Search engine optimization strategy services, compared

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy a strategy engagement without buying a deck

1. Define the decision the strategy has to make. Write down the question first: which service lines to invest behind, whether to rebuild or repair the site, whether to compete nationally or locally, whether search deserves budget at all. A strategy scoped against a real decision produces an answer. One scoped as a review of our SEO produces a list of observations you already suspected.
2. Insist on named queries with volumes and difficulty. The core of any credible strategy is a query set: the terms to pursue, what each is worth, how hard the current results look, and which pages will target them. Ask to see the format before you commission the work. If the sample is a spreadsheet of thousands of terms with no selection applied, you are buying an export rather than a judgement.
3. Require a sequenced plan with owners and effort. Every recommendation needs three attributes: who does it, roughly how long it takes, and what it depends on. Without those the document cannot be executed by your team or priced by anyone else. Ask for the plan to be ordered by expected return against effort, and ask the agency to say plainly which items they would drop if the budget halved.
4. Agree who executes, and price that separately. Keep the strategy fee and the execution fee visible as separate numbers even if you buy both from the same firm. It keeps the strategy honest, since a plan written to justify a retainer looks different from one written to be handed over, and it lets you take the document to another supplier if the fit is wrong.

What belongs in the deliverable

A usable strategy document has six parts. A demand map: the queries that exist in your category, grouped by the intent behind them, with the ones you are choosing to ignore marked as ignored rather than silently omitted. A competitive read: who currently occupies those results and what they have that you do not, described concretely rather than as authority. A site diagnosis: what structurally prevents you from ranking, separated into things that need a developer, things that need a writer and things that need a decision. A page plan: what gets created, merged or removed, mapped one to one against the query groups. A measurement plan naming the accounts and the definition of a result. And an ordered roadmap with effort estimates.

Google publishes its own account of what its systems reward in the guidance on creating helpful content, and a strategy that contradicts it without saying why should be treated sceptically. That guidance is a useful neutral reference point in a room where two agencies are asserting incompatible things with equal confidence.

What it costs, and why quotes differ so widely

Strategy work is priced by depth, not by page count. A short engagement for a single service business may be a few days of senior time and produce a tight plan. A multi market or multi brand site with a large existing page inventory can absorb weeks, because the analysis has to cover cannibalisation between existing pages, migration history and template level problems that repeat thousands of times. When two quotes differ by a wide margin, the gap is almost always in how much of the existing site is actually being examined and whether a senior person is doing the examining.

Ask each candidate for the number of senior days included and the format of the deliverable, then compare on those units. Ask also to see a redacted example from a comparable business. A firm that will not show any sample of its central deliverable is asking you to buy the one thing you are least able to evaluate on trust alone.

How to know the strategy was any good

Judge it on three things a few months later. Was it executable, meaning did your team or another supplier actually ship from it without needing the author in the room to explain what was meant. Was it specific enough to be wrong, meaning did it make predictions that could fail rather than statements that could not. And did the ordering hold up, meaning did the early items turn out to matter more than the later ones once real results arrived.

Build in a review point at the end of the first quarter of execution, written into the original scope, where the author revisits the plan against what actually happened. That single clause converts a document into a working relationship and costs almost nothing to include at the outset.

Questions people actually ask

Is a strategy engagement different from an audit?

An audit describes the current state, usually technically. A strategy chooses a direction and sequences the work to get there. Many firms sell an audit under the strategy label, which is why asking to see the query selection and the ordered roadmap before commissioning is the quickest way to tell what you are actually buying.

How long should a strategy engagement take?

Typically a few weeks from kickoff to delivery for a mid sized site: time to gather access, analyse the existing inventory, research the query set and write it up. Much faster usually means a template was filled in. Much slower usually means the scope drifted or access was never granted.

Can we execute it ourselves afterwards?

Yes, if it was written to be handed over, which is why the effort estimates and owners matter so much. Make it explicit in the brief that the document must be executable by a third party, and confirm in writing that the deliverable and its underlying research are yours to keep and to share.

What access will the agency need?

Analytics, search console, the content management system in read access at minimum, and any historical records of migrations or penalties. Grant these through accounts you own with the agency added as a user, never by handing over credentials, so that removing access later is a single click rather than a negotiation.

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