SEO Company. What the Word Is Hiding

In practice, size and nothing else. Company and agency usually imply a team, consultant usually implies one person, and firm implies whatever the person writing the website thought sounded solid that day. None of the words is regulated and none of them predicts quality. What predicts quality is who actually does the work, whether they will show you a plan before invoicing, and whether you can take everything with you when you leave.

Small-business retainers commonly run from a few hundred pounds a month, mid-market work into the low thousands, competitive national campaigns higher again. One-off audits sit in the low hundreds. Those are market ranges rather than our price list — see SEO packages for what each band buys.

Bigger buys you cover when someone is ill and a wider bench of specialisms. It also buys you layers: the person who sold you the work is frequently not the person doing it, and juniors do more of the hours than the pitch implied. Neither shape is automatically better. The question worth asking either way is who will be in your account next month and whether you can speak to them.

Ask for one client whose rankings you can verify yourself, then search for their terms. Ask what they would do in the first thirty days and whether that is diagnosis or publishing. Ask who owns the content. Then run our free audit on your own site and see whether their account of its condition matches what the tool finds.

A technical audit, a keyword map tied to your actual services rather than to search volume alone, and the fixes that do not need your sign-off already done. If month one is blog posts, the diagnosis was skipped.

The honest ones do not, because nobody controls the auction. An offer of guaranteed number-one rankings almost always means keywords nobody searches for, where ranking first is trivial and worth nothing. We do not offer it and we would treat it as a warning sign anywhere else.

Three months to start is defensible: the first month is diagnosis, so a shorter window genuinely cannot show whether the work lands. Twelve-month lock-ins with no break clause are not about the work taking twelve months, they are about the cost of leaving.

Yes, and it is usually cheaper. We produce the findings and the priority order and your developer implements them. We do not build websites, so there is no version of this where we recommend a rebuild because we would be the ones paid for it.

Often not. If you can spare an hour or two a day and your market is not brutal, the fundamentals are learnable — that is the whole reason the training exists. Hire someone when the hours are worth more spent on your actual business, or when the market is competitive enough that experience is the thing you are buying.

They do not vanish. Work already done keeps earning, which is the structural difference between search and advertising — our ad spend calculator shows that comparison in numbers. What you lose is ground to competitors who keep publishing, so long gaps cost more than short ones.

Sometimes, and usually for less than people expect. For most local service businesses the highest-return work is the Google Business Profile and review flow rather than the website — see local SEO — and that is a bounded job rather than a permanent retainer.

Before you sign, confirm in writing that Analytics, Search Console, the Business Profile, the content and any documentation are yours. Then leaving is an afternoon. Companies that resist that question at the start are the ones who make leaving expensive at the end.