SEO
SEO that ranks you for the searches that end in revenue.
Technical foundation, pages that match real commercial intent, and a measurement setup that ties rankings to booked work rather than to a screenshot of a traffic graph.
SEO is three jobs that get bundled under one word: making the site technically crawlable and fast, making each page unambiguously about one commercial intent, and earning enough external credibility that Google trusts the domain to answer that intent.
Most small business sites fail on the second job. They have a homepage, a contact page, and a services page listing eight things, which means there is no single page Google can rank for any of the eight. The fix is architectural, not cosmetic.
The failure mode we see most
A business offers seven services across three cities. Its website has four pages. Every one of those twenty-one commercial intents is competing for space on a single services page, and none of them wins, because the page cannot be simultaneously the best answer for emergency plumber Renton and water heater installation Kent.
This is not a content volume problem. It is a mapping problem. Each distinct thing you want to be found for needs a page that exists to serve it, with a title, a heading, body copy, and schema that all agree on what that page is about. Get the mapping right and a fifteen-page site outperforms a hundred-page site with no architecture.
Technical foundation
Technical SEO is unglamorous and mostly binary: either the site can be crawled and indexed cleanly or it cannot. We run a full crawl and work through what it surfaces.
- Indexability. Pages blocked by robots.txt or noindex that should be indexable, and the reverse: staging pages, filter permutations, and placeholder content that should never have been crawlable.
- Duplicate URL resolution. Trailing slashes,
.htmlextensions, www and non-www, HTTP and HTTPS, uppercase variants. Each unresolved pair splits signal across two URLs. We standardize on one form and 301 the rest. - Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift on mobile, which is the crawl that counts. Mobile is where most sites fail and where most reports quietly show desktop numbers instead.
- Structured data. Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, and Article where relevant, implemented as a connected graph rather than disconnected blocks, so search engines can resolve the relationships between entities.
- Internal linking. Every page that matters should receive three to five internal links from relevant pages. Orphaned pages do not rank, no matter how good the content is.
Keyword strategy, done with data
We do not guess volumes and we do not present a keyword list without one. Terms go through Keyword Planner and a second source before priority is locked, because the intuitive ordering is wrong often enough to matter. The output is a mapping document: every target keyword assigned to exactly one page, with the intent classified as informational, commercial, or transactional, so we never have two pages competing for the same query.
Content that earns its position
The bar for publishing is that the page answers a real query better than whatever ranks for it today. In practice that means specificity: actual numbers, actual process, actual constraints. A page about SEO pricing that gives ranges beats one that says it depends on your goals, because the first one answers the question the searcher asked.
It also means structure. Direct answers near the top, question-shaped headings, and FAQ blocks are what get extracted into AI Overviews and cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity. That is increasingly where discovery happens, and it is covered in more depth on our AI search optimization page and in our guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT.
What you get monthly
On-page optimization on two to three pages, one to two new content pieces, technical monitoring, internal link maintenance, and a written performance review. Not a dashboard export with no interpretation, but a read on what moved, what did not, and what changes next month as a result.
How it runs
The first ninety days.
Baseline and access
Search Console as a domain property rather than a URL prefix, GA4 with conversion events defined, call tracking, and a full crawl. We capture the starting position before anything changes so improvement is provable.
Technical remediation
Indexability, duplicate URLs, redirects, Core Web Vitals, structured data. Everything that blocks ranking regardless of content quality gets cleared first.
Keyword mapping
Volume data pulled, intent classified, every target term assigned to exactly one page. Gaps in the page architecture become the content roadmap.
Page build and optimization
New pages for unserved commercial intents, rewrites for pages targeting the wrong thing, and an internal linking pass so nothing is orphaned.
Measure and iterate
Monthly review against the baseline. Impressions and position first, sessions second, conversions third. The strategy changes when the data says it should.
Questions
Straight answers.
How much does SEO cost for a small business in the Seattle area?
Across the Puget Sound market, most agencies charge between $750 and $3,000 a month for a small local business, with one-time technical and foundation work billed separately on top. Multi-location businesses and competitive commercial categories run higher.
What is worth comparing is hours and scope rather than the headline number, because two proposals can carry identical bullet points and very different amounts of work behind them. Ask any agency how many hours a month you are buying and which specific tasks happen in them.
We quote after looking at your site, your category and your competition, not from a package sheet.
What is the difference between SEO and local SEO?
SEO targets the standard organic results. Local SEO targets the map results and the localized organic results, and it runs on a partly different set of signals: Google Business Profile, proximity, reviews, citations. A Renton restaurant needs local SEO first and traditional SEO second. A software company selling nationally needs the reverse. Most businesses in the Seattle area need both, weighted toward local.
For businesses inside the city, the local side of this is covered in more detail on our SEO in Renton page.
Do I need to publish blog posts to rank?
Not necessarily, and volume for its own sake is a common waste. What you need is a page for every distinct commercial intent you want to serve. If you offer eight services in three cities, you need pages that map to those intents, not twenty-four thin ones and not a weekly post about industry news nobody searched for.
Content earns its place when it targets a query someone actually types and answers it better than the page currently ranking. That is a much smaller set of pages than most content calendars assume.
How do you measure whether SEO is working?
Three layers. Leading indicators: impressions and average position in Google Search Console, which move first. Middle: qualified organic sessions and rankings for the specific commercial keywords we agreed to target. Trailing: form submissions, tracked calls, and booked revenue attributed to organic.
We set the target keywords and the conversion definitions before work starts, so there is no retroactive redefinition of success. If the trailing numbers do not move by month six, the strategy was wrong and we say so.
Will you guarantee a number one ranking?
No, and neither should anyone else. Nobody controls Google's ranking systems, and a guarantee usually means the agency intends to target a keyword so obscure that ranking for it is trivial and worthless. What we will commit to is a defined scope of work, a named set of target keywords, a measurement baseline, and a monthly written account of what was done and what moved.
Want to know what it would take to rank in your market?
Book a free strategy call →