Almost every local agency sells the same three column pricing table, and the columns are almost never comparable. One firm counts a Google Business Profile update as a deliverable; another treats it as housekeeping and never lists it. One counts citation submissions in the hundreds; another builds the ten that matter and spends the remaining hours on pages that can actually rank. Read across two tables and you are comparing invented units. The useful move is to ignore the tier names, ask what changes on your website and your profile in month one, month three and month six, and price that instead. Everything below is written to help you do exactly that without needing to learn the jargon first.
What is genuinely inside a local plan
Strip the packaging and a local plan contains five things. First, the business profile: correct categories, correct hours, correct service areas, photographs that are yours, and a habit of answering questions and reviews. Second, the pages: one page per service you want to be found for, and separate pages for locations where you have a real presence rather than a pin dropped on a map. Third, the technical floor: the site loads on a phone, the phone number is a link rather than an image, and the address and hours on the site match the profile exactly. Google's documentation on local business structured data lists the properties a page can mark up, including address, opening hours and areas served, and the value of that markup collapses the moment those details disagree with the profile. Fourth, reviews: a repeatable way to ask, not a burst before a slow month. Fifth, reporting that shows calls and form fills, not a ranking screenshot. A tier that adds a sixth thing is usually adding volume, not value.
What moves results, and what just fills the table
Proximity is a real factor in local results, which means a single location on one edge of a metro will not appear for searches on the far side however good the copy is. An honest agency raises that in the first call rather than in month six, and reshapes the plan around the radius you can realistically win. Category selection on the profile often outranks months of content work in impact and takes an afternoon. Review velocity matters more than review count once you are past the first handful. Against that, mass citation submissions, blog posts written to a monthly quota, and social posting bundled into an SEO retainer are the classic table fillers: cheap to produce, easy to count, rarely decisive. Google's own starter guide is direct that pages which are useful and well organised around what people are actually searching for beat technical cleverness applied to thin content, and that ordering holds locally too.
How to compare two plans on the same units
Convert both proposals into four numbers before you look at the monthly fee. How many hours a month, and from whom by name and seniority. How many new or rewritten pages, and who writes them. How many profile actions a month, stated as a count rather than as ongoing management. What the reporting cadence is, and what a result is defined as: a ranking, a call, a booked job. Two plans that look far apart on price often turn out to be one senior day a month versus one junior day a month, which is a fair comparison to make once you can see it. This is also the point where shortlisting the best local SEO services becomes a matter of reading published terms rather than sitting through pitches, because a firm that publishes its scope and its floor price has already answered half your questions.
Contract length, ownership and getting out
Local work is slow enough that a one month rolling term is unrealistic and long enough that a twelve month lock is unnecessary. Three to six months with a notice period is the shape most defensible for both sides. Before signing, settle ownership in writing: the website, the domain, the analytics property, the business profile and any tracking numbers are yours, held in accounts registered to you with the agency added as a user. Agencies that create these under their own accounts are not usually acting in bad faith, but the effect on the day you leave is the same, and rebuilding a profile with a history of reviews is not something money fixes quickly. Ask what happens to the pages they wrote if you leave, and get the answer in the contract rather than in an email.
Questions people ask about local seo plans
Why do local SEO plans vary so much in price?
Mostly seniority and hours, not method. A lower tier is often a junior executive following a checklist, a higher tier is a senior consultant deciding what is worth doing. Ask each candidate to state monthly hours and who performs them, then compare the effective rate. If neither will say, the price difference cannot be explained and you should assume the cheaper one is a checklist.
How long before a local plan shows anything?
Profile corrections and category changes can move visibility within weeks because they are data fixes rather than authority building. New service and location pages are slower, typically a few months before they hold a stable position. Anyone promising a fixed position by a fixed date is selling certainty that the ranking system does not offer.
Do I need a plan at all, or can this be a one off project?
If your profile and site have never been set up properly, a one off audit and fix is often better value than a retainer, and a good agency will say so. Ongoing spend earns its place where there is real competition in your radius, a steady flow of reviews to manage, or several services and locations that each need their own page maintained.
What should reporting contain at minimum?
Calls and form enquiries with their source, the queries that produced profile views, which pages gained or lost visibility, and what was done that month against what was promised. Rankings can appear as context, never as the headline, because a position that produces no calls is not a result you can bank.