The first ninety days
Month one is diagnosis and the fixes that do not need permission. Technical audit, crawl issues, the sitemap, page speed, structured data, and the Business Profile if it is a local business. This month rarely moves rankings and always makes the later months possible.
Month two is the pages that already exist. Most sites have pages ranking on the second page for terms they could win, and improving them is faster than writing new ones. This is also when internal linking gets fixed, which is the cheapest ranking work there is and the most commonly skipped.
Month three is new content against researched queries, plus whatever the first two months revealed. By the end of it you should see movement in positions, though enquiries usually lag positions by another month or two.
We say ninety days because that is when the work becomes evaluable, not because it is finished. Anyone describing SEO as a three-month project is describing something else.
What we report, and what we refuse to report
We report positions for the terms agreed at the start, organic traffic, and enquiries attributed to search. Those three, in that order of increasing importance.
We do not report impressions as a headline metric, because impressions rise when you rank badly for more things. We do not report a proprietary score, because a number only we can calculate cannot be checked. And we do not report keyword counts, because ranking for four hundred terms nobody searches is not an achievement.
If the numbers are flat we say they are flat and explain what we think is happening. An agency that has never delivered bad news has either been extraordinarily lucky or is managing your perception rather than your rankings.
When you should not hire us for SEO
If you need customers this quarter. SEO does not work on that timescale and paid search does. We will tell you this on the call rather than sell you a retainer that disappoints in month two.
If your site is about to be rebuilt. Optimising a site that will be replaced wastes both the work and your money. Do the rebuild first, with SEO in the brief.
If the bottleneck is not traffic. If enquiries arrive and do not convert, more traffic multiplies the leak. That is a sales or site problem and it is cheaper to fix.
If you want guaranteed positions. Nobody controls the ranking algorithm, and any guarantee is either a misunderstanding or a sales tactic. We would rather lose the deal than make that promise.