Most proposals from an SEO company in Abbotsford are long. There's an audit section with a lot of red icons, a strategy section with a lot of arrows, and a price near the back. You can skip nearly all of it. Three questions tell you what you're buying, and if a proposal doesn't answer them, ask before you sign anything. That goes for ours too.
What exactly will you track
Not "we'll monitor your visibility". Which phrases, checked how often, from where. A company that's going to work on your rankings should be able to name the fifteen or twenty searches that matter for your business before they start, and tell you where you sit for each of them today. If the answer is a screenshot of a tool with 400 keywords and a green arrow, that's a sales page, not a measurement.
The "from where" part matters more than people think. Rankings in Abbotsford are not rankings in Vancouver. A search run from a data centre in Toronto, or from the salesperson's phone in Langley, tells you very little about what a customer on Sumas Way sees. We run ours from a browser in our own office here, personalization off, location pinned to your city. Whatever company you talk to, ask where the search happens.
How will you report, and can I check it
A monthly PDF with traffic graphs is the industry standard, and it's standard because it's hard to argue with and easy to produce. Traffic went up; great. From what searches? To which pages? Did any of it turn into a phone call? The honest reports are the boring ones: here are your phrases, here's the number for each, here's the chart for the last 90 days, here's what we did this month and here's what we're doing next.
Then ask whether you can log in and see the same numbers yourself, any day, not just when the report lands. If the company's data only exists in their deck, you're taking their word for it. Ours is a dashboard you can open whenever you like, and a plain email every week. There's a look at the chart on ranktrack.ca.
What happens when I cancel
This is the one most owners don't ask, and it's the one that decides whether the relationship ever goes wrong. Three things to find out.
- Is there a contract, how long, and what does it cost to leave early.
- Who owns the Google Business Profile, the analytics account, the domain and the website when you walk away. (The answer should be "you, and you always did.")
- Does the work stop, or does it get undone. Content published on your own site stays. Content published on their network of sites, or links they built on pages they control, can vanish the day you stop paying.
Year-long contracts exist in this business because SEO is slow and nobody wants to be judged on month two. But a contract shifts the risk of a slow start entirely onto you, and it means the company doesn't have to earn month seven. Without one, they do.
What we charge, so you have a number to compare
Rank tracking on its own is $79 a month per location: 15 phrases, three checked daily and twelve weekly, the dashboard, the weekly email. Local content plus the tracking is $199 a month, which adds two local pieces every month published on your blog and your Google Business Profile. Google Business Profile work on its own starts at $99 a month. Review management is $99 a month. Everything is month to month, and your Google Business Profile, your site and your accounts stay yours.
Those numbers are on the pricing page and they're the same for everyone. If you take a proposal from any SEO company in Abbotsford and it can't answer the three questions above in plain language, the price doesn't matter, because you won't know what you paid for.
Ask the three questions. Then decide.