Five checks before you hire anyone
We turn down more small businesses than we sign, and it's almost always for one of these five reasons. Run them yourself before you take a single sales call. They take an afternoon and they'll save you a year of retainer fees.
- Does search demand exist? Open Google Keyword Planner, or just search your category plus your city and look at what comes back. If the results are national aggregators and nothing local, or if there's genuinely nothing, people aren't finding your category this way. SEO surfaces existing demand. It doesn't invent it.
- Is one customer worth ₹10,000 or more in gross margin? Or worth ₹3,000 repeated twelve times? If neither, the arithmetic in the next section is going to hurt.
- Can you handle more enquiries? A dentist with one chair and a full book has a capacity problem, not a marketing problem. More leads makes it worse.
- Does your site convert the traffic you already have? Check Search Console for the last 90 days. If you're getting 400 clicks a month and closing nobody, adding 400 more changes nothing. Fix the page, the price clarity and the phone number before you buy reach.
- Can you fund twelve months? SEO compounds. Three months of retainer followed by a cancellation is money set on fire — you pay for the setup and quit before the return arrives. If twelve months at your quoted rate isn't comfortable, don't start.
The margin maths that actually decides it
Here's the calculation almost nobody runs before signing. Take the monthly fee, divide by your gross margin per customer, and you get the number of extra customers you need every month just to break even on the fee — before you've made a rupee of profit on it.
We're using ₹40,000/month, which is the low end of a serious retainer in India and where our own smaller-site SEO starts. Three rules before you run it on your own numbers:
- Use gross margin, not revenue. A ₹50,000 order carrying ₹4,000 of margin is a ₹4,000 customer.
- Add lifetime value if it's genuinely repeat business. A gym member at ₹1,500/month for eighteen months is a ₹27,000 customer, not a ₹1,500 one.
- Then roughly double the break-even figure. You want the channel to pay for itself *and* return something, and a meaningful share of what SEO brings in won't close.
| Gross margin per customer | Extra customers needed / month | Realistic? |
|---|---|---|
| ₹500 — café, small retail basket | 80 | No. Fix footfall and repeat visits instead. |
| ₹2,000 — salon service, one month of tuition | 20 | Hard. Possible in a dense city, unlikely in year one. |
| ₹8,000 — dental treatment, annual service contract | 5 | Yes, for a clinic with spare capacity. |
| ₹25,000 — interior consult, legal matter | 1.6 | Comfortably. This is where retainers start earning. |
| ₹1,00,000+ — B2B contract, property deal | 1 every 2.5 months | Easily. One deal pays for the year. |
When your Google Business Profile is the whole job
If you serve customers from one address or one service area — a clinic, a studio, a workshop, a restaurant, a local practice — most of your winnable search traffic lives in the map pack, not the blue links. And the map pack responds to things you control directly, for free.
The local ranking inputs Google is open about are relevance, distance and prominence. You can't move distance. You can move the other two in an afternoon, and no agency does it better than an owner who actually knows the business.
Here's the uncomfortable bit for our industry: for a single-location business with a decent website, a fully-built Google Business Profile plus a steady review habit will out-perform the first six months of most ₹25,000 retainers. We'd rather you knew that from us.
- Primary category set precisely — "orthodontist", not "dentist", if that's what you actually are. This one field moves more than most on-page work.
- Every service and product listed, each with its own description. Most profiles leave this empty.
- Real photos, added monthly. Interior, exterior, team, work in progress.
- Hours correct, including holidays. A wrong "closed" costs you that click permanently.
- Q&A seeded with the questions you answer on the phone twenty times a week.
- Reviews: ask every satisfied customer, in person, with a short link. Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, without sounding like a legal department.
A 90-day plan you can run yourself
This is what we'd tell a single-location business to do instead of hiring us. Roughly four hours a week, no tools beyond Search Console, which is free.
Weeks 1–2 — claim and complete
- Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. Fill every field, including the ones that feel pointless.
- Set up Google Search Console and connect it to your site. This becomes your evidence file for everything that follows.
- Write down the baseline. Enquiries per month from search, right now.
Weeks 3–4 — make reviews a habit
- Generate your review short link and put it on the invoice, the WhatsApp follow-up, and a card at the counter.
- Ask in person at the moment of relief — after the treatment, after the delivery, after the fix. Not by email three days later.
- Reply to every review inside 48 hours, and name the service in the reply.
Weeks 5–8 — make the site do its job
- One page per service you actually sell, each answering: what it is, who it's for, what decides the cost, and what happens next.
- Phone number as a tap-to-call link on mobile, above the fold. WhatsApp too, if that's how your customers behave — and in India it usually is.
- Name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear. Same format, same suite number, same spelling.
- Compress your images. Most small business sites in India are slow because of one 4MB hero photo.
Weeks 9–12 — write the three pages people search for
- The price page. Even a range with the factors that move it. "Contact for pricing" loses to anyone who publishes a number.
- The comparison page — the choice your customer is genuinely agonising over between two options.
- The area page, but only if you truly serve multiple areas and can say something specific about each. Two honest pages beat fifteen templated ones.
- Then open Search Console: are you appearing for more distinct queries than in week one? That's the signal, and it moves before revenue does.
Four cheaper things that work first
Before a retainer, spend the money here. Each of these is a one-off or a fraction of the monthly cost, and each one removes a reason SEO would have failed anyway.
- A one-off technical audit and fix. A few days of a good freelancer's time, once, beats twelve months of a bad agency. See what an SEO audit is.
- One month of paid search. ₹20,000 on Google Ads tells you in three weeks what SEO takes six months to reveal: whether people search, whether they click, and whether they buy. If the ads don't convert, SEO on the same keywords wouldn't have either. Our performance marketing work starts at ₹40,000/mo, but a solo test costs less.
- Better photos and a booking flow that works. Unglamorous, and it lifts every channel you already have.
- A freelancer on a small monthly. Below roughly ₹40,000/month a good freelancer usually beats a cheap agency — fewer overheads, and you get the specialist rather than a junior. The trade-off is range. See agency vs freelancer.
The point where hiring stops being premature
There's a fairly clean line. Hire an agency when the free work has already produced something and you've run out of the ability to keep going — not when you're hoping someone else will start the fire for you.
In practice, four conditions have to be true at once:
- Your gross margin per customer clears roughly ₹10,000, or your repeat value does.
- Search Console already shows you appearing for queries you didn't pay for — proof the demand is real.
- You have the capacity to serve more customers this quarter.
- You can commit twelve months of budget without it hurting.