Search Marketing FAQ

Yes - every engagement has a named program lead who is your single point of contact for all communication, status, and decisions. Slack channel and bi-weekly Zoom standups are standard. The work team (specialists across SEO, PPC, content, dev) operates behind the program lead.

in Onboarding

Read-only or admin access varies by tool. Google Search Console: ownership-level for verification. Google Analytics: editor for goal/event setup, viewer afterward. Google Ads: admin (paused if not actively managing). CMS: editor or developer access depending on the work. We document everything granted and provide an offboarding checklist if engagement ends.

in Onboarding

Real work starts in week 1. Audit refresh, keyword strategy, and technical fixes begin immediately. Onboarding isn't a phase that delays delivery - it runs in parallel with live work.

in Onboarding

Month-to-month structure means cancellation requires no penalty - give notice by the end of a billing period and the next month doesn't bill. Pause is also supported (typically up to 60 days) for clients who need a temporary stop without ending the relationship. Offboarding includes a transition document so internal teams or new agencies can pick up cleanly.

in Onboarding

No - prices are quoted per engagement after the audit because the variables (keyword count, keyword difficulty, country coverage, scope of work) drive the price. Listing a generic price would either inflate small engagements or undersell large ones. The audit produces a fixed quote within 7 business days.

in Pricing & Contracts

For service programs (SEO, AEO, GEO, PPC), the practical floor is roughly $3K/month - below that, the program can't sustain meaningful work cadence. For Website Development, project minimums depend on scope (typical floor $25K). We don't take engagements that can't be staffed to deliver real outcomes.

in Pricing & Contracts

No setup fees for service programs (SEO, AEO, GEO, PPC) - month-1 fees include the audit refresh and ramp work. Website Development projects bill in milestones (discovery, design, development, launch) without a separate setup line.

in Pricing & Contracts

Retainer covers ongoing strategy, optimization work, monthly reporting, account management, and standard tooling. Separately billed: paid media spend (you pay platforms directly), content creation beyond standard cadence, custom dev work outside scope, paid asset purchases (stock photo, premium tools). The scope document specifies inclusions explicitly.

in Pricing & Contracts

Yes - scope adjustments take effect the following billing cycle. Common scale-up moments: post-audit when scope expands, after Q1 budgets unlock, when a launch needs concentrated push. Scale-down is equally supported. The month-to-month structure exists to allow this without contractual friction.

in Pricing & Contracts

Invoices issued by the 1st of each month, due by the 10th. Stripe-processed in USD by default. Non-USD billing supported for international clients (CAD, GBP, EUR, AUD). Net-30 terms available for enterprise clients on signed scope. All invoicing terms documented in the scope agreement.

in Pricing & Contracts

Technical SEO is the layer that lets search engines crawl, render, index, and serve your pages at all. Without it, the best content stays invisible. A small mistake (a robots.txt disallow, a broken canonical) can drop visibility to zero, as Ryanair learned losing 12 days of organic traffic to a single robots edit.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Crawlable means Googlebot and other search bots can actually reach your pages by following internal links or sitemap entries, with no server errors, robots.txt blocks, or rendering failures stopping them. If a page cannot be crawled, it cannot be indexed, cited by AI engines, or ranked. Crawlability is the floor of SEO.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Indexable means Google can store the page in its database after crawling and parsing it, making the page eligible to appear in search results. A page can be crawled but not indexed if it carries a noindex tag, returns a soft 404, duplicates another page, or fails Google's quality threshold.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Open Google Search Console, run the URL Inspection tool on a sample page, and check whether Google reports it as indexed or excluded. The Pages report surfaces site-wide crawl issues by reason (blocked by robots.txt, noindex, server error, redirect). Pair with a Screaming Frog or Sitebulb crawl to find what GSC misses.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Robots.txt blocks crawling, not indexing. A page disallowed in robots.txt can still appear in search results if other sites link to it, often with a generic snippet because Google could not read the page. To remove a page from the index, use a noindex meta tag and allow the crawl that reads it.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

An XML sitemap lists every URL you want search engines to crawl, including pages that internal links alone might not surface (orphaned pages, deep category pages, recent uploads). Submitting it via Search Console accelerates discovery, and Bing uses the lastmod timestamp to decide which pages to recrawl first after a content update.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Include every canonical, indexable URL that returns 200 and you want ranked. Exclude noindex, redirected, duplicate, and parameterized URLs. Use the ISO 8601 lastmod tag with timestamp so Bing and Google can prioritize recrawl of changed pages. Skip changefreq and priority; Bing ignores them and Google treats them as hints only.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

A canonical tag is an HTML link element in a page's head that tells search engines which URL is the primary version of that content. The format is `<link rel='canonical' href='https://example.com/page'/>`. It's how you stop near-duplicate URLs (filters, parameters, www vs non-www) from competing for the same ranking signals.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Canonical tags consolidate ranking signals (links, internal links, content quality) onto one URL when multiple URLs serve similar content. Google indexes only the canonical version, freeing crawl budget and preventing cannibalization. The tag is a hint, not a directive; Google can override it if your signals contradict the declared canonical.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Redirects are server instructions that send a user (or Googlebot) from a requested URL to a different URL. The 3xx HTTP family includes 301 (permanent), 302 (temporary), 307 (temporary, preserves method), and 308 (permanent, preserves method). For SEO, default to 301 for permanent moves and 302 only when the URL actually returns.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Each hop in a redirect chain costs crawl budget and slowly leaks PageRank, even though Google says 301s now pass full equity per hop. On large sites, chains drain Googlebot's daily budget away from new content. Aim for one direct 301 from old URL to final destination. Flatten any chain over two hops.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Site speed is a Core Web Vitals ranking signal through LCP, INP, and CLS. Slow pages also degrade crawl budget: Googlebot pulls back when servers are slow, so fewer pages get crawled per visit. Faster pages get crawled more aggressively, indexed faster, and earn higher engagement signals that reinforce ranking over time.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

Run a crawler (Semrush Site Audit, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb) to surface broken links, redirect chains, missing canonicals, duplicate titles, and slow pages. Cross-check Search Console's Pages report for indexing issues Google specifically flagged. Use the URL Inspection tool to verify status for high-value pages. Work through issues by severity, errors first.

in Technical SEO Deep Dive

International SEO is the practice of optimizing a website so search engines serve the right country and language version to the right user. It combines hreflang annotations, geotargeting in Search Console, localized content per market, and URL structure (ccTLD, subdirectory, or subdomain) so each market's version ranks for that market's searches.

in International SEO