Our Difference
A Retainer Bills Either Way. Our Local SEO Doesn’t.
A standard SEO retainer bills the same amount every month, whether your rankings climb or your phone stays silent. Our performance-based plan runs the other way.
Your website comes with no fee, and we don’t send an invoice until real customers start calling, so if the SEO doesn’t pay off, the risk lands on us instead of you.
A typical retainer
What A Monthly SEO Retainer Buys You
SEO retainers follow much the same pattern wherever you look: you pay a set amount each month for a defined bundle of work.
There’s nothing dishonest about that. SEO takes ongoing work, and a retainer is a fair way to pay someone for their time. It does create a particular risk, though, and you carry it alone.
If the strategy works, you keep paying the fee you were already paying. If it doesn’t, you keep paying that same fee while you hunt for what went wrong.
Underneath it all sits an incentive problem. Once your payment clears every month regardless of outcome, the agency’s income stops depending on your results.
- Hours logged
- Tasks completed
- Content published
- Links built
- New customers from this work Not in the report
Reports built on hours logged and tasks completed are common, and they can be perfectly honest. What they rarely show is a straight line from that work to a new customer calling your business.
A retainer isn’t the wrong choice for every business. It does mean the businesses paying one carry a risk that doesn’t have to be theirs.
Our model
No Fee For The Site, Then Billed Per Lead
We built the opposite structure on purpose. On our performance-based plan, nothing is paid upfront: we build the website, fix up your Google Business Profile, put citations and backlinks in place and get your local SEO running, all before the first per-lead invoice.
None of that SEO setup is billed. The first SEO invoice arrives only once real customers reach out: a phone call, a text conversation or a form from someone who wants to hire you. It isn’t an introductory rate that quietly becomes a retainer after a few months, either. It’s how the relationship works for as long as you stay on it.
That single structural choice moves the risk of the SEO work from your side of the table to ours.
Month 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Retainer Billed every month
Performance Nothing Upfront, Billed Once Calls Arrive
Legend Invoice, results or not Website and build, no invoice Invoice, for verified leads
An illustration of twelve months: a retainer sends an invoice every month whatever happens, while performance pricing sends nothing for the website or during the build, and invoices only once verified calls start arriving.
The cost of getting your local SEO off the ground sits with us until it starts working. You pay for the SEO only once it produces results.
We’ll leave the billing mechanics to our process page, which covers how leads get counted, verified and invoiced in full. This page is about what the structure does to the relationship, and that’s the part to understand before you compare rates.
The incentive problem
Two Agencies, One Stalled Account
Picture two versions of the same agency, working the same account.
Only One Keeps Pushing When The Account Stalls
Ask which one keeps refining a stalled strategy rather than reporting it and moving on to the next client. It’s the second one, every time, because its own income depends on it.
That’s the logic behind pay-on-performance pricing. You don’t have to trust that we’ll prioritize your account out of goodwill, because goodwill was never what kept us on task. Your bottom line was. When your results stall, so do ours, in the same month rather than eventually.
It’s also why we don’t accept every business that reaches out. Agreeing to this structure in a market we hadn’t checked would mean months of unpaid work on something we already suspected wouldn’t rank. We’d rather turn down a project than carry a risk we don’t believe in.
The full story of how this model began lives on our about page. In short, the person behind it spent years watching skilled tradespeople stand idle for lack of a ringing phone, never for lack of skill. This pricing model takes aim at that same problem from the marketing side.
Paid regardless
One Earns On The First Of The Month, No Matter What
Paid on results
The Other Earns Nothing Until A Real Customer Calls
Why the second one, every time
- Its own income depends on your results
- Goodwill was never the mechanism; your bottom line was
- When your results stall, so do ours, the same month
The logic behind the number
Two Tests Set Your Rate. The Lower One Wins.
Before any work starts, we set one number: what a single verified lead costs you, whether it’s a call, a text or a form submission. Two tests produce that number. Both run for every client, and the lower result becomes your rate.
−15%
vs. Local Services Ads
Test one: we come in at least this far under what the same lead costs through Google’s program.
≤15%
of average job value
Test two: your rate can never exceed this share of what an average job is worth.
1
Rate, set once
Agreed before any work begins, and it doesn’t move without a new conversation.
Two Tests, One Number
The first test uses Google’s Local Services Ads as the yardstick: we guarantee our rate comes in at least 15 percent below what the same lead would cost you through that program. Google already shows what businesses in your industry pay per lead there, so we’re undercutting a real benchmark, not a figure we invented.
The second test caps your rate at no more than 15 percent of your average job value, and whichever test gives the lower number sets your price. The word “average” is doing real work there, and it’s worth explaining why.
Does the Local Services Ads test come out lower?
The benchmark is lower Your rate is at least 15 percent under what Google’s Local Services Ads charge for the same lead, and already below the job-value cap.
The cap is lower Your rate is no more than 15 percent of your average job value, which comes in even lower than the Local Services Ads test.
