An SEO retainer buys a number of hours of attention each month. Everything on the list of inclusions: keyword research, technical work, content, local search, reporting, describes what those hours might be spent on, not what they were spent on. There is one question that separates a real engagement from a subscription to a monthly PDF, and you can ask it at any point.
The list everybody publishes
It is the same list on every agency site, including ours, and none of it is dishonest.
- Keyword research. Working out what your customers actually type, which for a trade is mostly a service and a place plus a long tail of symptoms.
- On-page work. Writing and rewriting service pages so each one covers its job properly.
- Technical work. Indexing, speed, redirects, duplicate versions of the site, the faults that fail silently.
- Local search. The Google Business Profile, listings consistency, reviews, service area accuracy.
- Content. Pages answering the questions customers ask before they book.
- Reporting. Some account of what happened.
Every line is real work that genuinely needs doing. The list is also perfectly compatible with an engagement in which almost nothing happens, because it describes categories rather than actions. That is the problem with it.
The question worth asking
“Show me what changed last month.”
A real engagement answers with specifics: these two pages were rewritten, here they are; this redirect was broken and now is not; the profile categories were wrong and were corrected on the fourteenth; nine photographs went up; these four reviews were responded to; we looked at which pages produced calls and moved budget accordingly.
A report factory answers with a document. Rankings up, impressions up, a graph trending in a pleasing direction, and no artefact anywhere that a customer could see. If nothing on your website or your profile is different from how it was thirty days ago, nothing was done, whatever the graph shows.
Ask it every month, in those words. It takes ten seconds and it is the only diligence that reliably works.
What a month of real work looks like
Concretely, so you have something to compare against. In a typical month you should be able to point at:
- Two or three pages written or substantially rewritten, which you can open and read.
- At least one technical fix, named, with what was wrong and what it now does.
- Something done to the Google Business Profile: photographs, a services correction, questions answered, posts if you use them.
- Review activity, responses at minimum, and ideally some system for getting more of them.
- One decision that changed because of something in the data, rather than a description of the data.
The first two or three months are usually heavier and more technical, because that is when the accumulated faults get cleared. If month nine looks exactly like month three, that is a sign, and not a good one.
Reporting that is worth reading
The report should lead with calls and booked jobs. Rankings and impressions belong in it, further down, as diagnostics.
The reason is not philosophical. Rankings are the easiest number to make look good, because there are thousands of phrases and some of them always improve. A ranking report is a selection, and the selection is made by the person being judged on it. Why keyword rankings matter less than you think covers the mechanics; ranking first and getting no calls covers what happens when a business optimises for the report instead of the phone.
What you should not be paying for
- A ranking report as the deliverable. If the report is the product, you are buying a subscription to a spreadsheet.
- Links bought in bulk. No local effect, and an unnecessary risk. Off-page work for a trade is not really about links.
- Content written to a word count on topics no customer of yours has ever searched for.
- The same line item every month. “Optimised meta tags and headings” is a legitimate first-month task. Appearing again in month eleven, on the same pages, it means nothing was done.
- A lock-in that outlasts the evidence. Twelve months is long enough to find out whether this works and long enough to be stuck if it does not. Ours are month to month, which is a commercial position, but it is also the one that puts the burden in the right place.
The awkward paragraph
We sell this service, so treat the above as a test we would rather you applied than not. It is easy for an agency to be busy and produce very little, and the only real defence a contractor has is asking to see the artefacts.
There is also a version of the answer where you should not buy it yet. If your profile is a mess, nobody asks for reviews and your service pages do not say what you charge, those are things the owner does better than any agency, and doing them first makes anything you buy afterwards work harder. That division is set out in the parts of this you should genuinely do yourself.
Frequently asked questions
What is actually included in SEO services?
Keyword research, on-page and technical work, local search and profile management, content, and reporting. All real, all vague. What matters is what was done inside those categories in the last thirty days.
How much should SEO cost?
There is no honest single figure, and anyone quoting one without seeing your market is guessing. Ask instead how many hours you are buying, who does the work, and what the first three months will produce.
How long before it works?
Meaningful movement usually takes three to six months, and the return compounds after that. The first months should still produce visible changes to your site and profile even while the results have not moved.
How do I know it is working?
Calls and booked jobs from organic search, tracked over months rather than weeks. If those are flat after two quarters while the rankings report improves, the report is measuring the wrong thing.
Where to start
Send your current provider one line: show me what changed on my website and my Google profile last month. The quality of the answer will tell you more than any audit you could commission.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our search optimisation or book a strategy call.