What $800 a Month of SEO Buys

Almost nobody publishes a price for SEO. The usual explanation is that every business is different. Accountants and lawn care companies deal with that same variety, and they still quote a number. When a price isn’t published, it’s easier to raise later and you can’t line it up against anyone else’s. We suspect that’s why most agencies leave it off.

We publish ours. Managed search is $800/month, and it goes to $1,600/month when paid search runs alongside it. Both figures are management fees. Your ad budget goes straight to Google or Microsoft and never shows up on our invoice. Here’s where the $800 goes.

The first ninety days are mostly repair

Almost every site that comes to us has the same three problems, and keywords aren’t one of them.

The first is technical. We see pages that take six seconds to load on a phone, and images exported at 4000 pixels wide to fill a 400 pixel slot. There’s often a redirect chain three hops deep, left over from when the site moved from HTTP to HTTPS to www and nobody cleaned up. Google will still crawl a slow site. It crawls less of it, and less often.

The second is structure. A services page lists nine services in one paragraph and none of them gets a page of its own, so a search has nowhere to land. Somebody types the name of a service you sell, you have no page about it, and ranking never enters into it.

The third is local signal. We usually find three versions of the business address floating around the web and a Google Business Profile with the wrong hours. Its category was picked in 2019, and the last review came in before the pandemic. Local rankings lean on consistency harder than almost anything else. Getting everything consistent is tedious, so it tends to sit undone.

Month one is mostly cleanup after whoever had the site before us.

Then come the pages, which are the slow part

Once the repairs are done, the job is writing and publishing pages that answer what someone typed into the search bar. Each one should map to a search where somebody is looking to buy. We don’t write blog posts just to have them.

Retainers tend to get thin here without anyone saying so. An agency that promises "four blog posts a month" is selling volume, and volume is cheap to produce and rarely ranks. Two pages that answer a real question, with details only someone who does the work would know, will outrank eight pages of restated generalities. That’s where we spend the hours.

• Service pages, one for each thing you sell, written for the person searching
• Location pages for the places you serve, with enough detail to prove you work there
• Answer pages built from the questions customers ask on the phone before they buy
• The dull ones about pricing, process and what happens after you sign

What the $800 does not buy

Sales pitches usually skip this part, so we’ll spell it out.

• Ad clicks. This tier includes no paid traffic. If you need calls this month instead of next quarter, you need the $1,600 tier plus an ad budget on top of it.
• A new website. We’ll fix speed, structure and metadata on the site you already have. If nobody can log into the platform it’s built on, that’s a web design project first.
• Reviews. We’ll set up the process that asks customers for them. Writing fake ones is off the table for us, and it should be for anyone you hire.
• Results in month one. Technical fixes can show up within weeks. Getting new pages to rank for competitive terms takes three to six months, and anyone promising faster is describing ads.

When $800 a month is the wrong purchase

Some businesses we tell to wait. We lose the sale when we do that, so we mean it.

Put your phone number at the top of your homepage before you buy traffic. If nobody picks up the phone during business hours, more searches won’t help, because you’re already losing the calls you get. And if you sell to four customers a year and every one comes through a relationship, search marketing won’t fit your business now or later.

Sometimes the site itself is broken. We’ve seen a store that can’t take an order, and a contact form that had been emailing a departed employee for two years. That’s a site problem dressed up as a marketing problem. Spending $800 a month to send people to it just loses them faster.

What the report has to show

The report is one page and takes five minutes to read. It gives you three numbers you can act on: calls and form fills that came from search, the pages that produced them, and what changed since last month. We track impressions and average position as well. Those help us diagnose problems, so we keep them off the front page.

If you get twelve pages of graphs every month and the word "call" appears nowhere in them, somebody designed that report to impress you. You’re allowed to ask for a different one.