What $800 a Month of SEO Actually Buys

Almost nobody publishes a price for SEO. The standard reason given is that every business is different, which is true and also true of accounting, insurance, and lawn care, all of which manage to quote a number. The real reason is that an unpublished price is easier to raise and harder to compare.

We publish ours: $800/month for managed search, $1,600/month when paid search runs alongside it. Both are management fees. Ad budget goes straight to Google or Microsoft and never touches our invoice. Here is what that money is actually doing.

The first ninety days are mostly repair

Nearly every site that arrives has the same three problems, and none of them are about keywords.

The first is technical. Pages that take six seconds to load on a phone, images exported at 4000 pixels wide and displayed at 400, a redirect chain three hops deep because the site moved from HTTP to HTTPS to www and nobody cleaned up after. Google will crawl a slow site. It will just crawl less of it, less often.

The second is structural. A services page that lists nine services in one paragraph, with no page for any of them. There is nothing for a search to land on. If somebody types the name of a service you sell and you have no page about that service, the ranking question never comes up.

The third is local signal. Three versions of the business address across the web, a Google Business Profile with the wrong hours and a category chosen in 2019, and no reviews since the pandemic. Local rankings lean on consistency harder than almost anything else, and consistency is unglamorous work that nobody has done.

Most of month one is not marketing. It is picking up after whoever had the site last.

Then it is pages, and pages are the slow part

After the repairs, the work is writing and publishing pages that answer what someone actually typed. Not blog posts for their own sake — pages that map to a search with commercial intent behind it.

This is where retainers get quietly thin. An agency that promises "four blog posts a month" is selling volume, and volume is the cheapest thing to produce and the least likely to rank. Two pages that answer a real question, with the specifics only somebody who does the work would know, beat eight pages of restated generalities. We would rather ship less and have it land.

• Service pages, one per thing you sell, written for the search not the brochure
• Location pages where you actually serve, with detail that proves it
• Answer pages: the questions customers ask on the phone before they buy
• The unglamorous ones — pricing, process, what happens after you sign

What the $800 does not buy

This is the part that is usually left out of the pitch, so here it is plainly.

• It does not buy ad clicks. No paid traffic is included at this tier. If you need calls this month rather than next quarter, you need the $1,600 tier and an ad budget on top of it.
• It does not buy a new website. We will fix speed, structure, and metadata on the site you have. If the site is built on a platform nobody can log into, that is a web design project first.
• It does not buy reviews. We will build the request flow that asks for them. We will not write them, and neither should anyone else.
• It does not buy month-one results. Technical fixes can move within weeks. New pages ranking for competitive terms is a three-to-six month arc, and anyone promising otherwise is describing ads.

When $800 a month is the wrong purchase

There are businesses we tell to wait, and it costs us the sale, so we mean it.

If your phone number is not on your website above the fold, fix that before you buy traffic. If you do not answer the phone during business hours, more searches will not help — you are already losing the ones you have. If you sell to four customers a year and each one comes through a relationship, search marketing is a bad fit for your business and always will be.

And if the site itself is broken — a store that cannot take an order, a form that has been emailing a departed employee for two years — that is not a marketing problem wearing a marketing costume. Spending $800 a month to send more people to a broken thing is just a faster way to lose them.

What the report has to show

One page, five minutes, three numbers that a business owner can act on: how many calls and form fills came from search, which pages produced them, and what changed since last month. Impressions and average position are diagnostic detail — useful to us, not a result.

If the monthly report is twelve pages of graphs and you cannot find the word "call" in it, the reporting is designed to be impressive rather than useful. That is a choice someone made.