Website SEO services, compared on what providers publish

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a provider for website SEO services

1. Establish whether your problem is technical, editorial or authority. A site that cannot be crawled properly needs engineering. A site that is crawlable but says little needs writing. A site that is sound and thorough but invisible in a competitive market needs authority and digital PR. Most buyers guess wrong, so make each candidate state a diagnosis and defend it.
2. Buy a fixed price audit first. An audit is the cheapest test of judgement available. It costs a defined amount, produces a document you own and can take elsewhere, and shows you how the provider prioritises. Grant read access to your analytics and Search Console for it, rather than write access to the site itself.
3. Ask for the minimum, the term and the notice period. One email, no meeting, and it is the fastest filter in the process. Long lock in periods are common in this category and are where a poor fit becomes expensive, so ask what happens if you want to leave in month four and get the answer in writing before you sign anything.
4. Separate what is done in house from what is bought in. Content, development and link acquisition are frequently subcontracted, which is normal but changes accountability, turnaround and quality control. Ask which parts leave the building, who reviews the output before it reaches you, and what the escalation path is when something published is wrong.
5. Fix ownership, tracking and reporting before month one. Create the analytics and Search Console properties yourself and grant access. Agree the query set, what counts as a conversion, and that every report lists what was shipped that month alongside what moved. Reports that only show graphs make it impossible to tell whether any work happened.

What is actually inside a website SEO retainer

Four workstreams do nearly all the work. Technical health governs whether pages can be crawled, indexed and rendered, and covers site structure, duplicate content, redirects and page performance. Content covers whether your pages answer the questions your buyers type, in the language they use. Authority covers whether anyone else references you. Measurement covers whether you can tell any of it worked.

Retainers differ mainly in how much of each they fund and in who performs it. Ask each provider to allocate the monthly fee across those four with hours attached, and two proposals at the same price will stop looking alike immediately. It is also the fastest way to discover that a low retainer is funding a report and very little else.

Speed, accessibility and the parts that help every channel

Page experience work pays back across every channel at once, because the same improvements that help search visitors also lift paid traffic conversion. Core Web Vitals, documented on web.dev, provide a consistent way to measure loading, interactivity and layout stability, and Largest Contentful Paint tracks how long the main content takes to appear to a real visitor.

Accessibility belongs in the same conversation. ADA.gov publishes guidance on web accessibility explaining how the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites, and the structural work involved, headings, alternative text, labelled form controls and keyboard operability, overlaps heavily with what makes a page legible to search engines. Ask whether a provider treats accessibility as part of the technical workstream or as somebody else's problem.

How to read a proposal without a specialist in the room

Convert every proposal into three numbers: monthly cost, monthly hours, and the seniority of the people supplying those hours. Then read the deliverables and ask which of them would be visible to a customer. A plan whose entire output is internal documents and dashboards is not going to change anything a buyer of your product ever sees.

Finally, check the exclusions. Google's guidance on third party SEO tools and services notes that no tool or provider has special access to ranking systems, so a proposal implying a privileged relationship is misrepresenting the trade. Serious providers say what they will not do and why, and that list is often more informative than the deliverables.

Questions people actually ask

One off project or ongoing retainer?

If your site has never had technical attention, a project usually produces the largest single improvement and can be bought at a fixed price. Retainers make sense when the competitive gap is content and authority, both of which compound. Many buyers do a project first, then decide whether an ongoing programme is justified by what it found.

Can my web developer do this instead?

A good developer can handle much of the technical workstream and should be involved regardless, since most fixes are implemented in their code. What they usually cannot supply is query research, editorial judgement and competitive analysis. Splitting the work that way is often cheaper than paying an agency to brief your developer.

How is progress reported honestly?

Ask for two things in every report: what was shipped, and what moved. Shipped is a factual list of pages, fixes and outreach. Moved is impressions, clicks and conversions for the agreed query set. A report with only the second half cannot be audited, and a report with only the first half is not accountable to results.

What happens to the work if we part ways?

Everything published on your domain stays yours, provided you own the domain, the hosting and the content. Confirm before signing that analytics and Search Console properties are in your account, that page content is not licensed to the agency, and that any custom code is handed over with documentation.

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