The four things every SEO agency actually does
Strip away the dashboards and the decks, and SEO work falls into four buckets. Every legitimate agency does all four. The ones that only do one charge like they do all four.
Here's what each one means in practice, and roughly where the hours go on a typical ₹75,000/month engagement.
| The work | What it actually means | Share of hours |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | Crawling, indexing, site speed, Core Web Vitals, schema, redirects, duplicate URLs. The plumbing that caps everything else. | 20–30% up front, ~10% after |
| Content | Keyword research, pillar pages, cluster articles, refreshing pages that are slipping, rewriting pages that never ranked. | 40–50% |
| Links & PR | Earning links from real sites — digital PR, data studies, expert commentary, partnerships. Not buying them. | 20–30% |
| Reporting & strategy | Tracking the number that matters, telling you why it moved, deciding what happens next month. | ~10% |
The first 90 days, week by week
Almost every agency runs some version of this sequence. The names change, the order rarely does — because each stage genuinely depends on the one before it. You can't sensibly write 40 articles before you know which queries convert, and you can't rank any of them if the site takes nine seconds to load.
Weeks 1–2 — audit and baseline
A full technical crawl, an analytics and Search Console review, a competitor gap analysis, and keyword research mapped to the pages you already have. The output is a plan and a baseline — the number you'll be measured against.
This is the stage most clients undervalue and most agencies rush. Skip it and you spend six months optimising pages nobody searches for.
Weeks 3–6 — fix the foundation
Redirect chains, broken internal links, duplicate and thin pages, missing or wrong canonical tags, schema, page speed, mobile rendering. Unglamorous and frequently the single highest-ROI work in the whole engagement.
On an older site this stage alone often recovers traffic that was quietly lost in a past migration — no new content required.
Weeks 5–12 — content and links, on cadence
Content starts shipping while technical work finishes. Pillar pages first, then clusters around them, then internal links wiring the cluster together. Link work starts in parallel, because links take the longest to compound.
Cadence matters more than volume. Four solid articles a month for a year beats fifty in one quarter and silence after.
Day 90 — the first honest read
Ninety days is the earliest point at which you can fairly judge an SEO engagement. You should see movement in impressions and rankings for target queries, early traffic gains, and — on shorter sales cycles — the first leads.
You should not expect the full return yet. Anyone promising that in 90 days is either buying links or managing your expectations for a renewal they don't intend to earn.
How agencies charge, and what the money buys
Four pricing models dominate the Indian market. Each one changes the agency's incentives, which is the part worth paying attention to.
- ₹25,000–₹40,000/mo buys a small local site real progress, or a competitive site almost nothing. Below ₹25,000 you're funding a freelancer's part-time attention.
- ₹75,000–₹1,50,000/mo is where a serious multi-discipline team becomes viable for a competitive national keyword set.
- ₹3,00,000+/mo is enterprise: multiple markets, migrations, in-house coordination, and usually a dedicated pod.
| Model | Typical range | What it incentivises |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | ₹25,000–₹3,00,000 / mo | Long engagements. Good when the agency is honest, expensive when they coast. |
| Project / one-off | ₹50,000–₹5,00,000 | Shipping a defined deliverable. No incentive to care what happens after. |
| Hourly | ₹1,500–₹8,000 / hr | Hours. Rarely aligns with anything you care about. |
| Performance-linked | Base + bonus on results | Actual outcomes — but only if the metric is chosen honestly. |
Who's actually on your account
This is where the gap between agencies is widest, and where the pitch is least reliable. A typical SEO team has five roles. At a big agency you meet the first one and get the last one.
The people who win the pitch are very often not the people who do the work. It's the single most common complaint founders bring us about their previous agency.
- Account lead / strategist — owns the plan and the number. The person you should be able to name.
- Technical SEO — crawling, indexing, site speed, schema, migrations.
- Content team — researchers, writers, editors. Often the largest group.
- Link / digital PR — outreach, data stories, placements.
- Analyst — tracking, dashboards, attribution.
What a retainer actually buys — and the thing it usually doesn't
Here's the uncomfortable part. A standard SEO retainer buys capacity: a certain number of hours, a certain number of articles, a certain number of links. It does not buy an outcome. If the outcome doesn't arrive, the invoice arrives anyway.
That's not fraud, and it's not unusual — it's how most professional services are sold. But it explains why so many founders describe SEO as money that disappears. The agency did the work they promised. The work just didn't do anything.
The fix is to agree, in writing, on one number and one date before any work starts. Not traffic. Not rankings. Something that shows up in the business — qualified leads from organic search, or organic revenue.
We built the whole company around that idea: we freeze your trailing-90-day organic lead count on day one, and if we haven't beaten it in 90 days we keep working free until we do. It's why we only take three clients a month — you can't carry that risk at volume. See how the guarantee works.
How to tell whether it's working before the contract ends
SEO is slow, which makes it easy to hide behind. These are the leading indicators that tell you the truth well before the revenue does — check them monthly.
- Impressions for your target queries in Search Console. This moves first, often within 4–6 weeks. Flat impressions at month three is a real warning sign.
- Average position for the specific keywords in your plan — not a vanity average across every query you accidentally rank for.
- Indexed page count versus published page count. If you publish 20 pages and 6 get indexed, something is broken and content volume won't fix it.
- Referring domains, monthly. Slow and steady is healthy. A sudden spike of 400 usually means somebody bought links with your domain.
- Qualified leads from organic, tracked in your CRM, not your analytics. This is the only one that pays salaries.
Red flags worth walking away from
Some of these are outright scams. Most are just misaligned incentives that will cost you a year.
- Guaranteed #1 rankings. Nobody controls Google's index. Google's own guidelines call this out. A guarantee against *your own baseline* is honest; a guarantee of a position is not.
- No baseline. If nobody wrote down where you started, nobody can prove you moved.
- Reporting that leads with traffic. Traffic is easy to inflate with irrelevant queries. Leads are not.
- Twelve-month lock-in with a 90-day notice period. Long contracts protect the agency's revenue, not your results.
- Vague link building. Ask where the links come from. "Our network" means a private blog network, and it's a penalty waiting to land.
- You never meet the people doing the work. See above.