Agency card · what you are buying
What Is an SEO Company? The Card You Should Read First
An SEO company is an outside team that owns part of your search performance: it finds the technical and content reasons your pages do not rank, ships the fixes, and reports what changed. The useful question is not what the label means. It is which of the three working models you are actually buying, and what counts as delivered.
Scope, model and acceptance standard agreed in writing before any invoice.
So what is an SEO company, in one paragraph?
An SEO company is an agency or consultancy that takes responsibility for a site's organic search results: it audits crawl, index and page-level signals, fixes or commissions the fixes, produces or edits the content, and reports against agreed metrics. It is judged on shipped work and measured outcomes, not on activity or tool subscriptions.
What the company actually does all month
Four workstreams. Every credible proposal maps to these, even when the slide deck renames them.
Diagnose what blocks the site
Crawl errors, indexation gaps, template-level duplicate titles, slow category pages, internal links that all point home. If you want to see how this is documented, the process is the same one behind Whats Is SEO?, and the output is a ranked list rather than a 60-slide deck.
Choose which pages deserve the work
Not every page can rank and not every page should. The company picks the templates and query clusters where a fixed month of effort has the best chance of paying back, then defends that choice with impression data.
Produce the change, not the recommendation
Title rewrites, briefs, internal link maps, schema, redirect maps, and pull requests or CMS edits. The dividing line between a real agency and a report factory is whether anything lands in production without you chasing it.
Show what moved and what did not
Indexed count, clicks by template, impressions on target clusters, and the queue for next month. A honest report includes the items that failed, because those determine the next decision.
WebSEOGrow
Search team · operating card
- Does
- Technical audits, on-page work, content briefs and pages, internal linking
- Works
- Hybrid by default: we ship what your stack allows, you keep the CMS
- Charges
- Monthly retainer or fixed project. No percentage of ad spend
- Accepts
- Signed scope, four-week shipping cadence, monthly shipped list
- Refuses
- Rank guarantees, bulk link buys, content at volume with no target query
- Exit
- Thirty days notice, all documents and access stay yours
Six fields. Ask every company you shortlist to fill the same six, then compare the cards side by side rather than the pitch decks.
Why the card beats the proposal
Proposals are written to win the meeting. A card is written to survive month four, when the first report is late and someone asks what was actually promised. When you force the same six fields across three vendors, the differences stop being rhetorical. One company cannot name its exit terms, another has no refusal list, a third charges a share of spend which quietly rewards it for spending more of your budget.
None of those are fatal on their own. Together they tell you how the relationship will feel when a project slips or a template change breaks indexation at month three. That is the moment the contract gets tested, and the card is what you will re-read.
If you are still at the stage of understanding the discipline itself, start with SEO Audit Services before comparing vendors. Choosing a company before you can describe what search work involves is how most disappointing retainers begin.
Three working models, compared honestly
The model decides who does the work and where the bottleneck sits. Pick the model before you compare quotes, because the same monthly figure buys very different things.
| Decision | Fully managed | Hybrid | Consulting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owns strategy | Company | Company | You, with advice |
| Writes content | Company | Company or you | You |
| Ships changes | Company, inside your CMS | Split by stack | Your developers |
| Your time per month | Two review calls | One call plus approvals | Eight to twelve hours |
| Best for | Teams with no SEO owner | In-house devs, no SEO lead | Strong in-house team, new market |
| Main risk | Opacity, slow feedback | Unclear handoffs | Nothing ships |
FixedRetainer or project fee
You pay for a defined monthly scope or a defined deliverable. Predictable, easy to budget, and it puts the risk of underestimating effort on the vendor, which is why scope has to be written down precisely.
VariableHourly, day rate or performance
Hourly suits consulting. Performance-linked fees suit mature sites with clean tracking. They fail where attribution is broken, because both sides then argue about credit instead of shipping.
No price figures belong in this comparison, because the right question is not cheap versus expensive. It is what unit of work you are buying: a shipped change, a delivered document, or an hour of judgement. Ask each vendor to state the unit in the proposal, then divide their fee by it.
Not sure which model fits your team?
Tell us who can edit the CMS and who can touch the template. The model follows from those two answers.
Eight questions to ask before you sign
Ask them in this order. The first two filter out most of the market, and the last two decide whether the relationship survives a bad month.
Who writes the deliverable, and who ships it?
Named roles, not a department. If the person in the pitch is not the person doing the work, ask who is.
What is explicitly out of scope?
A proposal with no exclusions is a proposal that will expand until the fee feels wrong.
Which three pages will you touch first, and why?
A real team answers with pages and a reason. A vendor answers with a process diagram.
What will the monthly report contain?
Demand a shipped list with dates. Screenshots of ranking tools are not a report.
Who owns the access and the assets?
Search Console, analytics, content and crawl exports must stay in your accounts, transferable on day one.
How do you handle a migration?
The answer should involve a redirect map, a pre-launch crawl and a post-launch index check, in that order.
What happens when a recommendation fails?
Look for a diagnosis habit, not defensiveness. Failure review is where the next good decision comes from.
How do we end the contract?
Notice period, handover documents, and a final crawl. Ask before month one, not month eleven.
Five signs to walk away
Each of these is common enough to see twice a month in inbound requests from companies trying to leave a previous vendor.
Rank promises in writing
Nobody controls the algorithm or your competitors. A written guarantee converts a professional relationship into a bet you will lose.
Links priced per unit
Bulk guest posts and directory placements sold by volume are the fastest route to a manual action and the slowest thing to undo.
Reporting you cannot audit
If the report shows a composite score that only their tool calculates, you cannot tell whether the work or the formula changed.
No access for you
Work done in an account you cannot see is work you cannot verify, keep, or take with you.
Content with no target query
Four posts a month and no keyword mapping means you are paying for words, not pages that answer demand.
Every fix is a redesign
When the only solution is a rebuild, the company is selling production capacity, not prioritisation.
What a first month with us looks like
Short, because the point is to reach a shipped change quickly rather than to complete an onboarding programme.
Access and baseline
Search Console, analytics, CMS and server access. We record the baseline numbers before anything changes, so month six has something to compare against.
Crawl and prioritise
A full crawl, an index comparison and a template sample. You get the ranked list at the end of the week, not at the end of the quarter.
Ship the first batch
Titles, internal links, redirects, schema or a category rewrite, depending on which item sits at the top of the list. Small enough to deploy, large enough to measure.
Measure and queue
What moved, what stalled, and the next four weeks of work written into a shared board you can read without us.
That cadence is the whole offer: one shipped batch every four weeks, a measurement you can audit, and access that stays in your name. Teams that want a wider programme than search alone usually fold it into the same operating rhythm rather than buying a second vendor.
Questions buyers ask us
Six answers we give on calls, in the same words each time.
Can I start with a project instead of a retainer?
Yes. An audit or a migration project is a normal entry point. Many clients start there, ship the list, then move to a monthly scope only if the queue justifies it.
Do you need access to our CMS?
For the hybrid and managed models, yes, with a named editor role rather than admin. In consulting we work from exports and leave the editing to your team.
How quickly do we see movement?
Crawling can change within days. Ranking and click movement usually appears between eight and sixteen weeks, and it is uneven across templates.
What if we already have an in-house writer?
Then we brief and edit rather than write, and we spend the saved budget on internal linking and template fixes. That is the hybrid model doing its job.
Do you work with sites in other languages?
Yes, with a native reviewer on the languages we do not speak internally. Structure and intent transfer; idioms and search phrasing do not.
Is there a minimum term?
Three months, because a crawl, a ship cycle and a measurement do not fit in less. After that it is monthly, with thirty days notice.