FAQs
Questions buyers ask before signing a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) contract
Quick answers to the things buyers always check first.
How is SEO priced?
In scoped phases with a fixed deliverable each — audit, foundations, then content and links — not an open hourly meter. Audit-only engagements start at $4,500. Growth retainers begin at $7,500/month and scale with content velocity, link budget and technical complexity. You approve each phase and can stop between them.
How long until SEO actually moves the needle?
You will see crawl, indexation and Core Web Vitals wins inside the first 30 days. Branded and long-tail rankings typically move in 60–90 days. Money-keyword movement on competitive verticals lands in months 4–9 — the timeline we bake into your roadmap on day one.
Do you guarantee first-page rankings?
No honest agency can — Google controls the algorithm. We guarantee the work, the reporting and measurable leading indicators (indexation, Core Web Vitals, qualified traffic), not a specific position. Every contract includes minimum traffic and ranking thresholds; if we miss them we work for free until we hit them.
What do we own at the end of the engagement?
Everything — the content, the technical fixes in your codebase, the schema markup, the backlink placements. There is no proprietary platform you lose access to when the engagement ends. Your data, your assets.
How do you split technical SEO from content work?
Technical SEO (crawlability, Core Web Vitals, schema, JS rendering) runs first and in parallel — it clears the runway so content actually ranks. Content velocity and link building phase in once the foundation is solid. A single roadmap coordinates both so they compound rather than collide.
What does your reporting look like?
Weekly Loom video walking through what changed and why, a shared live dashboard tracking rankings, traffic and qualified conversions, and a monthly business review with forecast versus actuals. No 40-page PDFs you have to decipher — only the numbers and the decisions behind them.
Will you work with our in-house team or existing agency?
Yes. We embed alongside in-house SEO, dev and content teams via Slack, weekly standups and a shared project tracker. We can also manage end-to-end if you do not have internal capacity. The one thing we will not do is share the account with a conflicting vendor billing on the same KPIs.
How do you approach AI search visibility alongside traditional SEO?
AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from the same content signals Google rewards — E-E-A-T, structured data, passage-level citability. We treat GEO/AEO as part of every content and schema brief rather than a separate service, so each piece we ship is optimised for both the ten-blue-links SERP and the AI answer box.
What industries do you have deep playbooks for?
iGaming, legal, health and medical, real estate, financial services, SaaS, hospitality and home services. These verticals have compliance constraints, content restrictions or high-competition link environments that generic agencies get wrong. Our playbooks document the exact patterns that work (and what to avoid) so we do not learn on your budget.
Is local SEO and national SEO the same engagement, or separate?
They share technical foundations but diverge on strategy. Local programs focus on Google Business Profile, map-pack signals, review velocity and geo-targeted content. National programs build topical authority and editorial links at scale. If you need both — for example a franchise with a national brand and local storefronts — we run a combined program on one roadmap.
How do you vet link quality, and will low-quality links put us at risk?
We earn placements through editorial outreach, digital PR and HARO, never through PBNs or paid link farms. Every placement is screened for real traffic, topical relevance and manual review history. If a link looks risky after it goes live, we disavow it — at no extra charge. Penalty recovery from a prior agency is included as part of our onboarding audit.
What are the contract terms?
No long lock-in. We start with a 3-month minimum to clear the founding phase, then move to rolling monthly terms. Performance guarantees are written into the contract, not just quoted in a pitch deck. If we miss the agreed thresholds in any 90-day window, the next month is at no charge.