One rate, set once: the lower of the two
Take an electrician. One call might be an elderly homeowner who needs a breaker flipped back on, a small job closer to a service-call minimum than a project. The next might be a contractor lining up a $3,000 panel rough-in for a new build. Price every lead off that second call and the small jobs pay far more than their share. Price every lead off the first, and the rough-in becomes a bargain that ignores what landing it was worth.
Pricing off the average solves both problems at once.
Why the average, not the job
- A breaker flip and a $3,000 rough-in cost the same to acquire.
- Pricing off the big job would punish the small ones.
- Pricing off the small job would undercharge the big ones.
So the breaker-flip call and the panel rough-in carry the same lead price, even though one job pays many times more than the other. On small jobs, that keeps your cost per lead from eating an outsized share of the work. On larger ones, you pay well below what the lead was worth to you. Across a mix of small and large calls over sixty or ninety days, the average keeps the number fair in both directions, including the one that doesn’t favour us.
The rest of the pricing story lives elsewhere. How a phone call bills differently from a text or a form, and how invoicing and disputes work, are covered on our lead billing and process pages, and your exact rate is set on your evaluation call. This page is about the logic behind the number, because a rate only feels fair once you know why it landed where it did.
Included For As Long As You’re With Us
- New services get added
- Photos go stale
- A new crew member joins
Staying current
We Stay Involved As Your Business Changes
A website and Google Business Profile built at the start won’t match a growing business forever. You add services. Photos age. A new crew member joins, and the business behind the site looks different from how it did on day one.
As your partner, we’ll update any part of the online presence we built for you, whether we spot the change first or you ask for it. A new service worth advertising, fresh photos, new hours, a change in your crew: tell us and we’ll handle it as part of the partnership, not as a separately billed project, for as long as you’re with us.
We’d rather stay close to how your business is changing than build something once and check in only at renewal time. A local SEO presence that reflects last year’s business stops working for this year’s, and letting it drift out of date helps neither of us.
This is less a line-item promise than the plain result of how the incentives already work. We stay invested in keeping your presence current for the same reason we invested in building it.
Side by side
Retainer Vs. Performance, Side By Side
A few questions cut through most of the noise between these two ways of paying for local SEO.
01 Who Carries The Risk If The Strategy Doesn’t Work?
RetainerYou do. The fee is due either way.
PerformanceWe do. Nothing is owed, website included, until the strategy is working.
02 What Happens To The Relationship Once You’ve Signed?
RetainerThe drive to keep pushing tends to soften once each month’s invoice clears.
PerformanceIt holds, because no SEO invoice goes out until your phone has rung.
03 What Does Month Twelve Look Like?
RetainerThe same bill as month one, whether your rankings climbed or stalled back in month four.
PerformanceWe only earn in month twelve if the leads are still coming in.
04 How Locked In Are You If It Isn’t Working?
RetainerIt keeps billing until you cancel it yourself, often well after you’ve noticed the results aren’t there.
PerformanceThe exit is set before you sign: fewer than ten verified leads in a guarantee window that runs 90 days or more, and you walk away with everything we built, owing nothing for the website or the work behind it.
Four Places To Go From Here
A retainer asks you to trust that the work is working. We built a structure that removes the need: no fee for the website, and nothing invoiced until real customers are already calling.
For the exact mechanics in your market, our process page walks through every step and the contract terms in full, and our lead billing page shows what gets counted and billed.
- 01 How It Works Evaluation, billing, guarantee and contract terms in full
- 02 Local SEO What gets built, and how leads are billed
- 03 Website Design One flat fee for the site and your Google Business Profile, if SEO was never the question
- 04 Talk it through Same-day reply, no obligation
Next step
Have Your Market Checked Before You Commit
Book a free evaluation call, or send us a text, and we’ll give you a straight answer on whether your market qualifies.
Questions
Hard Questions About Performance Pricing
The same thing that stops any business from cutting corners on work its income depends on. Our SEO doesn’t invoice until a real customer calls, so a shortcut costs us directly. One that hurts your rankings hurts our revenue in the same month, which deters it far more than a client noticing months later and cancelling a retainer.
It’s a different kind of cost, not automatically a bigger one. A retainer bills a fixed amount every month regardless of results, including the months when nothing improves. Our rate comes from two tests set before we start: 15 percent below your market’s Local Services Ads benchmark, or 15 percent of your average job value, whichever is lower. What you pay stays tied to what you get.
Because we’re selective about which businesses and markets we offer it to. We only use this structure where we’ve checked the numbers (your domain’s current standing, the competition, local search volume) and believe we can deliver. Turning down a poor fit protects our business as much as it protects yours.
Yes. Coming from a retainer elsewhere changes nothing about how we work. We usually build from scratch, whatever you have now, and the same evaluation and pricing rules apply whether you’re switching agencies or hiring one for the first time.
In practice, it covers the small, ongoing updates that keep a website and Google Business Profile in step with a growing business: new services, new photos, current hours. Anything big enough to be its own project gets talked through on a call, the same way any major change would.