SEO FAQ: Hiring, Contracts, and Reporting

Three things: access to your Google Search Console and Analytics, a 30-minute call so I understand your business and your customers, and your current site URL. That’s it. No lengthy onboarding decks, no questionnaires with 40 fields. The audit does the rest.

Project-based for the audit and one-off fixes. Monthly retainer for ongoing work. No hourly billing. It punishes you for asking questions and me for being efficient. You pay for outcomes, not clock time.

Month-to-month after the initial audit. No six-month lock-in, no auto-renewal trap. If I’m not delivering value, you should be able to walk. The only exception is the audit itself. That’s a fixed-scope project and gets paid upfront. Everything after stays flexible.

No. Nobody can, and anyone who does is selling you something. Google changes its algorithm thousands of times a year. What I guarantee is the process: the audit, the fixes, the keyword map, the reporting. And 100% white hat work, no link farms, no private blog networks, no shortcuts that get you penalized in eight months. Rankings follow good work. Guarantees are marketing.

No. The way people search is changing, but the underlying job hasn’t. You want your business to show up when someone’s looking for it. AI overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, they all pull from sites Google and the other engines trust. Which means the fundamentals still matter. Good content, clean structure, real reputation. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) isn’t a replacement for SEO. It’s what SEO looks like when the results page changes.

Depends on how long you’ve been at it. Stop after six months and you’ll likely slide back within a year. Stop after two years and the rankings tend to hold longer, because the authority is real and not rented. Either way, you don’t lose everything overnight. You just stop compounding. Competitors don’t.

Rankings, traffic, and conversions. But the order matters. Rankings without traffic mean you’re ranking for things nobody searches. Traffic without conversions means you’re attracting browsers, not buyers. I report on all three, and I’ll tell you which one is the bottleneck before I try to fix it.

Because bots don’t convert. I watch the quality of the traffic, not just the raw session count. Time on page, pages per session, form fills, calls, actual inquiries. If the numbers look high but the phone isn’t ringing, something’s wrong, and we investigate before we celebrate.

Yes. The keyword map from the audit defines exactly which terms we’re targeting, and the report tracks those same terms. No cherry-picking obscure keywords to make a report look good. If a target term isn’t moving, you’ll see that too.