Carverpoint home

Is an SEO agency worth it for a small business

Compared 6 min read

What a monthly SEO retainer buys a local trade, what you can do yourself for nothing, and how to tell in ninety days whether you are paying for anything.

Somebody has called you about page one. Or an email arrived saying your competitors are outranking you, with a report attached that looks technical and slightly alarming. There is a monthly figure at the bottom and a suggestion that six months is the minimum.

You do not know enough about this to argue with it, which is roughly the point of how it was presented. You may not need to pay anyone.

What SEO is, without the mystique

Search engine optimization is the work of making it more likely that you turn up when somebody searches for what you do.

For a national company selling things online, that is a large and difficult job with a lot of moving parts. For a plumber in one town it is a much smaller job, and most of it is a handful of specific, boring, free tasks.

A retainer priced for the first kind of business, sold to the second kind, is where the money goes wrong.

The free things that do most of the work

None of these require an agency and all of them are within your reach on a phone.

Your Google Business Profile is the single biggest one. Claimed, with the right category, the right service area, the right hours, real photographs, and the phone number that actually reaches you. That listing is what produces the map results, and for a local trade the map results are usually where the calls come from.

Then reviews, asked for by you, in person, at the end of a job when somebody is pleased. Then a page on your site for each main thing you do, written in the words a customer would use rather than the trade term. Then your name, address and phone number matching everywhere it appears. Then a site that loads quickly on a phone and does not hide the number.

That list is the actual work, and nobody can charge you for the parts of it only you can do, like asking a customer for a review.

What a retainer is usually buying

Once you have done the above, there is much less left than the report implies.

A lot of what fills a local SEO retainer is reporting: rankings tracked, graphs assembled, a monthly summary of movement that would have happened anyway. Some of it is directory submissions, which are cheap to do in bulk and rarely worth much. Some of it is blog posts written to a keyword list, which can be useful and can equally be filler nobody reads.

That is not fraud. It is a service designed to have something to show every month, because a retainer needs deliverables. But you are paying for the deliverables, not necessarily for calls.

What a good one actually does

There are people doing real work in this field.

They start by asking what happens after somebody finds you, not just how they find you. They will look at your inquiry form before they look at your rankings. They will tell you which searches actually matter, usually a much shorter list than the one in the report you were sent. And they will do the site work you cannot, like fixing pages that load slowly.

And they will tell you when the answer is that you do not need them, which is the clearest signal you will get.

The report that arrived with the cold call

Those automated audits are generated by software in seconds, for any website, including ones with nothing wrong.

They tend to list a lot of red items with technical names, most of which are minor or irrelevant, and a ranking comparison against companies you may not actually compete with. The alarm is the product. It is designed to make a call easier to open.

If you get one, the useful response is to ask which single item on it is costing you calls, and why. A real answer to that question is a good sign. A change of subject is also an answer.

Nobody can guarantee a ranking

If anybody promises you a position, or promises page one, they are either misunderstanding their own field or counting on you not checking.

Nobody outside Google controls the results, they change constantly, and they differ depending on where the person searching is standing. A guarantee can only be met by choosing a search phrase so specific that nobody types it, and that is usually how it is met.

Beware the same thing dressed up: guaranteed traffic increases, guaranteed leads, or a number of visitors promised per month. Visitors are not calls.

How to tell within ninety days

Whatever you sign, decide in advance what would count as it working, and make it something you can count without the agency's help.

Calls that started with somebody saying they found you online. Inquiry form submissions in your own inbox. Direction requests and calls shown in your own Google Business Profile, which you can read yourself. Booked jobs, which is the only number that pays for anything.

Rankings and impressions are not that. They can move a great deal without a single extra phone ringing, and a report built out of them can look like progress for a year.

Before you sign anything

If a retainer cannot survive these eight questions, it was not going to survive the year either.

When it is genuinely worth paying for

You are in a crowded town for a competitive trade, you have already done the free work properly, and the difference between position three and position eight is real money. Or your site has a technical problem you cannot see or fix. Or you have several locations and the listings are a mess. Or you simply will not do the work yourself, and paying someone to do it is better than it not happening, which is a perfectly honest reason.

If you have not yet claimed your Google listing or asked a single customer for a review, a retainer is the wrong purchase this month. Do those first and see where you stand.

Questions people ask

How much should local SEO cost?

Monthly SEO costs money and the range is wide. The more useful question is what is being done for it, because two retainers at the same price can contain completely different amounts of actual work.

Can I do SEO myself for my small business?

For a single location trade, most of it, yes. Claim the Google listing, keep it accurate, ask for reviews, write a real page for each service, and keep your details consistent everywhere.

How long does SEO take to work?

Months rather than weeks, which makes it easy to sell and hard to judge, so agree upfront what you will measure.

Should I sign a twelve month SEO contract?

Be cautious. If the work is good it will hold up on a shorter term, and a long minimum protects the agency far more than it protects you.

What if my website is fine but nobody calls?

Then check what happens after the click before you spend anything on getting more clicks. A form that does not send and a phone that goes unanswered both look exactly like an SEO problem from the outside.

Read next