The chart I keep open on the second monitor is for the phrase "seo abbotsford", checked every day from a Chrome browser in our office on McCallum Road. As of the date on this post it has seoabbotsford.com at number one. The same tool has us outside the top ten for "seo company abbotsford" and "seo services abbotsford". Same site, same month, same person doing the work. I mention both because the first number is the one an agency would put in a banner, and the second is the one that tells you how this actually goes.
So here is what the first 30 days look like when a business in Abbotsford hires us for SEO, with the price of each piece. There's no setup fee and no contract, so the 30 days are the whole commitment.
Week one: measure before touching anything
The first thing I do to your site is nothing. I pick 15 search phrases with you, the ones a customer would type, not the ones that sound impressive. For a roofer that's "roofer abbotsford", "roof repair abbotsford", "metal roofing chilliwack", that sort of thing. Three of them get checked every day and twelve once a week, from a real browser located in Abbotsford with personalization switched off. That's the Rank Tracking plan, $79 a month per location, and it includes a dashboard with 90-day charts and a plain email every week.
The reason to measure first is that most owners don't know where they stand. They've searched their own name from their own phone, found themselves at the top, and assumed. Google knows that phone. It doesn't know the stranger in Auguston with a leaking skylight. A week of clean checks gives us a starting line nobody can argue with, and it means that when something moves later, we can see it rather than guess.
Week two: the Google Business Profile
For a trade or a clinic in this town, the map pack (the three businesses with the pins, above the regular results) is where the phone calls come from. So week two is your profile. Primary category right, secondary categories filled in, hours matching the door, service area set to the towns you serve and not the whole province. Photos from this decade. A description that says what you do in plain words.
If you want us to keep doing this every month, that's the Local SEO work from $99 a month: the profile set up properly, citations made consistent, the site's wording tuned for your town. If you'd rather do it yourself, I'll tell you exactly what to fix on a call and you can go do it. Either way, it's the highest-return hour of the whole 30 days.
Week three: the pages
Now the site. Not a redesign. I'm looking at whether each service you sell has its own page, whether the page title says the service and the town, whether the first paragraph says it again in a way a human would read, and whether the page links to anything. A plumbing site with one page called "Services" that lists nine things is invisible for all nine.
Small fixes here are part of the $199 Local Content plan. If the site is genuinely the problem (built in 2014, no mobile version, loads like it's on dial-up), I'll say so, and a redesign from $899 is the honest answer. I'd rather tell you that in week three than sell you content for a site that can't carry it.
Week four: the first two pieces, and the ask for reviews
The $199 plan publishes two local pieces a month for you, on your blog and on your Google Business Profile. The first two go out at the end of the month. They're short, they're about something specific (a service in a neighbourhood, a question customers keep asking), and they're written to be read, not to hit a word count.
The same week I'll have you ask five recent customers for a Google review. Not fifty. Five. Reviews move the map pack and they move the person deciding whether to call. The asking has to come from you; nobody else's text lands the same. What Review Management does for $99 a month is the other half: watches the listing daily and drafts a reply for every review that comes in, which you approve.
What the chart looks like after 30 days
Usually not much. I want to be straight about that. Thirty days is enough to fix the profile and get clean measurement, and sometimes the map pack responds inside that window because profile changes land fast. Organic rankings are slower. Our own site was no exception; the number one for "seo abbotsford" took a lot longer than a month, and the phrases we're still missing are the reminder that a result on one term doesn't carry over to its cousins.
What you have at day 30 is a profile that's right, a site that's at least not fighting you, two pieces published, five reviews asked for, and a chart you can read yourself. The rank tracking page shows what that dashboard looks like. Month two is more of the same, and you can stop any month you like.