Is paying someone for SEO worth it?
Paying someone for SEO is worth it when the work carries a number you can watch move, and when the person doing it will tell you what that number was before they started. Three situations make it a poor buy: the business gets its enquiries from referral and always has, it serves a handful of clients on long contracts, or it has technical faults a crawl would find in an afternoon and nobody has run one. All three are answerable before you commit to a month. The $600 audit exists to answer them: it returns the crawl, the schema gaps, the reachability check and a citation baseline, and it stands on its own if the answer turns out to be no.
Last checked
- Audit, one-offThe way to answer this question without signing a retainer
- $600
- Ongoing, rolling month
- $400/mo
Ask for the starting number
A retainer that begins without a baseline can report progress from any starting point it likes, including one measured after the first month of work. Ask what was measured, on what date, and with what method, and ask for it in writing before the first invoice.
The three poor-buy cases, in more detail
Referral-led businesses often rank badly and do fine, because their customers arrive by name. A business with few clients on long contracts has a sales problem measured in conversations, not impressions. And a site with a broken crawl, a blocked robots file or an unreachable phone number will waste a retainer on top of a fault, so the fault gets fixed first and separately.
What a fair answer looks like
Someone should be able to tell you which queries you already appear for, which ones you do not, and which of those two lists is worth spending on. If nobody will say that until you have signed, the number they eventually report has nothing to be compared against.
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Perth, Western Australia