Questions We Get Before Anyone Signs

Both of us, directly. Search Strength SEO is run by Paul Weidner, founder and owner, who leads the search side, and Steven McVicker, co-owner and CTO, who leads web and software development. There is no account manager relaying messages between you and whoever is doing the work — you talk to the person making the change. In practice that means most questions get a real answer the same day rather than a promise to check with the team.

The work carries on. Both of us hold full access to every client account, so nothing sits behind one person’s login. What we do for each client is written down rather than kept in someone’s head, and the running work log in your portal shows exactly where things stand at any moment. Development and search are split between us, so a stretch of leave on one side slows a specialism down — it does not stop your account.

Most content and on-page changes ship within one to two business days of being agreed. Larger development work is scoped first and given a date before anything starts. If a request is going to take longer than that, we tell you when you ask rather than when the deadline passes.

We offer both flexible terms and longer-term contract options, so the engagement can match how you prefer to work. Most of our work runs on a longer-term agreement, simply because search compounds and a longer runway lets us plan a proper sequence of work rather than a month at a time. We will talk both options through with you before anything is signed.

Scope drives the number, not company size. The things that move it are how many services and locations need their own page, how much of the existing site has to be repaired before new work will hold, and whether development is involved alongside search. We quote a fixed monthly figure after looking at the site rather than reading a rate off a package tier, and the quote states what is included so a later invoice never contains a surprise.

For most local service businesses the honest window is four to six months, and it depends heavily on what a customer is worth to you. A business where one booked job covers several months of fees reaches the break-even point far sooner than one selling a low-value service. We record your baseline before anything ships so the comparison later is a measurement rather than a claim.

Yes, from day one. Every client gets a portal login showing the leads that came in, calls, texts and form fills as separate counts, the status of each page we are working on, and a log of what was changed and when. You can switch it between thirty, sixty and ninety day ranges or filter by month. It is the same view we work from, not a monthly PDF assembled to look good.

The first month is measurement and repair rather than publishing. We record where you rank and what the site currently earns, fix the technical faults that would undermine anything built on top, complete and correct your Google Business Profile, and agree the page plan with you. New pages start going live once that groundwork is done, so the results that follow can be attributed to something.

Everything. The website, the domain, the Google Business Profile, the analytics history and every page we wrote stay yours, under your own accounts. We ask for access to accounts you own rather than creating them under ours, which is what makes leaving straightforward. You keep your portal data export as well.

Not in house, and that is deliberate. We are an organic-first shop, and running ads is a different discipline that deserves someone who does it every day. When a client genuinely needs paid alongside search — a new location, a seasonal push, a gap while organic builds — we bring in a vetted paid-ads partner and coordinate the two so the ad spend and the search plan are not fighting each other. You are never quietly upsold into a channel you did not ask for.

No, and it is worth being wary of anyone who does. Nobody outside Google controls the results, and a promised position is either luck or a term so obscure that ranking for it changes nothing. What we will commit to is the work itself, a baseline recorded before we start, and reporting that shows movement in rankings, calls and form fills honestly — including the months where a number goes the wrong way.

Local service businesses that answer the phone: trades and home services, contractors, restoration, landscaping and exterior work, healthcare practices, and professional firms with a service area rather than a storefront. We also take national work where the buyer researches before calling. We are a poor fit for large e-commerce catalogues and for anyone wanting volume traffic rather than booked work — in those cases we say so early.