01
What counts as success?
If the answer is rankings and traffic, ask the follow-up: how many enquiries did that bring? If the scorecard never reaches enquiries, any amount of effort can be called a result.
Home/SEO company
Choosing the SEO company
matters more than the SEO.
Choose wrong and the money is gone, the rankings have not moved, and six months are gone with them. This page lays out how we work, and the questions to ask — they work just as well on the next agency.
Why this is hard to judge
In SEO, the people doing the work and the people telling stories look identical from outside
You can see whether a contractor did a good job. SEO you cannot. What arrives is a deck of charts, and from outside a good one and a useless one look the same. By the time you notice, six months are gone.
The hard part is not spotting who is better. It is spotting who is doing anything at all. The questions below work on us, and they work on whoever else you are talking to.
- Reports full of "impressions are up" and nothing about calls or forms
- A promise of "guaranteed #1" — nobody can guarantee anything with Google
- No straight answer about what was actually done this month
- Accounts held in their name, so you leave with nothing if you switch
How to judge
Ask these four questions out loud
The ones who cannot answer have told you what you needed to know.
02
What did you do this month?
They should be able to name the pages changed, the content written, the technical issues fixed. No specifics usually means no work.
03
Whose name is on the accounts?
Business Profile, Search Console and ad accounts should be yours, with access granted to them. The other way round, you walk away empty-handed.
04
How long until it works?
The honest answer is three to six months for a trend. Anyone saying "page one in two weeks" is either lying or planning to use tactics that get you penalised.
How we work
We do one thing: make sure people nearby can find you
We do not chase national head terms and we do not run e-commerce networks. We work with New York local businesses — clinics, law firms, restaurants, contractors, salons. Their customers are within a few miles, and that game is nothing like national SEO.
So we do not watch "what position are we". We watch "can someone nearby find you". Those are different questions: you can rank first standing in your own shop and be invisible three blocks away.
- Measured on cost per enquiry, not on impressions
- Monthly reports in plain language: what we did, what moved, what is next
- Every account stays in your name and you can take it back any time
- Chinese, English and Spanish, so you reach both communities
Process
How we work
Five steps, repeated every quarter.
Discover
Your customers, your margins, your competitors and what is already working.
Strategize
A written plan: channels, priorities, timelines and what success looks like.
Build
Website, profiles, tracking and content — the assets everything else depends on.
Grow
SEO, GEO, Maps, social and ads running together toward the same goal.
Optimize
Monthly review of what produced enquiries, and where the next gain is.
FAQ
About hiring an SEO company
Can you guarantee the top spot?
No, and neither can anyone else. Google does not publish its ranking rules and they change constantly. Any "guaranteed #1" is a sales line. What we can guarantee is that you see exactly what was done and what moved, every month.
How long before it works?
For a local business, roughly three months to see a trend and six to see enquiry volume change. Faster if your profile and site are already in decent shape, slower if you are starting from nothing.
How long is the contract?
No long lock-in. SEO does need time to compound, but that is not a reason to trap a client. If the work is good you will stay.
How is this different from a cheap online package?
Mainly whether there is anyone to talk to when something goes wrong. Cheap packages are usually tools run in bulk, nobody owns the outcome, and the accounts are often not yours.
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