● SEO · Local search · Reporting

Search work with reporting you can read

Technical and editorial SEO for independent businesses, delivered as ongoing work rather than a one-off audit. Available with our hosting or as a standalone engagement on a site hosted elsewhere.

Request a quote Call (443) 772-6592

Standalone or bundled · Monthly reporting · Same-day response

Most sites are not penalised.
They are invisible.

Poor search performance is rarely the result of a penalty. It is usually a site that loads slowly, describes its pages badly, and has no structure a search engine can interpret. Those are solvable problems, and they are the ones we start with.

Why rankings stall
Three findings account for most of it
Every engagement opens with a full technical and content review, and the same faults turn up again and again.

  • Nothing to interpret. Missing titles, duplicate descriptions, no schema, and headings used for styling rather than structure.
  • Slow on the devices that matter. Unoptimized images and no caching. Most visitors arrive on a phone, and that is where the losses occur.
  • Reporting nobody reads. Automated dashboards full of metrics that never answer the only real question: what brought in revenue.
Site audit · sample output
Findings ranked by commercial impact
CRAWL! Pages indexed well below pages submitted
TITLES! Duplicates across category pages, some missing
SCHEMA! No structured data detected
SPEED! Largest paint over budget on mobile
IMAGES! Unoptimized originals served at full size
LINKS✓ Redirect chains resolved, no broken internals
LOCAL→ Profile claimed, citations inconsistent
You receive this in writing before any work is quoted

Scope of work

Four areas, worked continuously

Technical SEO
01 · Foundations
The structural work that determines whether anything else is worth doing.

  • Crawlability, indexing, and sitemap configuration
  • Site speed and Core Web Vitals
  • Schema and structured data
  • Redirects, canonicals, and duplicate content
On-page and content
02 · Content
Pages written and structured for the terms your customers actually use.

  • Titles, descriptions, and heading structure
  • Product and category page optimization
  • Content written and published for you
  • Internal linking and site architecture
Local visibility
03 · Local
For businesses whose customers search geographically.

  • Google Business Profile management
  • Citation and directory consistency
  • Location and service-area pages
  • Review monitoring
Reporting
04 · Measurement
Written in plain language, reviewed with you rather than emailed and forgotten.

  • Monthly performance summary
  • Rankings tracked against real commercial terms
  • Traffic attributed to revenue where possible
  • Reviewed in your scheduled consultation

Setting expectations

What search work can and cannot do

SEO is sold badly more often than it is done badly. Before an engagement begins, it is worth being direct about what is realistic, because that is what determines whether the work is worth your money.

It takes months, not weeks
Technical fixes show up quickly. Ranking movement on competitive terms generally takes three to six months.
Nobody can guarantee position one
Any provider who promises a specific ranking is either guessing or describing a term nobody searches.
Traffic is not the objective
Visitors who never buy are a vanity metric. We optimize for the terms that precede a purchase.
Some sites should not start here
If the site is slow or broken, that gets fixed first. We will tell you when search work is premature.

We would rather decline an engagement than take payment for work unlikely to return it.

Engagement timeline

What to expect, month by month

Published so you can hold the work to it. If a month passes without the column on the right happening, that is a conversation worth having.

  What we do What you should expect to see
Month 1 Full technical and content review, findings ranked by likely commercial impact rather than by severity score A written audit and a plan you can check the work against
Month 2 Foundations corrected first: crawlability, indexing, Core Web Vitals, schema, redirects and canonicals Faster pages, more of the site indexed, cleaner listings in search results
Month 3 Page and content work begins on the terms that precede a purchase, with internal linking rebuilt around them Early movement on lower-competition and long-tail terms
Months 4 to 6 Continuous publishing, category and product page work, local signals and citation consistency Ranking movement on competitive commercial terms
Ongoing Monthly written summary, reviewed with you in your scheduled consultation Next month’s priorities set from what the data shows, not from a template

No provider can guarantee a position. This is a schedule of work, not a promise of rankings.

The question everyone asks first

How long does SEO take?

Three to six months before you see movement worth discussing, and six to twelve before it shows up as revenue. Local work is faster than that. National or competitive commercial terms are slower, sometimes much slower. That is the answer we give before anyone signs anything, and it is the one to hold us to.

Faster Slower
Local, competing inside a few miles National, or an established competitive niche
An existing site with some history A domain registered last month
A real business with real customers who will leave reviews Nothing anyone would independently mention
Technically healthy, quick, properly indexed Slow, broken, or carrying years of thin pages
Someone who can answer questions and approve things Every decision waiting three weeks
Willing to remove content as well as add it Attached to pages that have earned nothing in five years
Enquiries first
Calls, form submissions and emails are the only numbers that pay anyone. They are the first line of every report.
Clicks, not positions
Roughly 68% of US searches now end without a click, so a page can climb ten positions and send nobody. We report clicks on the terms that precede a purchase.
Maps activity
For a local business, calls and direction requests from the map pack often move well before the website does.
Position, last
Average position explains the other numbers. It is a diagnostic, not the result, and it is never the headline.

The uncomfortable part is months one and two, when you are paying and the graph is flat. That is the shape of the work, not a sign it is failing. If anyone shows you a rising line in week three, ask what is on the vertical axis.

Common questions

Frequently asked

No. Search work is available as a standalone engagement on a site hosted anywhere. Clients who take both benefit from the technical and search work being coordinated by one provider, and from our being able to make server-level performance changes directly.
Technical corrections such as speed and indexing often show measurable change within weeks. Ranking movement on competitive commercial terms generally takes three to six months. Any provider quoting faster than that on a competitive term is describing a term with no real search volume.
We write and publish it. Submit any product knowledge or background material you want reflected and we handle the drafting, optimization, and publication. Clients who prefer to write their own receive briefs and optimization guidance instead.
No, and nobody credible can. Search engines do not sell placement in organic results and their ranking systems change continuously. What we can commit to is the work, the reporting, and an honest assessment of whether a given term is realistically winnable.
A written monthly summary in plain language covering what changed, what moved, and what is planned next, reviewed with you during your scheduled consultation rather than emailed as a dashboard export.
Yes. Local search is a distinct discipline covering Google Business Profile, citation consistency, and location pages. For many local businesses it produces a faster return than broad organic work.
Pricing depends on the competitiveness of your market and how much content work is included, so we quote per client after reviewing the site. Send us the domain and the terms you want to compete on.
To a point. Doubling the budget does not halve the time, because much of the delay is Google recrawling and reassessing, and money does not move that. Where more spend genuinely helps is doing several things at once instead of in sequence.
Then you need advertising, not SEO, and we will say so rather than take a retainer. Search work is the cheaper channel eventually and never the faster one. The two work well together: ads while the organic work matures.
You keep what you earned for a while, then drift as competitors keep working and content ages. Stopping at month six is the most expensive way to do this: you pay the whole cost of the slow part and leave before the return.
Impressions on commercially relevant terms, positions improving on the pages you actually sell from, Maps activity if you are local, and pages being indexed and crawled properly. Leading indicators, all visible well before the revenue, and all in the monthly report.

Speak with our team

Send us your domain and the terms you want to rank for. We will review the site and tell you honestly whether the work is worth doing.

(443) 772-6592
info@lyonswebsolutions.com

Find out whether search work is worth it

Send us the domain and the terms you care about. We will review the site and respond with a straightforward assessment.

Request a quote