An SEO company's job is to make a website the answer Google shows for the searches its customers actually type. In practice that is four kinds of work: technical fixes so search engines can crawl, render and index the site properly; structure and content so there is a page worth ranking for each thing you sell; off-site work such as reviews, listings and links that build trust; and measurement so you can see what it earned. If a monthly report cannot name the pages published and the faults fixed, you are paying for activity rather than work.
Why the question gets asked at all
Nobody asks what their accountant does all month. They ask about SEO because the deliverable is invisible. A website looks the same on the first of the month and the thirtieth, and the thing that changed — a position, an impression count, a crawl error — is not something you can hold.
That opacity is also why the industry has a reputation problem. It is easy to sell a monthly fee for a report full of charts, and harder to be held to a list of things you actually did. So the useful version of this question is not "what is SEO" but "what should appear on the invoice". Here is the honest answer.
The four kinds of work
Every legitimate SEO engagement is some mix of these four. The proportions change with the business, the market and what state the site is in when you start.
| Type of work | What it involves | When it dominates |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | Crawling, indexing, rendering, speed, redirects, canonicals, duplicate pages, structured data | Early on, and after any migration or redesign |
| Structure and content | One page per service and per genuine location, headings that name things, articles that answer real questions | Months two to six, then steadily |
| Off-site | Reviews, business listings and citations, genuine local links, consistent business facts | Continuously, heaviest for local businesses |
| Measurement | Search Console, analytics, call tracking, and a report a human can read | Every month, from the first one |
An agency that only does one of these and charges for a full retainer is the most common way SEO money gets wasted. Technical-only work caps out quickly. Content-only work on a slow, badly structured site is pushing water uphill.
Month one: the audit and the fixes
The first month should be unglamorous and should produce visible change. A crawl of the site, an inspection in Google Search Console, and a list of everything stopping the site ranking, in order of how much it matters.
Typical findings on a small business site:
- Pages Google has never indexed, often because nothing links to them
- A slow theme or page builder pushing Largest Contentful Paint past three seconds on a phone
- One "Services" page listing nine services, so it competes properly for none of them
- Headings that say "Welcome" instead of naming the service
- Missing or wrong redirects from an old site, leaking whatever authority it had
- No structured data, so search engines are guessing what the business is
- A Google Business Profile with one category, no service areas and no recent reviews
The important word is fixes. A PDF of problems is not SEO, it is a quote for SEO. If month one ends with a document and nothing changed on the site, ask why.
Months two to six: pages and answers
This is where most of the value is, and it is the part that looks like writing rather than engineering.
Service pages. One page for each thing you sell, with a heading that names it in the words customers use. A plumber with separate pages for boiler repair, bathroom installation and emergency call-outs will beat a plumber with one page listing all three, because each page can be the specific answer to a specific search.
Location pages, where they are genuine. If you work in five towns and can write something real about each, five pages will outperform one page that lists them. If you would be publishing the same page with the town name swapped, do not: Google is good at spotting it and it can do harm. Our article on local SEO covers when a location page earns its place.
Question-led articles. The things customers ask before they buy, answered plainly. These do two jobs: they catch searches at the research stage, and they are what AI answer engines quote when they summarise a topic. Google's own guidance on helpful content is essentially a description of writing for a reader rather than for a crawler.
The off-site work
For a local business this is often the highest-return hour of the month, and it happens mostly outside your website.
- The Google Business Profile. Categories, services, service areas, photographs, posts, questions and review replies. Google states plainly that relevance, distance and prominence decide local rankings, and the profile is the main lever on two of the three.
- Reviews. A routine for asking at the moment the customer is happiest, with a direct link, and replies to all of them. Volume, recency and rating all feed prominence.
- Citations. Your name, address and phone number consistent across the listings that matter. This is dull, finite work, and it should be finished, not billed forever.
- Links. Genuine ones: local organisations, suppliers, partners, project write-ups, sponsorships. Bought links are a risk without an upside, and a bulk directory submission is not a link strategy.
What should be in the monthly report
The test of an SEO company is whether its report survives a simple question: what did you do, and what happened? A good monthly note is one page and answers both.
| Should be in it | Should not be the whole report |
|---|---|
| Pages published or rewritten, named | A chart of "keywords in the top 100" |
| Technical faults found and fixed | Traffic including branded searches, undifferentiated |
| Reviews gained, profile activity | A screenshot of a rank tracker with no commentary |
| Enquiries, calls and forms | "Ongoing optimisation" as a line item |
| What is planned next month, and why | Anything you cannot verify yourself |
You should also hold the accounts. Search Console, analytics and the Business Profile belong in your name with the agency added as a user. If you cannot log in and check the figures yourself, that is a problem regardless of how good the agency is.
What an SEO company cannot do
Being straight about the limits is part of the job.
- It cannot promise a position. Nobody controls Google's results. Anyone guaranteeing page one is either guessing or planning to rank you for your own business name, which you already had.
- It cannot fix a bad business. SEO brings people to the door. Reviews, pricing and service decide whether they come in.
- It cannot work quickly on a broken platform. If the site is fundamentally slow or cannot have pages added sensibly, a monthly fee spent working around that costs more over two years than rebuilding once.
- It cannot make demand exist. If nobody searches for what you sell, the honest advice is to spend the money elsewhere. A good agency tells you that in the first meeting.
How long before any of it shows
Technical and Business Profile fixes often move things within two to six weeks. Content-led growth usually appears between three and six months and compounds over six to twelve. Impressions climb well before clicks do, which is why a report that only shows clicks in month two looks worse than the reality.
We go into the detail, and the reasons some businesses move faster than others, in how long SEO takes.
Where to go next
If you are trying to work out whether your current arrangement is worth what you pay for it, the fastest check is to ask for last month's list of pages published and faults fixed. If it arrives quickly and reads sensibly, you are in good hands.
If it does not, tell us about it and we will look at the site and the profile and give you a plain list of what is actually wrong. Our SEO service covers the work described above, and SEO in Stourbridge sets out what it costs locally.
And if you are deciding between paying for SEO or paying for clicks, SEO or Google Ads sets the two side by side.