SEO services run by the people who build the sites
We run monthly SEO retainers for US service businesses: technical fixes, on page work, writing and outreach, all reported against your own Search Console data. No rank guarantees.
- Monthly retainer, no minimum term
- Reported against your own Search Console
- US business hours
Building and maintaining WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify sites has been the day job here since 2018, under this name and a previous one. Selling SEO as a retainer is newer for us, and we would rather write that down than pretend otherwise. What we bring is the half of the job most agencies subcontract: the technical half.
That matters more than it sounds. A large share of any retainer is editing templates, fixing canonicals, killing duplicate paginated URLs and pulling Largest Contentful Paint under Google's 2.5 second threshold. If your agency raises a ticket with your developer for each, the month is gone.
So the offer is narrow on purpose. SEO services here are sold to a small number of clients at a time, on a fixed block of hours, with you on the Search Console property so you can check the figures yourself.
More on this:SEO for sites already built on WordPress·our WordPress speed and Core Web Vitals work·plumber website design·sites we have designed and built
What usually goes wrong
Reports that do not match Search Console
You get a deck of 40 keywords climbing and nothing tied to an enquiry. Those figures come from a rank tracker, not from Google.
The developer bottleneck
Your agency writes recommendations. Your developer queues them behind feature work. Six weeks on, the title tags still say what the audit said.
Pages that rank for nothing you sell
Posts get written to a calendar, not to what a buyer types before calling. Sessions climb and the phone stays quiet.
A site that fights the crawler
Faceted filters spawn thousands of near duplicate URLs, staging leaks into the index, and the sitemap lists redirects. Googlebot burns its budget on junk.
What our SEO services cover each month
Technical fixes we ship, not recommend
We find the problem and change the code. The usual suspects: a canonical pointing at the staging domain, the Discourage search engines box still ticked under Settings then Reading, and a sitemap listing pages you deleted.
Keyword targets you can actually win
Volume and difficulty come from Semrush, US database. A phrase doing 200 searches with buying intent beats one doing 9,900 owned by sites with 3,000 referring domains.
Writing a person did
One to four pages a month, each written to a brief and landing between 1,200 and 1,500 words. You read every draft first.
Core Web Vitals, measured in the field
Google's thresholds are 2.5 seconds for Largest Contentful Paint, 200 milliseconds for Interaction to Next Paint and 0.1 for Cumulative Layout Shift. We read yours from the Chrome UX Report.
Search Console as the source of truth
Reporting comes from your own property and analytics. If a figure looks wrong, open the same report and prove it.
In every retainer
- A month one audit covering crawl, index coverage, canonicals, internal linking and Core Web Vitals
- Monthly reporting pulled from your own Search Console property, not a rank tracker
- On page work carried out by us, template edits and schema included
- Keyword and competitor tracking in Semrush against the US database
- A quarterly review where we reforecast or say it is not working
What a monthly retainer covers
How the retainer runs
A retainer here runs in monthly cycles with a standing agenda, so you always know what the hours bought. The front half of the month goes on whatever holds the site back technically, because publishing into a crawl problem wastes the writing budget. The back half goes on content and outreach. Each cycle closes with a call.
Month one is different. We audit, fix what is cheap and obvious, and set a dated baseline in Search Console so everything after it is measured against something real rather than a memory of last spring. No new pages ship in month one.
From month two the hours split roughly evenly between technical work and content, and that split moves with the data. If the Pages report shows forty URLs sitting in Crawled, currently not indexed, we stop writing and find out why. Publishing more pages into that makes it worse.
We do not buy links. Outreach means digital PR, supplier and trade association listings, and the slow work of asking people who already mention your name to link to it. That is less tidy than a link package, and it does not leave your domain carrying the risk of a manual action two years from now.
- A named person you email, not a ticket queue
- Fixed hours each month, logged and shown
- Every change ships as a commit you keep
- Thirty days notice, no annual lock in
The first 90 days
- 01
Week one, the audit
We crawl the site, pull sixteen months of Search Console data and walk index coverage URL by URL. Findings come back ranked by what they are worth, not by severity colour.
- 02
Week two, the cheap wins
Anything that can change without a design decision changes now. WordPress has served its own sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5 and keeps serving it when your plugin publishes a second one, so we check which file Search Console reads.
- 03
Week three, the plan
We agree keyword targets and a page map for the quarter. You sign it off before anything is written.
- 04
The monthly cycle
Technical work, content, outreach, report, call. Same agenda, every month.
- 05
Day 90, and every quarter after
Impressions, clicks and average position get compared against the month one baseline. If the line is flat and we cannot say why, you hear it on the call.
What SEO services cost
The state of the build
A clean WordPress install needs few technical hours. A nine year old theme carrying three stacked page builders on shared hosting needs a great many.
How hard the keyword is
Semrush difficulty 20 and difficulty 60 are not the same job. The second needs links, and links take months of outreach, not a bigger writing budget.
How much content you want
One page a month and four are different retainers. Each one is researched, written and reviewed at 1,200 to 1,500 words before it goes near the site.
Who does the implementation
Some clients want the plan and have their own developer. That retainer is smaller. Most want us in the code, which costs more and moves faster.
A number that never adds up
Here is what catches every retainer out. The query table in Search Console is capped at 1,000 rows, and Google drops rare queries entirely for privacy, so the chart totals never equal the sum of the rows beneath. If an old agency report added up perfectly, it was not built from Search Console. We pull yours through the API and reconcile the gap aloud.
Sources:Google Search Central on whether you need an SEO·Google's documentation for the Search Console performance report
If you already know which pages should be earning and are not, send the URLs and read access to the property. We will tell you what is wrong before you commit to anything monthly.
Otherwise start with a quote. Give us the site, the market and what you want to be found for, and a scope, a monthly hours figure and a price come back within one business day. If SEO is the wrong place for your money this quarter, we will say so, which happens more often than you would expect.
Get a fixed-price quote Back within 1 business day
Questions we get asked
How much do SEO services cost?+
We price by the hours a retainer needs rather than by package tier, so the figure follows a look at the site. What moves it: the state of the build, keyword difficulty, and how many pages you want. Ask for a quote.
How long does SEO take to work?+
Expect three to six months before movement in Search Console means anything, longer where the top results hold thousands of referring domains. Technical fixes can show inside weeks. Anyone promising page one by a fixed date is guessing, and Google says so itself.
Do you guarantee rankings?+
No, and nobody honest does. We control the site, the writing and the outreach. We do not control Google's ranking systems, a rival's budget, or a core update landing in week six. What we commit to is fixed hours and an auditable report.
Can I do SEO myself?+
Yes, for a small local site in a quiet market. Google publishes a starter guide covering most of the fundamentals, and the work is more patient than clever. What you buy from an agency is time, judgement, and a developer.
What is the difference between SEO and Google Ads?+
Ads buy clicks today and stop the day the card stops. Organic search compounds slowly and keeps working once it lands, though an algorithm update can knock it sideways. Plenty of clients run ads while the organic work builds, then taper the spend.