We don't publish fixed tiers.
Here's why — and what an actual proposal looks like.

We have no minimum engagement length contractually. Every engagement is month-to-month with a 30-day notice clause. We say this honestly even though shorter engagements rarely produce SEO results — most categories need 6 to 12 months for organic traffic to compound meaningfully, and we'll baseline that timeline expectation on the discovery call rather than burying it in a 12-month lock-in clause. About 92% of clients stay past month 12 voluntarily because the work is producing; the few that leave earlier usually do so because their funding situation changed, not because the work didn't perform. We'd rather earn the renewal each month than trap a client in a contract.

Because the work isn't fixed and pretending it is would mis-serve the client. A $1.5M local accounting firm in a single city has a fundamentally different SEO scope than a $12M multi-state ecommerce brand with 8,000 product pages — same retainer dollar amount produces wildly different outcomes for those two businesses. Fixed-tier pricing pages exist primarily to make the buying decision feel easier, not to scope the work correctly. We publish ranges and engagement archetypes here, then tighten them on the discovery call once we understand your actual situation. The honest version: fixed tiers help the agency's marketing funnel more than they help the client's outcome.

Seven things we treat as commodity components included in every retainer regardless of tier. Senior strategy review (monthly, conducted by Joel House — author of The Growth Architecture and AI for Revenue, both on Barnes & Noble). Weekly performance reporting with real metrics, not vanity dashboard screenshots. Technical SEO and schema retrofit (we run a @graph schema upgrade as standard practice, not as an upsell). Monthly content production (allocation varies by tier; high-velocity overflow scoped separately). Active link acquisition with a transparent target list, not opaque PBN credits. AI search optimization via Mention Layer baseline tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews — included at no separate fee. And quarterly strategic planning sessions where we re-baseline targets against actual performance.

Five categories. High-volume content production beyond the included monthly allocation (we'll quote a per-piece rate transparently rather than building it into a padded retainer). Migration or re-platform projects (typically a discrete project quote with a fixed scope and timeline, not folded into ongoing fees). Site rebuild or significant development work (rare, but when needed it's a separate engagement scope rather than hidden inside SEO retainer hours). Original-data research projects (the V2026 Ranking Study we ran for our own positioning is the template — these are quoted as discrete deliverables when in scope). And multi-language or international expansion projects (different working scope, different cost structure, scoped as their own engagement).

Four scenarios prompt a formal re-scope conversation. First — meaningful expansion of the keyword footprint (you launch a new vertical, enter a new geographic market, or acquire another business). Second — the rate of content production needs to increase to compete (we'd rather flag this and quote the additional scope than under-deliver against an unchanged retainer). Third — a discrete project comes into scope (migration, rebuild, original research) that warrants its own engagement layer. Fourth — performance is materially exceeding or under-delivering against the baseline math we set at engagement start, and we need to re-plan. We don't quietly increase scope to justify a larger retainer; if a re-scope is warranted, we'd rather have the explicit conversation.

No, and any agency that does is either hiding the fine print or operating outside Google's terms of service. Search rankings depend on factors outside any agency's control — competitor moves, algorithm updates, your own product changes, market shifts. What we do guarantee is the work itself. We commit to specific deliverables (technical fixes shipped, content pieces published, links acquired against named targets, schema implementations completed). We baseline ROI math at engagement start (cost per organic conversion, payback period assumption) and report against it monthly. If the math meaningfully under-delivers against our own baseline projection for two consecutive quarters, we'll either re-scope at no additional fee or release you from the engagement. That's a stronger commitment than a 'we guarantee page-one rankings' clause that means nothing in practice.

Strategy is Joel personally on every engagement. The monthly senior review, the quarterly planning session, the discovery call, the proposal, the engagement architecture — Joel is the operator on those. Execution work (content production, link outreach, technical implementation, reporting builds) runs through the team Joel built across the AU and US offices, supervised by Joel and reviewed before anything ships to the client. This is the model that lets us serve $1M to $15M+ revenue businesses at professional-tier pricing — Joel's hours are the bottleneck, so we route them to where senior judgment actually changes the outcome and route execution to a team built specifically to ship it. The team has produced work for 300+ businesses across $96M+ in attributable client revenue. You'll see Joel's name on the strategy work, not a junior account manager's.

The retainer covers the included monthly allocation. If a month requires content production beyond that allocation, we'll quote the overflow before producing the work — never after. Three patterns we explicitly avoid: surprise line items on the next invoice, retroactive 'we did extra work, here's the bill' invoices, and vague 'additional services' charges without itemised scope. The mechanic: if mid-month it becomes clear the work scope is going to exceed the included allocation, you get a written note with the additional scope and the additional cost, you approve or decline, and we proceed accordingly. Same applies to link acquisition (target list is shared and approved before outreach), technical implementation (development work outside retainer scope is quoted separately), and any project work that emerges from the ongoing engagement. The principle: no surprises on the invoice.