SEO is the one line on your marketing budget you can't see. A maintenance invoice has a website you can open. An ads invoice has a dashboard you can log into.

SEO gets you a number on a page and somebody's word for it. Nothing on that quote tells you what actually happens in month 2.

That's the real question here. Not "what is off-page SEO". You want to know whether the invoice is worth paying, and how you'd spot it if it wasn't.

So here's the jargon cleared out of the way, what a month of this work contains, what should make you suspicious, and when you shouldn't buy a retainer at all.

We sell SEO. We'll still tell you to keep your money!

On-page, off-page, and the jargon between you and the answer

There are 2 halves to it. On-page SEO is everything you change on your own website. Off-page SEO is what other websites say about you.

That's it. That's the whole split, and our industry has built an entire vocabulary on top of it!

Your on-page half is page titles, headings, the words on the page, and how fast the thing loads on a phone. Plus the plumbing: internal links, so a customer and Google can both find your money pages.

Your off-page half is mostly backlinks. A backlink is a link on somebody else's website pointing at yours.

Yip, that's genuinely the entire concept. Impressed yet?

Google treats those links like references on a CV. One from a name your customers recognise counts. 40 from sites no human has visited count for roughly nothing.

What a real month of SEO work actually contains

Nobody itemises this, which suits everyone selling it. So here's ours, in things you can picture.

• Fixing the pages you already have. Titles, headings, copy that answers the question a customer actually typed, links between related pages. Unglamorous, and it's where most of your early movement comes from.
• Technical clean-up. Speed, mobile layout, broken links, and pages accidentally hidden from Google. Sometimes your whole problem is one checkbox somebody ticked in 2021!
• New content. One page a month that genuinely helps somebody beats 4 thin ones. If nothing new goes up, you're paying monthly to keep polishing the same 6 pages.
• Off-page outreach. Getting your business listed, mentioned, reviewed and linked to by sites a real person would read. Slow, manual, and there's no button for it.
• A report you can argue with. Where you rank for the words you care about, how many enquiries came in, what each one cost you, and a plain sentence saying what we did next.

The balance shifts as we go. Early on the bulk of the month goes on your own site, because that's the half we control and the half that moves first. Later it tips towards content and outreach.

What actually moves the number on your quote

3 things, mostly. How many hours a month you're buying, whether new content sits inside the fee or costs extra, and whether the off-page half is real manual outreach or a subscription to somebody's link list.

We're not printing a price band, because ours would be a guess about a site we haven't seen. Read your own quote against those 3 instead.

A cheap retainer isn't automatically a scam. It's usually just fewer hours. The scam is fewer hours sold as a full month!

The bits that should make you suspicious

This section will save you the most money. Read it with your current quote open.

Guaranteed rankings. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO says it flatly: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Anyone promising you the top spot is either bluffing or about to do something you'll pay somebody else to undo.

"We'll submit you to 500 directories." That same Google page tells you to avoid anyone who talks about submitting your site to thousands of search engines, and low-quality directory links sit on Google's spam list too. 500 listings is 500 business cards pinned to a noticeboard in a building nobody has walked into since 2009!

Bought links. Google's spam policies are blunt about it: buying or selling links to move rankings counts as link spam. That's not a grey area for your supplier to interpret, it's the referee writing it on the board.

Paying for backlinks is like paying somebody to be your reference. It works beautifully right up until the interviewer picks up the phone!

So how do you separate honest outreach from a directory blast? Ask which sites, by name, then open them. Point that question at us too, because none of us can dodge it.

Reports where the line only ever goes up. An impression just means your result appeared on somebody's screen. Nobody has to click.

Why does that matter? Because impressions climb on their own when Google reshuffles, whether anyone did a stroke of work on your site that month or not.

A report that celebrates impressions and never mentions enquiries is a report built to avoid questions. Ask what each enquiry cost you and watch what happens.

A method nobody will explain. If your supplier won't tell you plainly what they're changing on your site, that isn't clever intellectual property. That's a chancer hoping you don't look too closely!

Nothing changing on your actual website. Plenty of retainers quietly become a monthly rankings screenshot and a chat. If nobody has edited a page in 3 months, you're not buying SEO, you're buying a newsletter about SEO.

How long before anything moves

Months, not weeks. We'd love to sell you a faster answer, and we can't.

On-page and technical fixes show first, because Google has to come back and re-read your site anyway. The off-page half is slower, because you're waiting on other humans to publish.

We'd rather leave the number blank than invent one for your quote. What we will do is tell you at the 3 month mark whether it's working, and say so if it isn't.

Meanwhile, watch the small signs. Pages getting indexed, which just means Google will show your page. Rankings creeping from page 4 to page 2.

None of that pays your salary yet. It's still the difference between work happening and work getting invoiced!

When you genuinely shouldn't buy an SEO retainer

Now we argue against our own invoice.

If your website is slow, confusing or 6 years old, don't buy traffic for it yet. Fix the site first. Pouring visitors into a site that doesn't convert is topping up a bucket you haven't patched!

Hiring somebody to grow your search traffic before your website works is doing marketing backwards. We've said it to people standing there with the card already out.

Skip it entirely if nobody is searching for what you sell. This is the one where you walk away and nobody here gets paid. So check it properly.

Some businesses run on referrals, tenders and 20 year relationships. If your last 10 jobs came from somebody who knows somebody, search isn't your channel yet.

Google's own Keyword Planner shows you the search volumes for nothing. It sits inside Google Ads, so you'll have to enter billing details to reach it, but you don't have to run a single ad.

The lazy version works too. Search the words you'd want to win and see who's paying to advertise against them. Nobody bidding usually means nobody buying!

Then there's stopping early. We won't name you a minimum number of months, because we'd only pick one that suits us.

Quitting doesn't set fire to what you've paid for. Your page fixes, speed work and published pages carry on earning.

What you lose is momentum. Outreach stops, content stops, and you've walked off the field just as the score starts moving.

So put the money into the site itself, into keeping it working, or into ads that switch on this afternoon. No shame in the short game when you need the phone to ring.

And yes, we'd cheerfully sell you all 3 of those. Price them elsewhere if that bothers you, because we'd still rather your money went there than into a retainer that can't work yet!

Still reading, and none of that sounds like you? Then a retainer is probably a fair buy, and the SEO work we do is the list further up this page.

Questions we get asked

Can I do the on-page half myself?

A decent chunk, yes. Write page titles that say what the page is, answer the questions customers actually ask, link your pages to each other, get it loading fast on a phone.

That's a lot of the value, and it costs nothing. Go and do that before you pay anybody!

Do we need page 1 for the big keywords?

Usually not, and chasing them is exactly how budgets disappear. "Web design" is a bloodbath you won't win. "Web design Hillcrest" is a conversation with somebody 15 minutes up the road.

We find that unsexy too! It just happens to be the one that pays.

What to do with all that

Ask your current supplier 3 things this week. What changed on my site last month, which words are we chasing, and which sites have linked to me since we started.

Straight, specific answers mean keep paying. Charts and vibes mean stop your debit order.

Not sure which you got? WhatsApp us the report and we'll read it with you, even if the verdict is your current lot are fine.

Or book a chat with us and bring the invoice along!