SEO

The invoice.

The reports that land on our desk come from firms charging fifteen hundred to thirty-five hundred dollars a month for local SEO, and twenty-five hundred to eight thousand and up for national. These are not someone's nephew. They are established companies with account managers, sales decks, and two decades of client logos. The invoice is professional. What it pays for is the question.

Experience as the product.

Ask what you're buying and the answer is years. Twenty years in search. Fifteen years of proven results. Experience is a fine thing to have. It is not a deliverable. And in this field it becomes a liability the moment it hardens into a method — because the method most of these firms sell was built for a search engine that no longer exists.

The 2010 formula.

It goes like this. A keyword list. A blog cadence — four posts a month, eight if you pay more, written to a word count rather than to a question anyone asks. A "link-building campaign." A monthly PDF showing rankings for the keyword list. The same plugin stack on every site, the same theme with the colors swapped, the same PDF with the logo swapped. One system, run for every client, because one system is how a retainer stays profitable at scale.

This worked, roughly, in 2010. It has been dying since the map pack took over local results, and it is finished now that Google answers the question itself above the results and, increasingly, phones the business on the customer's behalf. None of those three things exist in the formula. The formula predates all of them. The firms selling it know this, which is why the reports have quietly changed what they measure.

Branded search, or how a flat year gets reported as a good one.

Open your last report. Find the keyword that drove the most traffic. If it is your own company name — or your name plus your town — you are looking at your existing customers typing your name into Google to find your phone number. That is called branded search. It was always going to arrive. It has nothing to do with the work you're paying for, and it is routinely presented as the headline result of that work.

Now find the line for paid search. If you are paying for ads on your own company name, you are paying Google to stand between your customers and your own free listing, and then paying your agency to report the clicks. Someone who searched your name was already coming. You've bought them twice.

This is not a mistake the firms make. It is the mechanism by which the retainer survives contact with results.

"Increase the budget."

When the organic numbers don't move, the recommendation is paid search. For most local businesses the arithmetic is poor — you are buying clicks from people who would have found you on the map, or from people who were never going to call — but it has one virtue for the agency: it produces a number that goes up when you spend more. That number is clicks. Ask instead what the spend produced in booked jobs. If the answer is a pause, you have your answer.

The site itself.

We come at this from the infrastructure side. Watchman has spent a decade cleaning up after it. The sites these retainers produce are, with regularity, slow, built on the same overloaded template, carrying plugins nobody has updated since install, and secured accordingly. Your business name is on the front of it. The report doesn't mention any of this, because the report measures keyword positions — not whether the site loads in under three seconds on a phone, and not whether it has been quietly compromised.

Clicks, delivered.

Some of what arrives is worse than lazy. Traffic can be manufactured — bought, botted, redirected, inflated with search terms nobody would ever convert on — and it shows up in the report as growth. A firm that can deliver clicks this way can undercut an honest one, hide the cost in overhead, and keep a client for years on a chart that goes up while the phone stays quiet. This is predatory, and it is ordinary. You would notice it one way: visits up, calls flat. If that describes your last twelve months, you have already noticed it.

Why it persists.

A retainer pays for activity. It does not pay for outcomes, and it is not structured to. The report is built to justify the invoice, which is why it is long, dense, and measured in things you cannot check. The account manager is trained to translate it. The client, who runs a business and not an agency, accepts the translation. This is not a conspiracy. It is an incentive structure, and it works exactly as designed.

What we do instead.

We are a technology company, not a marketing one, and the difference shows up in what we measure. Your Helm Report has five numbers: found, called, answered, booked, closed. If a number is branded traffic, it says so. If your site is slow or insecure, it says so. If your current vendor is doing good work, we say that too — it happens, and we have no interest in replacing something that works.

We build the search work for your business, not from a template, and when the way people search changes, we change with it. That is what a technology company is for.

Send us the report.

If you want a second opinion on what you're paying for, send us your last SEO report. We'll mark it up — what's real, what's branded, what's padding, and what it would cost to do properly — and send it back. No call required. If the report is good, we'll tell you it's good.