paying £420/mo for SEO, told it's "not getting worse"

roichaser

"Not getting worse" is not a deliverable. It's an invoice.

A colleague of mine runs a small physio clinic and asked me to sanity check his SEO setup. Two years with a guy who delivered nothing visible, then a new one about seven months ago at £420 a month. Since then: flat traffic, flat bookings, flat visibility. When pushed, the current guy's whole defense is "well, it's not getting worse."

I do marketing for a living and that line would get a lead gen vendor of mine axed mid-call. my spicy take though: the usual "SEO takes years, be patient" excuse holds up differently for a local physio. This is maps, Google Business Profile, reviews, service pages. Seven months of zero signal is a red flag, not a waiting game.

The catch is the clinic is steady and busy, so there's no fire. And my colleague is hands-off by nature, never sets targets, never checks the scoreboard. Which makes it genuinely hard to tell if he's being conned.

So what should expectations actually look like at £420 a month? If he finds someone new, should he be demanding something like "increase organic contacts by X% in 90 days"? And how do you judge what's fair when you don't know enough about SEO to smell nonsense?

digitalnomad

Sadly, the guy offering that deal treats SEO like a checklist instead of a real strategy. Finding genuine talent at that price point is unicorn territory.

Easy way to vet him before handing over money:

🎯 Ask why he'd take a certain approach, not just what he'd do
🔍 Ask how he'd actually measure results

Vague answers = walk away. A couple of free SEO videos will also give you enough basics to spot the nonsense early.

socialbutterfly

"It's not getting worse" is not a result, full stop. For a local business, 7 months is plenty of time to see real movement, including better local rankings, GBP visibility, relevant traffic, and ideally more calls or bookings.

Tracking campaign ROI is literally my day job, and when a partner serves vague updates, here's what I ask for:

📊 A simple before-and-after report pulled from GSC, GA4 and GBP
📝 A monthly breakdown of exactly what work was completed
📞 Proof the traffic is turning into calls or bookings

Nobody can guarantee exact rankings or nice traffic numbers, but after 7 months there should be clear evidence the strategy is actually working. If the reporting stays fuzzy, that tells you everything

cpaoptimizer

If someone can't work backwards from a business number, they shouldn't be touching your account. That's the whole interview, honestly.

Here's how a real conversation should go. Say the goal is 10 more bookings a month. Any competent SEO/PPC person pulls your current conversion rate, then does the math backwards: 10 bookings means X extra leads, which means X extra visits. It's never an exact science, but ballpark figures are table stakes. If they can't put that on a spreadsheet, that's a red flag.

From there, they should estimate the resources behind it. Maybe that's building 5 new pages, promoting them on social, chasing a few inbound links or press coverage, and fixing 2 existing technical issues. Whatever the list is, it should exist in writing before you sign anything.

A decent SEO tells you what's reasonable and what isn't, then either agrees on a target with you or walks away. "Just trust me" is not an answer.

tiktokguru

"It's not getting worse" is the classic line when there's no report behind it. seven months is plenty of runway to see movement in impressions or keyword rankings, even if bookings lag. make him show you:

📊 The exact keywords he's targeting
📈 Where each one sat in month one vs. today

If he can't pull that up on the spot, you've got your answer. local physio SEO isn't complicated either: reviews, a properly optimized GBP, and a handful of solid service pages. anyone this deep in should have receipts, not vibes.

brandvoice

at around $400 a month, "things aren't getting worse" should feel like a red flag, not a win. Seven months in, you deserve numbers you can actually feel, not vague comfort. Push for Search Console clicks and impressions on the service and location pages, Google Business Profile views plus calls or direction requests, and whether review volume is creeping up. A short monthly note showing those figures and what changed on the site or profile would put your mind at ease real fast. if bookings are the real goal, also ask how new contacts are finding them - Maps, organic, or referrals - because judging everything by total website visits alone can make progress look invisible when it's quietly happening.

leadgen

Watching a client go through this exact situation right now, and it's déjà vu. Back when I ran customer success for a small agency, one of our accounts hired an outside SEO consultant and expected leads by week three. Every check-in call turned into the same argument because nobody had framed what "progress" actually looks like up front. Learned a lot watching that relationship fall apart.

