank for nothing and read like nobody stood behind them.
Off-page
Links and mentions from other sites, plus your details being consistent across directories. Google's own guidance names how many sites link to you as a factor in how prominent you are.
Usually wrong because Either nothing at all, or bought links from somewhere that also sells to your competitors.
Local
The map pack, your Google Business Profile, reviews and proximity. If somebody has to be near you to buy from you, this stops being one part of five and becomes most of the job.
Usually wrong because A profile claimed once, filled in halfway, and never opened again.
What actually gets done
Those five parts turn into six recurring jobs. This is the version of the work you would see on a monthly report, rather than the version in a textbook.
Categories, services, photos, posts, questions answered, hours right. For a local business this is the highest-leverage thing on the list and the fastest to move.
Fast pages, a page for each service you sell rather than one list, headings in the right order, and the code that tells a search engine what your business is and where it works.
The same name, phone number, service area and hours across directories and data aggregators. Unglamorous, and one of the most common reasons a business quietly underperforms.
A system that asks after every job instead of in panicked bursts, and every review answered. Review count and recency are direct inputs to where you sit in the map pack.
Chamber of commerce, suppliers, associations, local press, sponsorships. Slow, and the part most providers skip because it cannot be automated.
Search Console and your profile insights, which are Google's own numbers rather than a third-party estimate, plus what actually produced phone calls.
If a proposal has something on it that is not one of these six, it is worth asking which one it feeds. Sometimes there is a good answer. Often there is not.
What it costs
Most agencies will not print a price. The reason is not complicated: a number quoted after a call can be shaped by how much you look like you can spend. So here is the ladder, and you can check it against anyone else you are talking to.
Month to month at every level, no setup fee on the retainers, and no contract to get out of. What decides which of these is right is your industry and how hard your market is, which is what the free audit measures before either of us commits to a number.
Before you hire anyone
These separate a provider who will do the work from one who will send you a report. My answers are underneath each.
Will they tell you what they would do before you pay?
Not a strategy document, just the first three things and why those three. Anyone who cannot answer without a signed contract either has not looked at your business yet or is planning to work it out afterwards.
Are the prices published, or do they depend on you?
A quote that arrives only after a discovery call is a quote calibrated to what you look like you can afford. Mine are on the site, on the pricing page and on every service page. You can check them before you speak to me.
Do they guarantee a ranking?
Nobody can. Google's own guidance says plainly that using a service or tool does not guarantee ranking success, and that third parties do not have access to its internal ranking data and cannot guarantee performance. There is no dial. What a provider can promise is the work, the timeline, and showing you the measurement, and that is what you should be comparing.
Google Search Central, third-party SEO tools and adviceCan they show you where the advice comes from?
Google publishes most of how this works, and any recommendation should trace back either to that documentation or to somebody's own data and experience, said out loud as such. Advice that traces to neither is a preference wearing a lab coat.
Google Search Central, third-party SEO tools and adviceWho is actually going to do the work?
Ask specifically. A lot of agencies sell with a senior person and deliver with a junior or an offshore team you never meet. Here it is me, which is the upside and the ceiling at the same time, and why I take a limited number of clients.
What happens the month you stop paying?
Your profile, your pages, your reviews and your links should still be yours and still working. If leaving means losing the site, the listing or the tracking, you were renting your own business.
Where to go next
Not because it is bundled cleverly, but because for a local business it would be the same work under a second name and a second price. What you are looking for is one of these.
Where I am not the answer
All of the above applies to any business. What I specialize in is the local half of it. If you sell nationally, run ecommerce at real scale, or need a team of specialists rather than one person across all of it, another shop will serve you better.
Your website is fine, your listing is not
$250/mo. The map pack only, no site work. Cheapest way in and the fastest to move.
Nobody finds you, site included
From $500/mo. Your listing and your website together. This is what most people searching for an SEO company actually need.
You need work booked this month
From $250/mo. The only channel with no lag, and the one to run while the slower work builds.
You genuinely do not know
It looks at your site, your profile and where you stand, and tells you which of the above to start with.
Questions
Making it likely that somebody searching for what you sell finds you rather than a competitor. In practice that is your website being fast and structured properly, having a page for each thing you do, your business details being consistent everywhere they appear, reviews arriving steadily, and other sites mentioning you. What changes between agencies is which of those they actually do and whether they tell you which.
For a business like yours, no, and that is why there is no separate price for it here. Local SEO is regular SEO with the map pack, your Google profile and proximity added, and if your customers have to be near you to buy from you, that is simply what your SEO is. Businesses that sell nationally have a genuinely different job, which is a different specialty and not the one I do.
Three tiers. $500/month for one service in your city, $850/month for every service you sell in your city, $1,500/month to compete across the surrounding towns too. Month-to-month at every tier. There is no separate SEO price on top. The Google Business Profile tier at $250/mo is the cheaper entry point if your website is already fine and only your listing needs work.
Profile work can move inside 30 days. Map pack positions usually shift in 60 to 90. Organic rankings take three to six months. Nobody can compress that, and an agency promising otherwise is selling the promise rather than the result. If you need work sooner than that, ads are the only channel with no lag.
No, and Google's own guidance says nobody can. No third party has access to its ranking systems. What I can do is publish the prices, work month to month so you can leave, and show you the measurement rather than a report full of impressions.
I do. There is no account manager, no handoff to a junior after the sale, and no offshore team you never meet. That is the upside and the limit of it at the same time, which is why I take a limited number of clients.
Free audit
Performance, Core Web Vitals, your Google Business Profile, and whether AI can find you. It runs automatically and lands in your inbox in about three minutes.
You get the findings whether or not you hire me, and if search is not where your next dollar should go, I will say so.
