Side by side
| A traditional SEO agency | FiveStarGuard | |
|---|---|---|
| Contract | 6 or 12 months, signed up front | None. Stop any month. |
| What you pay for | Time. Hours worked, reports sent. | Ranked pages. Nothing else. |
| If nothing ranks | You still pay the full monthly fee | You pay the $1,000 build and nothing more |
| If a page drops off page one | You still pay the full monthly fee | That page comes off your bill |
| Who checks the rank | Their dashboard, their numbers | Your Google Search Console, your login |
| Who writes the content | Often a tool, sometimes a person | A person. Every page. |
| What arrives each month | A PDF of charts | A page you can open, read, and send a customer to |
Why SEO has a bad name
Read what business owners say about SEO agencies and the same stories come up.
"Five months in, seven pages were indexed." Not seven pages ranking. Seven pages Google had even picked up. The work was billed. The pages were not there.
"Thousands a month to fix my headings." Work worth about a day, billed monthly, forever.
"Every report says the same thing." Traffic is up. Impressions are up. Nobody can name one customer who came from it.
Here is the honest version. Those agencies are not all crooks. They are paid by the month, so the incentive is to keep the month going. Nothing in the deal makes them ship a page.
We changed the deal. We get paid in the months a page holds page one and earns a click. That is the only lever we have, so we pull it. If we are slow, you save money. If we are wrong about a page, you do not pay for it.
What ranked pages actually do
We took a local service business from 0 to 6,880 organic clicks in 7 months. 71.9% of those came from non-brand search, meaning people who had never heard of them.
Non-brand is the number to watch. Brand search is people who already knew the name, which is your existing customers finding you. Non-brand search is new people searching for the service, landing on a page, and calling.
Most agency reports lead with total traffic, because total traffic includes everyone who already knew you. Ask yours for the non-brand split. It is one filter in Search Console.
See what you are missing before you decide anything
Send us your site and your main town. We will show you how many of your pages Google has actually indexed and which nearby towns you have no page for.
Get My Free 2-Minute Diagnostic It's free. No card, no call, no contract.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from a normal monthly SEO contract?
Most SEO companies charge a fixed monthly fee whether your pages rank or not. We charge $500 to start and $500 when your pages are live, then from $100 per page per month, less as more pages rank, and only for the months that page holds page one (a top-ten organic result — sponsored placements do not count) and earns at least one click in your own Google Search Console.
What happens if nothing ranks?
You have paid the $1,000 build and nothing more. There is no monthly charge for a page that has not reached page one.
Do you guarantee page one?
No, and you should walk away from anyone who does. Nobody controls Google's rankings. What we control is our own billing, which is why we only charge for pages that get there.
Who owns the pages if I leave?
You do. They are on your site, in your sitemap, written for your towns.
Is there a contract?
No. There is nothing to cancel and no minimum term.