What should a monthly SEO plan include & what shouldn't you pay for?
A monthly SEO plan should buy you work you can see: fixes to your site, new pages about the work you want more of and a report that ties it to inquiries. Some of what's sold as SEO does nothing, and Google warns against some of it by name.
SEO proposals tend to look alike. There's a list of deliverables, a monthly fee and a promise of more traffic. From the outside it's hard to tell which parts will bring you work.
Google publishes its own guide to hiring an SEO. It lists the useful services an SEO can provide and the warning signs to walk away from. This post turns that guide into a checklist for a B2B firm that wins most of its work from referrals and wants search to bring in more.
A good plan pays for fixes, pages and a clear report.
Google's list of useful SEO services includes a review of your site's content and structure, technical advice on things like hosting, redirects and error pages, writing content, keyword research and knowledge of specific markets. For a B2B firm, that comes down to five kinds of monthly work.
| Monthly work | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Technical checks and fixes | Reading Search Console for new errors, fixing broken pages and redirects, checking that new pages get indexed |
| New and better pages | Service pages, sector pages and case studies written from your project list |
| Your Google Business Profile | Current services and service areas, project photos and a steady flow of reviews |
| Links you earn | Listings with the associations you belong to, and links from suppliers, partners and clients who know your work |
| A report you can check | What was done, what changed in Google's own data and which inquiries came from search |
Most of the value is in the second row. Pages about the work you want more of are what buyers find and read.
Every page on the plan should match a search and a service.
"Four blog posts a month" isn't a plan until someone says what they're about. Ask for the list of pages for the next three months and the searches each one is meant for. Each page should tie to a service you sell, a sector you work in or a question your buyers ask before they hire.
Writing about technical work takes input from the people who do it. A good plan builds in a short call with your project leads each month, so the pages say things only your firm could say.
Links should come from people who know your work.
Links from other sites still count, and they're the part of SEO most open to abuse. Google's spam policies name buying or selling links for ranking as link spam, along with excessive link swaps and links made by automated services. Google's hiring guide adds that you should never have to link to an SEO.
The links worth having are the ones you'd get anyway if someone asked. Think of your trade association's member directory, the manufacturers you're certified with, an architect's page about a project you built or a local paper's story about a new facility. A plan should include asking for a few of those each month.
Some things sold as SEO aren't worth paying for.
| What's on offer | Why to skip it |
|---|---|
| Guaranteed rankings | Google says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking |
| A package of links every month | Buying links for ranking is against Google's spam policies |
| Submitting your site to thousands of search engines | Google calls this a typically useless exercise |
| Meta keywords | Google Search doesn't use them |
| Pages written to a word count or a keyword density | Google says length alone doesn't matter, and keyword stuffing is spam |
| A page for every town in your state with only the name changed | Google treats pages like this as doorways |
| A package that promises special treatment in Google's AI answers | Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode |
| Authority scores from SEO tools | Tool companies don't have access to Google's ranking data |
Every reason in that table comes from Google. The first and third are in the hiring guide above. Meta keywords, word counts and keyword stuffing are covered in the SEO Starter Guide. Doorway pages are in the spam policies. The AI point is from Google's page on AI features and your website, and the point about tools is from its guidance on third-party SEO tools.
AI answers do matter. The work that gets you into them is mostly the same work as SEO, plus making sure AI tools can get into your site. We cover it in how contractors, engineers and professional firms get named in AI answers, and our AI visibility page shows how AI tools read a site.
You should own the accounts and see every change.
Google's guide suggests two more checks. Ask the SEO whether they'll share every change they make to your site, with the reasoning behind it. And if they offer an audit, give them read access to Search Console only at that stage.
Take it one step further. Your Search Console account, your Google Business Profile and your analytics should be in your company's name, with the agency added as a user. If you part ways, the history stays with you.
Questions to ask before you sign.
These come partly from Google's guide and partly from what goes wrong for B2B firms:
- Can you show examples of work for firms like mine, and put me in touch with one?
- Do you follow Google Search Essentials?
- What results do you expect and by when? How will you measure them?
- Which pages will you publish or fix in the first three months?
- Who writes the pages, and how do you get the technical detail right?
- Will you tell me about every change you make to the site?
- Who owns the pages, accounts and data if we stop?
If the answers are vague, keep looking. What a plan like this costs is in how much SEO costs for a construction or engineering firm, and how long it takes to show results is in how long SEO takes for a B2B firm.
Our program starts from $1,499 a month.
Our SEO Growth Program is built for US firms in construction, engineering and other B2B trades. Each month's pages start from a short interview with you. AI tools draft them, Paul Whitelam checks every one and nothing goes live until you approve it. It starts from $1,499 a month. If you'd like to talk it through, book a call.