You're not buying deliverables.
You're buying a decision-maker.
$6,000 a month. Three clients at a time. No checklist, because your site isn’t the same as anyone else’s.
The problem with retainers
A fixed list can't respond to what it finds.
Most agencies sell a monthly checklist. Four blog posts, eight links, one report. The same list for every client, because a list is easy to sell and easy to staff.
The right move in month one is almost never the right move in month five. If your technical foundation is broken, content is wasted money. Once it’s fixed, content might be the only thing that matters. A fixed list can’t respond to that. It isn’t designed to.
So there’s no list here. There’s a priority order, set by the audit, revised every quarter, and worked from the top down.
Capacity
Why three.
The product is my judgment applied to your site. Judgment doesn’t survive being spread thin — the moment I’m running twenty accounts, I’m running a checklist, because that’s the only thing that scales.
So: three. When the seats are full, they’re full. The audit stays open, and a lot of people take it to their own team or their own agency.
No surprises
How we’ll actually work together.
Most agencies won’t tell you this until after you’ve signed. Here it is up front.
One channel: email
No text, no WhatsApp, no shared Slack. It keeps the thinking in one place and the record searchable, which serves you more than it serves me.
One business day
That’s my response window on email, and it’s a promise rather than a restriction. You’ll never wonder whether I saw it.
One call a month
Forty-five minutes, the same date every month, booked for the whole year when you start. It’s the pressure valve that makes email deferral reasonable.
One shared folder
The audit, the plan, every report, and a living priority list with statuses. You can see what I’m doing at any hour without asking me.
One report a month
Written by me, not exported from a dashboard. Four sections, the same every time: what I did, what it moved, what’s next, what I need from you.
What I need from you
Analytics and Search Console access. Call-tracking access — and if you don’t have call tracking, installing it is item one, before any SEO work, because half your conversions are phone calls and invisible conversions can’t be proved.
CMS access or a named developer. And sign-off when something needs your decision.
I’ll say this plainly: the work stalls without these, and the most common reason an engagement underperforms is access that took six weeks to arrive.
What results actually look like
Months one to three usually show leading indicators only — indexation, impressions, average position on target clusters. Not revenue.
Month two is when clients panic. I’m telling you now so that when it’s quiet, you’ll remember it was predicted.
Real movement in revenue and qualified leads generally lands between month four and month eight. I’ll give you a specific range after the audit. Anyone giving you one before is guessing.
Billing
One number. One line on the invoice.
$6,000, monthly.
You’ll get extraordinary detail about what I did. You will never get a line item that says ‘$50 per article,’ because I’m not selling you articles — and the moment a price sits next to a deliverable, you’ll start optimizing the line items, which is exactly the job you hired me to do.
Two exceptions, both stated plainly: pass-through costs (paid placements, tools bought in your name, a subcontracted developer) billed at cost with no markup, and separate projects like a full rebuild or a platform migration, quoted on their own.
Commitment: ninety days, then month to month. SEO doesn’t prove itself in three weeks. But if I haven’t earned month four, you should leave.
Every engagement starts with the audit.
I don’t take on ongoing work for a site I haven’t diagnosed. It would make me exactly the thing I’m arguing against.