Here's how I look at it now. Real progress typically shows up inside of three to six months, and the definition of progress matters a lot. The gold standard is organic leads that convert to revenue, because organic revenue is the actual goal. Fair warning: that one's hard to pull off and depends on solid revenue operations behind it.

Fallback goals, in roughly descending order of usefulness: more organic leads, more organic traffic, and before anyone even hits the site, growth in impressions, visibility, or the number of keywords you're ranking for.

The honest truth is that clean outcome-based goals are tough to write for SEO. It's not the right channel for every business, either. Whether it works for a specific company depends on the market, the audience, and especially the customer journey. A huge chunk of SEO success is downstream of other work like dev, design, copy, conversion rate, social, PR. A genuinely good consultant will advise across those buckets and can tell you "traffic growth in a quarter, IF x, y, and z happen in the other areas."

That said, input goals aren't a cop-out. For some businesses, paying for a set number of page optimization plans, new content, schema builds, or similar deliverables makes total sense, since a healthy program needs all of that anyway. Search is a monthly and yearly game, not a daily or weekly one. Serious organic lead flow takes most companies years to build, especially in crowded, established markets. Input goals let a business invest gradually and stack up the authority needed to eventually win in search.

Hope that helps the OP.

funnelhacker

Seven months of "it's not getting worse" would get that contract killed on the spot if it were my budget. that's not reporting, that's paying for a heartbeat monitor that just says "still alive."

Demand the deliverables: what actually shipped in those seven months, and which KPIs came back to him? impressions, non-brand rankings, clicks, bookings. If none of that shows up in a monthly report, the agency is selling vibes.

Look past SEO too. Does the site have an actual offer? Would a visitor instantly see why this physio beats the one two blocks over, with clear CTAs and a booking flow that takes two clicks? Pouring traffic into a page that converts poorly is buying clicks into a leaky funnel, and I've torched enough budgets on funnels like that to know it.

never ask for "X% more traffic in X months" since nobody controls Google. but absolutely demand they explain what they're doing, why, what they measure, and whether those numbers trend up. No measurement, no renewal.

emailwiz

A client learned this the hard way. They spent months on a similar budget in a packed niche, nothing moved. You'd normally expect some improvement by now. Have inquiries gone up at all since you started? Beyond that, £420 is thin for competitive SEO. If it's a primary channel, realistically you need to double it.

leadgen

Back in my customer success days, the ugly agency fights I sat in on were almost never about bad work. They were about expectations nobody put in writing. So flip it around: what deliverables actually land in your inbox each month for that $420? If nobody can produce that list, expectations were never managed on either side.

ryanseo

if a consultant said "it's not getting worse" with a straight face, that'd be the last conversation we'd ever have. Nobody expects earth-shattering results at $400 a month, but you're paying for accountable work, not a comfort phrase. Something should be moving - rankings, traffic, anything measurable

agencyarbitrage

£420 a month is not the red flag here. that sits inside the normal range for a single location UK business, most agencies price it anywhere from £400 up to about £1,200. The real problem is nobody can point at what the money actually produced.

One thing I've learned running local client audits: for a physio clinic, most of that spend belongs on the Google Business Profile, not the website. Profile completeness is the strongest local pack signal right now, and review velocity over the last 90 days comes second. a steady stream of fresh reviews predicts calls way better than the total count ever will.

So ask him two things: how many new reviews the clinic got in the last three months, and whether every category, service and photo field is filled in. then skip the website traffic report and pull the profile's own performance data instead. Calls, direction requests, booking clicks. those are the actual bookings, and there's a real chance they moved while site traffic sat flat.

cyberpunk

Agreed, and honestly the gimmick-driven SEOs deserve a chunk of the blame here. They've spent years selling SEO as a quick fix, like swapping a couple title tags and bumping an h2 to an h1 gets you straight to page one. Total garbage, and small businesses eat it up because it sounds so easy. My own understanding of SEO came from running full campaigns end to end - seeing how technical setup, content, and authority actually feed each other instead of treating every piece like a magic button. That context is exactly what these quick-fix pitches strip out.

leadgen

A former client swore her site was cursed because months went by with barely any traffic. Turns out an old plugin had the entire thing set to noindex. her SEO specialist caught it, fixed it in an afternoon, and looked like a wizard from then on. That's the rare exception though. Maybe one in a hundred sites is hiding a silly technical error like that. The rest is the long, unglamorous grind, which is why good SEO really is synergy.