What Should a Monthly SEO Package Include?

If you are paying an SEO company every month, you should know what they are actually doing, who is responsible for making changes and what happens when the problem is on your website rather than in a report.

A useful monthly SEO package is not a fixed list of four blogs, ten links and a PDF. The work should change according to what is stopping the site from getting found and turning that visibility into business.

That is the whole test. If the scope you are quoted would be identical for a plumber in Leeds, a law firm in Bristol and an e-commerce brand shipping nationwide, it was not written for any of them.

What should actually happen every month?

The honest answer is that it depends on what the site needs at the time, and a good package is written to allow that.

In the first month or two, the work is almost always diagnosis and repair. Which pages already rank, and for what. Which pages are competing with each other. Whether Google can crawl and index the site properly. Whether the pages that should convert are pointing at the searches customers actually make. This part is unglamorous and it is where most of the early movement comes from, because a page sitting at position 12 with the wrong title is a week's work, not a project.

After that, the work usually splits between three things:

• Fixing and sharpening pages that already exist. Retargeting a service page, rewriting a title that is not earning clicks, merging two pages that are splitting the same search between them.
• Building the pages that are missing. Most service businesses have one page called Services that is being asked to rank for six different jobs, and ranks for none of them.
• The off-site work. Google Business Profile for anyone with a location or a service area, reviews, citations, and links where they can be earned rather than bought.

What should stay constant is the reporting rhythm and the review point. A target that is not responding after eight weeks needs a change of approach, not another eight weeks of the same.

What should not be sold as monthly SEO?

Four things turn up in packages repeatedly and are worth naming.

An automated report as the deliverable. A report is evidence that work happened. It is not the work. If the monthly PDF is the only thing that reliably arrives, you are paying for a subscription to a dashboard.

A repeated audit. An audit is a starting document. Re-running the same crawl every month and re-sending the same list of issues, without any of them being fixed, is a way of billing for the diagnosis over and over. One thorough SEO audit at the start, then the fixes.

Content published to hit a quota. "Four blog posts a month" is a manufacturing target, not a strategy. Four posts nobody searches for are worse than one page that answers a question your customers actually type, because they dilute what the site is about.

Links bought to hit a number. "Ten links a month" is the same problem with more risk attached. Links that can be bought at volume are links Google can identify at volume.

None of these are automatically dishonest. They become a problem when they are the scope rather than a by-product of it.

Who implements the recommendations?

This is the question that changes the value of everything above, and it is the one most often left vague.

There are two models. In the first, the agency produces recommendations and you are responsible for getting them onto the site — through your developer, your web company, or yourself. In the second, the agency has access and makes the changes.

The first model is not wrong, and for a business with an in-house developer it can work well. But you should price it honestly: you are buying advice, and the cost of implementing it sits with you. A list of forty recommendations is worth nothing until somebody does them, and in practice the momentum tends to disappear at exactly that handover.

At neometa the changes get made directly. Where there is access to the site, the page rewrite, the technical fix and the internal linking are done rather than described, and the person doing the work is the person you spoke to. That is a deliberate choice about where the work stalls, not a claim that the other model never works.

Whichever you are being sold, ask it plainly: when you find something wrong, who fixes it, and is that inside this price?

What should £500, £1,000 and £2,000 a month buy?

Scope, not hours. The useful way to read a price is to ask how much ground it covers.

Around £500 a month buys focus on one thing. Realistically that is one location and the searches around it: the Google Business Profile properly set up, the technical basics right, the main service pages targeted and written, and a handful of local pages built in order of what they are worth. It does not buy a national campaign, and anyone selling one at this price is spreading the same effort more thinly.

Around £1,000 a month buys breadth. More service lines, more towns, or terms that are genuinely competitive — plus content published regularly rather than occasionally, and the internal linking and technical work that a larger site needs to hold together.

Around £2,000 a month and above is generally where you are either competing in a market with real money behind it, working across a large site, or funding a content operation with several pages a month. If you are a single-location service business being quoted this, ask what specifically requires it.

Our own SEO pricing sits in the first two bands: Local is £495 a month, Growth is £995 a month with a website build included, or £895 a month where you already have a site worth keeping. Prices are the full amount payable, with no VAT added on top.

Should a website be included?

It depends whether the website is the thing holding you back, and it often is.

Search work on a site that cannot convert is expensive traffic. If the service pages are thin, the enquiry route is buried, or the site is slow and awkward on a phone, better rankings mostly buy you more people leaving. In that situation the build is not an upsell, it is the prerequisite.

The commercial question is how the build is funded. A separate five-figure invoice up front is one way. The other is to fold it into the monthly plan, which is what our monthly SEO packages do — the website, hosting and maintenance are included inside the plan, and the minimum term is 12 months because that term is what pays for the build. Where you already have a website worth keeping there is nothing to fund, so the minimum term is six months instead.

Be wary of any version of this where the website never becomes yours. Ours is 100% yours at month 12, and the domain, content and Google Business Profile are yours from day one.

What should an SEO company measure?

In this order.

First, the things that are actually your business:

• Enquiries
• Bookings
• Calls
• Quote requests
• Sales, where attribution exists

Then the diagnostics that explain them:

• Rankings
• Visibility
• Traffic
• Click-through rate
• Indexation

The second list matters. Rankings and impressions are how you tell whether the work is moving in the right direction before the enquiries show up, and they are how you diagnose a problem when the enquiries stop. The mistake is treating them as the result rather than the explanation.

Two specific things to watch for. Impressions can rise while clicks stay flat, which usually means you are appearing for searches that were never going to convert. And average position can improve while clicks fall, which usually means the terms you gained were not the terms that mattered. Any report that leads with the flattering metric and omits the click count is choosing what to show you.

The other half of this is knowing where an enquiry came from. If your reporting cannot tell you which page someone entered on and which page they enquired from, you are guessing about what is working — and you will still be guessing in six months.

What we charge, and what it covers

Two plans, priced by how much ground the search work has to cover rather than by how many pages happen to be on the site.

Local — £495 a month. One location and the searches around it: Google Business Profile, local visibility, on-page SEO, technical fixes, and the website build included where you need one, with hosting and maintenance.

Growth — £995 a month with a build included, or £895 a month on your existing site. Everything in Local, plus ongoing content, technical SEO and internal linking across a larger site, keyword and competitor tracking, and a wider search scope for businesses competing across more services, more locations or harder terms.

The full breakdown, including minimum terms and what happens at month 12, is on the SEO packages page.

Get a plan and pricing

You do not need to work out which of the above you need before getting in touch. Whether you have an existing website or you are starting from scratch, I will reply within one working day with the three things I would look at first — and which level of work I think it actually needs.

If that turns out to be less than you were expecting to pay, I will say so. See the pricing in full or get in touch and I will look at it properly.