SEO services: monthly work on your site, reported against targets

What do search engine optimization services include?

Buyers search for what you sell, and a competitor shows up instead. That is the problem SEO work exists to fix. Google describes SEO as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it. Search engine optimization services are that work, done for you.

In practice the work comes in three parts, plus the measuring that ties them together:

• The site: titles and descriptions, structured data, pages competing with each other for one search, and faults that keep pages out of Google’s index.
• New pages and articles: a page for each service or kind of job people search for, and articles that answer the questions they ask.
• Links and mentions: other sites linking to yours because they have a reason to.
• Measurement: what changed, what it did, and how many leads came from search.

What does an SEO company do, and what does good work look like?

An SEO company, or SEO agency, does that work for other businesses. Good and bad agencies sound alike on a sales call, so judge them by how they work:

• It starts from your buyers: the plan comes from what people type when they need what you sell, and what Google shows them.
• It asks about you: Google’s advice is to find an SEO interested in your business, one that asks what makes it unique, who your competitors are and how your customers find you.
• It explains each change: what was changed on the site and why, in writing.
• It shows its sources: Google suggests checking whether an SEO cites official Google documentation for its recommendations.
• It keeps to Google’s rules: Google’s spam policies say sites that break them may rank lower or drop out of results, and your site pays for an agency’s shortcuts.
• It counts leads: the report should say how many calls and enquiries search brought in, alongside rankings and visits.

Do you need an SEO company?

Not always. Google’s page on hiring an SEO suggests an owner-run local business can probably take on a lot of the work itself, beginning with the SEO starter guide. The guide is worth reading even if you hire someone: it shows which techniques Google recommends and which it discourages.

Professional SEO services earn their place when the work outgrows the time you have: several locations or service lines, competitors already investing in search, or technical faults nobody on your side can fix. Google also names a good moment to bring an SEO in: a site redesign, the earlier the better, or the launch of a new site.

Some businesses don’t need it at all. If nobody searches for what you sell, or every job comes through people you already know, monthly SEO is money better spent elsewhere, and we’ll tell you so on the call.

How do you choose an SEO agency?

Talk to more than one, and put the questions Google suggests to each:

• Past work: examples of what they’ve done, and the results behind them.
• Google’s guidelines: whether they follow Google Search Essentials.
• Results and timing: what results they expect, in what timeframe, and how they measure success.
• Your market: their experience in your industry and in your country or city.
• Changes: whether they’ll share every change they make to your site, and the reasoning behind it.

Then ask past clients whether the agency was useful and easy to work with. If it offers an audit, give it read-only access to Search Console at that stage; Google expects an audit to estimate, realistically, how much could improve and how much work that would take. Walk away from these:

• A promised ranking: Google’s own words are plain: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
• Special standing: Google says to beware of anyone claiming a special standing with Google or a priority route into its results.
• Secrecy: a company that won’t explain what it intends to do. Deceptive content made on your behalf can get your site removed from Google’s index.
• Cold emails: Google warns about SEO firms that email you out of the blue.

Which kind of SEO work do you need?

Where you are now decides which work comes first:

When more than one row describes you, the call is where we work out the order.

How do you get on the first page of Google?

Google doesn’t sell places, so the first page is earned one page at a time. Its explanation of how results are ranked says its systems weigh many signals, including the words of a search, the relevance and usability of each page, the expertise of its source, and the searcher’s location and settings. One way it judges quality is whether other prominent websites link to or refer to the content. Usability counts too: pages that work on a phone and load quickly.

For searches with a place in them, Google’s business profile help says local results rest mainly on relevance, distance and popularity, and that no one can request or pay for a better local ranking. More reviews and positive ratings can help.

On timing, Google’s starter guide puts some changes at a few hours and others at several months, and advises giving a change a few weeks before you judge it. Our SEO pricing page covers how long SEO takes to work and whether it pays for itself.

Generative engine optimization makes a business easier for AI answers to find, read and cite, and our guide to GEO vs SEO explains where the two overlap.

What should you expect from an SEO agency?

From us, expect to see the work. It starts with a 15-minute call. If SEO fits, a proposal sets out what we would do, how it runs and what it costs, and work begins once you approve it. If we didn’t build your site, the first job is rebuilding it in our own system, with its old addresses redirected to the new pages.

Each month’s work falls into three groups:

• Repairs: weak titles and descriptions rewritten, structured data kept current, Google asked to re-crawl each page we change, and two posts aiming at the same search merged into one.
• Growth: a page for each service and kind of job, marked up for search; new articles every month; a page for a location only when it has demand and local proof of its own; links earned from other sites; and a monthly look at where AI answers mention you.
• Oversight: a weekly look over the site and a monthly one over its links, a one-page report that opens with leads on the month’s last day, and a quarterly review.

We don’t promise rankings or sell link counts, we never pay for links, and paid ads aren’t part of the work. Every report reads the results against the targets we set.

Our office is in Valencia, California; the work itself is remote, for businesses across the US. To see where your site stands now, book a 15-minute call.