Before you hire anyone
What SEO can do,
and what it cannot
The industry sells guarantees it cannot keep. This page is what we tell every client before taking their money — and it is part of every proposal we send, so you can hold us to it.
The honest timeline
Months, not weeks — and the first chart goes down
Google gives a new or newly-fixed site a trial: it shows your pages for a few weeks, deep in the results, and watches whether anyone chooses them. Nobody clicks page six, so the impressions then fall to zero. We have watched this happen, dated, on sites we run ourselves. It looks like failure and it is the process working.
Months 1–2
The fixes land: indexing, speed, structured data, profiles. Search engines recrawl, trial, and withdraw. Rankings move little and can dip. Anyone promising results in this window is describing luck.
Months 3–6
Real queries start surfacing on pages two and three. This is where links and mentions decide things: search engines ration attention by reputation, and reputation is earned, not submitted.
Month 6 onward
The compounding phase, and the only honest reason to pay for this monthly: ads stop the day you stop paying, while a page that ranks keeps working and gets cheaper the longer it runs.
In writing, before we start
Four promises we refuse to make
A number-one position
Nobody outside Google controls a ranking, and anyone guaranteeing one is guaranteeing something they do not own. We promise the work, the measurement and the honest reading of it.
A ranking by a date
Timelines above are typical, not contractual. A deadline attached to a position is how agencies end up buying links — which gets detected, and which can cost you the whole listing.
Beating a marketplace
When page one for a query is Zomato, Swiggy and a directory, the query wants a list, and a single business is not a list. We tell you to own your profile on those platforms instead of fighting them.
Traffic that cannot buy
Some queries are browsing, not buying — page one is Pinterest boards and design galleries. Ranking there brings visitors who were never shopping. We check the intent before we agree the target.
The occupancy check
We check whether page one is even available
Before agreeing any keyword, we fetch who actually holds its page one and classify every result. Marketplace slots cannot be taken by a single business. Google answering with its own pages cannot be outranked by anyone. What remains is the field you are really competing in — sometimes that is three positions, not ten.
We run this on our own keywords too, and we have walked away from terms we wanted because the check said no. A target that survives it goes in your plan with the evidence attached.
Keyword check
- QUERYchecked first
- PAGE ONE FETCHEDLIVE
- MARKETPLACE SLOTSCOUNTED
- GOOGLE-OWNED SLOTSCOUNTED
- REACHABLE POSITIONSWHAT IS LEFT
- VERDICTIN YOUR PLAN
Run before a target is agreed, never after.
The limits
Three things SEO cannot fix
What happens after the click
Search brings the visit. Reviews, photos, prices and the food decide the rest. If ratings are the problem, fixing search first is paying to show more people the problem.
A site nothing points to
Search engines ration crawling by reputation, and a site with no links or mentions waits at the back of the queue no matter how good the pages are. Directories, suppliers, press and partners fix this — some of that outreach only works coming from the owner.
A site that stands still
The audit names what to change. If the fixes never ship and the pages never grow, the report was a diagnosis without the treatment, and the numbers will say so.
What it earns you
The channel that compounds — and now feeds the assistants
Done patiently, search becomes the cheapest orders you get: no commission to a marketplace, no daily ad budget, customers who arrive already looking for what you sell. And when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini where to eat, the assistant answers from what search engines have indexed — a site that cannot be crawled cannot be recommended. We measure both, every morning, dated.
Send us your site tonight.
The crawler runs at six.
A real report back, dated and yours to keep, whether or not you hire us.