02 / Get found
An SEO retainer that buys pages, not adjectives.
$199/mo. The deliverable is countable: 8–12 real pages by month three, 15–25 inside the first year, one at a time, each one written for a single term that survived the search results.
- Retainer
- $199/moMonthly. Cancel any time.
- By month 3
- 8–12 pagesReal pages, one at a time.
- By month 12
- 15–25 pagesThe working range for local service businesses.
- Time to organic
- 3–6 monthsFor a new site. We do not shorten this.
The problem with how this is usually sold
Local SEO is sold as a monthly mystery. You pay, work allegedly happens, a dashboard shows traffic going up and to the right, and nobody can point at the thing that caused it. Then you cancel in month seven having no idea whether it was working.
So we made the deliverable countable. Every month you get a page that did not exist before, with a title, a URL and a date. You can look at it. You can send it to a customer. Twelve months later there are fifteen to twenty-five of them and your site covers the services you sell and the cities you sell them in.
Where the effort goes, and why
Not everything you can do for local search is worth the same. Roughly a third of what anyone can control sits in the Google Business Profile. Reviews are another sixth and rising. Citations — the directory listings most agencies lead with — are worth about seven percent and stop paying after thirty or forty.
That ordering drives the retainer. If your profile is a mess, we fix that first and tell you the site can wait a month, even though the site is the thing you are paying us for. It is a strange sales pitch and it is the right order of operations.
How a keyword becomes a page
First, the green-light test.We search the term and read the top of the results. Sponsored ads plus a map pack with organic buried below the fold means we drop it — there is no position worth winning. Map pack with light advertising means it is viable, but only with a strong profile behind it. Plain blue links means build it.
Then buying stage.Somebody typing “how does local SEO work” is months from spending money. Somebody typing “web design Milpitas” has a card out. Stage-four terms convert several times better than research-stage ones, and most agencies burn the budget on the wrong end. We build the ready-to-buy pages first and let the guides earn the earlier stages later.
Then the swap test. Before a city page ships, we replace the city name with a different city and read it again. If it still makes sense, it is a doorway page. It gets deleted, or folded into the single service areas page where a short honest paragraph per city belongs.
And before any of that, existing pages.Anything already sitting in positions 11–20 with real impression volume gets fixed before we write something new. Rescuing a near-miss beats ten fresh pages, and it is faster.
What we will not do
We will not guarantee rankings, to you or internally. We will not sell you a page for every town within an hour. We will not keyword-stuff your business name, your review replies or your headings. We will not bill you for three hundred directory submissions.
Each of those either does not work or actively risks the profile you depend on — and the August 2025 spam update suspended profiles for the name-stuffing one specifically.
What lands on the 1st
One report. Work performed, line by line, dated. Calls and direction requests from your Google profile. Keywords that moved between the 11–20, 4–10 and 1–3 bands. Pages published, and whether Search Console has actually indexed them — because a page stuck at “Discovered — not yet indexed” is a quality signal we act on rather than a number we hide.
Sessions and domain rating do not appear. They move for reasons that have nothing to do with your phone ringing.
Straight answers
Questions we get on the retainer.
What am I actually buying for $199 a month?
Pages, mostly. One new service page or city page written, published and internally linked each month, plus a technical pass over what already exists and a rank check on the keywords we agreed to track.
We put the page count in writing because it is the part you can verify. "Ongoing optimisation" is not a deliverable; a page that did not exist on the first of the month and does on the thirtieth is.
How long before it works?
Three to six months for a new site to hold organic positions, and we do not shorten that for anyone. There is a faster clock running alongside it: Google Business Profile changes typically show movement in days to weeks, which is why we usually recommend starting there if the phone ringing this quarter matters more than page one next quarter.
Why not just target more keywords at once?
Because one keyword per page is the rule that keeps pages readable, and because most of the terms people want to target do not survive contact with the actual search results.
Before we commit to a term we search it and look at what comes back. If the page is sponsored ads plus a map pack with the organic results pushed below the fold, we drop it — you cannot win a page you never reach. Plain blue links, we build it. That green-light test costs nothing and replaces most paid keyword research at this stage.
Do you build a page for every city nearby?
No. That is how you end up with a folder of doorway pages, which Google has explicitly targeted and which we would be embarrassed to hand you.
Our test is simple: swap the city name in the page for a different city. If the page still reads correctly, it is a doorway page and it gets deleted or merged into a single service-areas page. A real city page has to contain something true about that city that would be false somewhere else.
Will you build backlinks?
Not as a monthly product. We keep the core citations consistent — Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and the relevant industry directories — and we stop at roughly thirty to fifty, because returns plateau there and an endless citation retainer is a way of billing for motion.
Across the local ranking factors anyone controls, citations are worth about seven percent. The profile is worth roughly a third. We spend your money where the weight is.
What do you report?
Calls, direction requests, keywords moving between the 11–20, 4–10 and 1–3 bands, pages published and indexed, new reviews and reply rate.
Not total sessions and not domain rating. If a number cannot plausibly turn into a booked job, it does not go in the report — those metrics exist to make agencies look busy in months where nothing sold.
City pages this retainer builds
Call before you commit to a keyword.
Ten minutes and we'll run the green-light test on two terms you care about, live, while you're on the phone. If they fail, we'll tell you and suggest better ones.
A person answers. Fixed prices: $250 + $40/mo, $199/mo, $175/mo — or all three for $325/mo.
Based in Milpitas. Serving the South Bay & Bay Area. Not sure where you stand? Grade your Google profile free.