Choosing an organic search engine optimization company

Agencies with a verified published price

How to evaluate an organic search proposal

1. Make them name the queries and the pages. A credible proposal states which queries it is competing for, roughly what each is worth, and which page will target each one. Without that mapping there is no way to check progress in month three except by asking whether the agency feels good about it. Ask for the mapping before you sign, and treat reluctance as an answer in itself.
2. Separate the fixing from the publishing. Organic work splits into repairs that need a developer and content that needs a writer, and the two run at different speeds through different people. Ask for both plans separately with owners attached, because when the technical half stalls behind your engineering queue the retainer quietly becomes a content service that you are paying a technical price for.
3. Ask how links are earned, in specific terms. Links still matter and the ways of getting them vary from legitimate to actively harmful. Ask exactly what the method is, whether anything is paid for, and whether the agency will name the sites. Google's spam policies treat link schemes as a violation, and a supplier that is vague here is one whose tactics you would rather learn about now.
4. Fix what gets reported and from whose account. Reporting should come from your own analytics and search console, cover enquiries or revenue by landing page group, split branded from non branded demand, and list what was published against what was promised. Agree this format before the first invoice, since a reporting template is much harder to change once a routine has formed.

What organic work actually consists of

Four things, in rough order of how often they are the constraint. Crawling and indexing: whether the pages you care about can be reached, rendered and indexed at all, which is where migrations, faceted navigation and duplicate URLs cause the most damage. Content: whether pages exist that genuinely answer the queries you want, written with real knowledge rather than assembled from competitor pages. Structure: whether internal linking and site architecture make it obvious which page is the authoritative answer for each topic. And authority: whether other sites reference you, which is the slowest and least controllable part.

Google's search essentials documentation sets out the technical requirements and the spam policies that apply to every site, and it is a reasonable neutral reference when two agencies assert incompatible things with equal confidence. Where a proposed tactic sits awkwardly against those published policies, ask the agency to explain the discrepancy rather than accepting that everyone does it.

Why organic is priced the way it is

Almost all of an organic retainer is labour, and the largest recurring line is content production. That is why proposals diverge so widely: one firm is quoting a number of pages a month by a specialist writer, another is quoting a smaller number by a subject expert, and a third is quoting a large number produced cheaply. Ask for the page count, who writes, and whether subject expertise or interviews are part of the process. Then ask what happens to the technical backlog if your developers are slow, since that determines whether the rest of the fee is doing anything.

The other honest driver of price is competitive difficulty. Winning a low competition local query is a few pages of good work. Winning a national commercial query against established sites is a multi year programme, and a proposal that prices those the same is not being straight with you about one of them.

Making sure the value stays yours

Organic value accumulates in assets: pages, links, structured data, and the accumulated history in your analytics and search console. Every one of those should live in property you own. Register the domain, analytics property and search console in your business name and add the agency as a user. Confirm in writing that content produced under the engagement is yours on payment, including the working research behind it.

Ask one more question before signing: what happens to results if we stop. The honest answer is that published pages keep working for a while and then decay as competitors move and content ages, which is a much more useful thing to hear than a promise of permanence. A firm that says the value disappears the moment you stop paying is describing a rental, and you should find out which parts of the programme are actually rented.

Questions people actually ask

How is organic work different from paid search?

Paid buys placement immediately and stops when the budget stops. Organic earns placement slowly and decays slowly. Most businesses need both, with paid covering the demand you cannot yet rank for while organic builds. Judge them on different timescales and never compare their cost per enquiry in the first quarter.

How long before organic work pays back?

New pages competing for real demand typically need a few months to settle, and competitive categories need considerably longer. Set intermediate checkpoints instead: pages published on schedule, technical fixes shipped, impressions growing for the target queries, then enquiries. If none of those move by month six, something is wrong.

Should we buy content and technical work from the same firm?

Usually yes, because the two decisions constrain each other and a split creates a gap where each side waits for the other. Where you already have strong in house writers, buying only the technical and strategic half can be efficient, provided the query to page mapping is owned by someone.

What should make us walk away from a proposal?

A guarantee of specific positions, vagueness about how links are obtained, refusal to name target queries, or any arrangement that keeps your analytics, search console or domain inside the agency's own accounts. Each of those is either a risk to your site or a cost you only discover on the way out.

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