SEO – Organic Site Growth

No. The retainer runs month to month with no minimum commitment, starting at $1,500 a month. The goal is to justify the engagement through results every 30 days rather than hold you to a contract you cannot exit, and you can pause or stop whenever you need to. This is a deliberate business choice, not generosity. A twelve-month contract protects the agency, not the client, and it removes the pressure that keeps work honest. In practice it also changes what we report. Every action in the retainer is tied to something you can check yourself: a ranking, a measurable traffic change, or a lead. We measured our own site the same way, tracking response time, schema output and citability month over month. If a month produces nothing you can verify, you should be free to leave, and you are.

Technical fixes typically show ranking movement within 2 to 4 weeks, because they do not depend on authority. They depend on what Google can crawl and parse. The compounding effect of content, authority and GEO work becomes clearly visible in the 3 to 6 month range. The distinction matters for your expectations. Fixing schema, page speed or internal linking is one-off work with a measurable result. Building authority is cumulative and cannot be bought faster. In practice we always start with the technical layer, because it is the cheapest to fix and the fastest to prove. For example, our own site answers in 0.46 seconds across 45 pages with no page builder anywhere in the codebase, and that baseline is what lets every later action actually register. For example, a target at difficulty 5 can move inside a month, while one at difficulty 30 will not, and we say which is which before you commit.

SEO targets rankings in Google’s traditional results. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, targets citations inside AI-generated answers on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. According to BrightEdge (2026), 48% of Google searches now show an AI-generated result. The practical difference is what gets measured. In SEO the unit is the position of a page; in GEO it is whether you appear as a source inside the answer. A search results page shows ten options and the user chooses. An AI answer names two or three and most people stop there. So the work differs: instead of competing for a position, you build a structure that lets an engine lift a whole passage and attribute it to you. We run both together, because the same technical foundation serves each. We report both surfaces separately every month, so you can see which channel is actually producing.

Yes, fully. We handle keyword and topic research, writing, editorial review and direct publishing to your site, all produced in your brand voice and reviewed before it goes live. You do not manage a brief queue. The research runs on Semrush data rather than on guesswork, and that distinction decides whether a page earns traffic at all. For example, we measured one site in 2026 where 7 pages out of 8 targeted in-house phrasing with no measurable demand, while the winnable term sat at difficulty 13. Correcting the target alone changed what those pages could reach. In practice this is the most common problem we find in new engagements: the pages are written in the language of the company instead of the language of the buyer. In practice we run the research before quoting, because a page aimed at a phrase with no demand cannot be rescued by better writing later.

A flexible retainer is an arrangement you can resize or stop at any point. You can increase scope before a product launch, scale down when priorities shift, or pause outright, with no penalty and no exit process. We measured this against the alternative before choosing it. There is one caveat worth knowing in advance. If the technical base of the site is not solid, organic investment spends money on a foundation that will not hold. A slow site, broken schema, or a build assembled inside a page builder will cap results regardless of content quality. For example, one site we audited loads 15 plugins on the front end, against the 5 that load on our own. In that case we say so before taking the retainer. It sounds like turning down revenue, and it is, but it prevents three months of work you will not see results from and will reasonably blame on the SEO.

We will tell you directly. Organic investment on a technically broken site produces far less than it should, so we typically recommend a build engagement first to establish clean code and solid Core Web Vitals, then growing organically on top of that. What “not technically solid” means in practice is measurable rather than vague. We check server response time, how many plugins load on the front end, whether a page builder is generating the markup, whether schema is present and linked, and whether AI crawlers are blocked. For example, when we audited a large recruitment site we measured its GEO readiness at 28% and its brand mention presence at 20%, and the causes were specific enough to fix in a list. We would rather lose the retainer than take money for organic work that a broken foundation will cancel out.