Search engine optimisation is a craft with a long list of possible tasks. A quote that says only 'SEO, monthly' tells you almost nothing, and the gap between a careful quote and a careless one is the gap between a website that slowly earns trust and one that gets a handful of low-quality links. This guide helps you read the quote in front of you.
What SEO work usually includes
Most honest SEO work falls into four groups. Ask which of them your quote contains, and how much of each.
- Technical: making sure search engines can crawl and understand the site. Speed, mobile layout, sitemaps, redirects, structured data and fixing errors. The terms technical SEO, Core Web Vitals and schema markup live here.
- On-page: what each page says. Titles, descriptions, headings, the answer to the question the page exists for, and links between your own pages.
- Content: new pages or articles that answer what your customers search for. This is usually the slowest part and the one that matters most over time.
- Authority: other reputable sites mentioning or linking to you. Done well it means real mentions from real places. Done badly it means bought links, which can harm a site.
For a local business, a fifth group often matters more than all four: your Google Business Profile and the listings that must match it. See the Google listing self-check and the guide to claiming and completing a Google Business Profile. The word for matching your name, address and phone everywhere is NAP consistency.
Questions to put to any quote
- What will be done in the first month, and what in months two and three? A real plan has an order: usually technical fixes first, then pages, then content and authority.
- How many pages, articles or listings will be created or changed each month, and who writes them? Ask to see a sample.
- What do you mean by links? Ask where they come from, how they are earned and whether you will see the list. Refuse anything described as a package of links.
- Which keywords or topics, and why those? They should come from what your customers search for, not from a list the agency uses for everyone.
- How will you report? Rankings alone mislead. Ask to see enquiries, calls and visits from search, measured in tools you can open.
- Do I keep everything if I stop? The site, the content and the accounts should be yours.
Promises to walk away from
- A guaranteed first-page ranking, or a guaranteed position for a keyword. Search results are not for sale and are not controlled by any agency.
- A result in a fixed number of days. Search takes time to build, and the time depends on how competitive the topic is and how strong your site already is.
- Secret methods. SEO is documented in public guidance from the search engines. If the method cannot be explained, it should not be bought.
- Thousands of directory submissions or social bookmarks. These were common once and are now mostly noise.
- Articles produced in bulk with no one who knows your business reading them. Search engines and readers can both tell.
How long SEO takes
Any honest answer is a range with a reason. A new site on a competitive topic can take many months to earn visibility. A site that already has good pages and fixes a few technical faults can see change sooner. Local searches, where fewer businesses compete, often respond faster than national ones. What you can ask for is a plan with milestones you can check, such as pages published, errors fixed and listings corrected, rather than a date for a ranking.
What you can do yourself first
Before paying for ongoing SEO, fix what is free. Claim and complete your Google profile. Make sure the site loads fast on a phone, every page has a clear title and a one-sentence answer near the top, and your name, address and phone number match everywhere. The website readiness checklist and the website redesign checklist cover most of this, including what to protect if you rebuild the site.
SEO also works best when the website itself is built to be found: clear page structure, fast pages and content that answers real questions. If you are planning a new site, say so in the brief, and read what a website costs in India so the budget includes it. The performance marketing service page shows how we scope this work. If you would like a second opinion on a quote, send it with a short brief and we will tell you what we would ask.
