On this page5 sections
What should an SEO package include?
A written audit before anything starts, fixes applied to your own site, Business Profile work, a set number of new pages a month, and a report that explains what changed.
That list is close to universal, and the differences between providers hide inside the words 'applied' and 'a set number'. Some packages deliver recommendations and expect your developer to implement them, which is a materially different product at a similar price.
Ask which of the line items involve somebody logging into your site and changing it. On most packages the honest answer is fewer than the list suggests.
Which line items are filler?
Directory submissions past the first few, social posting bundled into an SEO price, and keyword research listed as a recurring monthly deliverable.
Filler is rarely fraudulent. It is usually something real that costs the provider almost nothing and reads well on a list.
- Directory submissions
- The first handful genuinely help by making your details consistent across the web. Submission number sixty to a directory nobody visits does nothing, and volume here is a warning sign.
- Social media posting
- Worth doing, and it is not SEO. Bundled into an SEO price it makes the package look larger while the hours come out of the work you bought.
- Keyword research, monthly
- It is real work the first time and mostly finished after that. Listed every month it is a line that costs nothing to repeat.
- Reporting
- Not filler, and not a deliverable either. Reporting is how you see the deliverables, so a package whose largest line item is the report has an empty middle.
Check my site
The same checks this page describes, run against your own site. About 30 seconds.
Check my site→Why do SEO packages have tiers at all?
Because writing is the only part that scales with money. Almost everything else is roughly fixed however much you pay.
The audit happens once. The technical fixes are finite and largely done in month one. The Business Profile is a day of work and then maintenance. None of those get meaningfully bigger on a larger plan, because there is no larger version of a correct title tag.
What does scale is how many pages get written each month and how much competitor and content research sits behind them. When you compare two tiers from the same provider, that is nearly always the actual difference, whatever else the table says.
What should never be in an SEO package?
Guaranteed rankings, purchased links, review gating, and Google Posts or review replies sold as a deliverable.
The first three carry real risk to your business. The fourth is simply not worth what it costs.
- Guaranteed rankings
- Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee is either meaningless small print or a plan to rank you for a phrase nobody searches.
- Purchased links
- Against Google's guidelines, detectable, and the penalty lands on your site while the seller keeps the fee.
- Review gating
- Screening customers so only happy ones get the review link breaks Google's rules and risks the listing that produces your calls.
- Google Posts and review replies
- We do not sell either at any price. Posts decay within days and will not rescue a badly configured listing, and a review reply is your voice answering your own customer.
How do you compare two SEO packages?
Count the pages written per month, then ask who implements the fixes. Those two answers separate almost any two packages in this city.
Line-item counts are designed to defeat comparison, because a provider can always add another zero-cost line. Pages written and fixes actually applied are both countable, both verifiable afterwards, and both expensive to fake.
Then ask what happens if you leave. Work done on your own site and in your own accounts stays with you. Work living on somebody else's platform does not, and that difference does not usually appear on the package table. Every price is on one page.
