SEO Services

Choosing between SEO services is mostly diagnosis, and buying the wrong one is how budgets disappear. If you can’t say why a page isn’t ranking, start with an audit — it’s cheaper than guessing. If the page is thin, off-intent or badly structured, fix that first, because authority pointed at a page that answers the wrong question mostly evaporates. If the page is genuinely good and stuck somewhere in positions six to thirty while competitors hold more referring domains, that’s the situation links are actually for. A link insertion (also called a niche edit) puts your link inside an article that’s already indexed and already read, which is why it tends to work faster than publishing something new.

Which service fits which problem

What every engagement includes regardless of service

These aren’t upsells or premium-tier perks. They apply whether you buy one $87 placement or a full audit.

• A written scope before any work starts — deliverables, price, timeline, in an email you can hold us to
• One named contact who does the work, not a ticket queue
• No auto-renewing retainers. Every engagement ends unless you choose to start another
• A reply to any enquiry within 24 hours, including the awkward ones
• On placements: a 12-month guarantee with free replacement if a link is removed

Pricing for placements is fixed and published — $87, $147 and $247 per link by host site tier, with 10% off at ten links and 15% at twenty-five. It’s all on the pricing page, including what each tier’s traffic and authority floor actually means.

What we decline

Saying no to work is easier when the rules are written down in advance.

We don’t take casino, gambling, adult or pharmaceutical placements — not on moral grounds particularly, but because the host sites that accept them are a different quality tier and the outcomes aren’t comparable. We don’t sell private blog network links, or placements on sites built to sell placements. We don’t guarantee positions, because nobody can, and the agencies that do are either guessing or targeting keywords nobody searches.

We also turn down link building for sites that shouldn’t be buying links yet. Below roughly DR 20, with a handful of thin pages, links won’t do what you want and you’d be better spending the money on content. And we’ll say plainly that paid links sit outside Google’s guidelines. We reduce risk by placing only on real sites with real readers, but we can’t eliminate it, and anyone claiming otherwise is guessing on your behalf. Our full position on that risk is on the blog.

How to sequence the work

1. Diagnose before you buy

   Know which of your pages are close to ranking and which aren’t in the running. An audit does this properly; Search Console does a rough version of it free.

2. Fix the pages you already have

   Intent, structure, internal links, depth. This is the cheapest work available and it makes everything after it more effective.

3. Build authority to the pages that deserve it

   Placements on pages that already match intent and rank on page two or three. Start with a few, measure, then scale — our pacing guidance covers realistic monthly volumes.

4. Reassess after 8-12 weeks

   Rankings, not traffic, are the near-term signal. If pages moved, keep going. If they didn’t, the constraint was something other than authority and more links won’t find it.

SEO services: common questions

Not sure which of these you need? Send the URL, the keyword and what you’ve already tried. We reply within 24 hours with a straight recommendation, including “you don’t need us for this” when that’s the answer. Get in touch, or check what everything costs first.

How do you tell which SEO services you actually need?

Work backwards from the symptom, not forwards from the service menu. Every ranking problem leaves a specific fingerprint in Search Console and in the search results themselves, and each fingerprint points at a different cause. Match the fingerprint to the cause first, then buy the one service that addresses that cause.

The table below covers the six situations we get asked about most. It’s deliberately blunt about the cases where the answer is not link building, because those are the cases where money most often gets wasted.

How the services combine, with three worked scenarios

These are illustrative scenarios, not clients. SerpInsight is newly launched and we don’t have finished campaigns to show you, so inventing a case study here would undercut the exact argument the rest of this site is making. What follows is how we’d sequence the work and roughly how the effort splits, priced at our published rates of $87, $147 and $247 per placement.

Scenario A: a new site, roughly DR 15, eight months old

Effort split, very roughly: 70% content and on-page, 30% technical, 0% links for the first quarter. That last number tends to disappoint people, and it’s the honest one. A site at this stage has almost nothing for authority to amplify — you’d be paying to make an incomplete page marginally more visible. The sequence we’d propose is an audit to clear indexation and structure, then on-page work to build out a genuine cluster of pages around one commercial topic, then a reassessment. Links enter the plan at the point where a page is landing in the top thirty on its own. If that takes six months, it takes six months, and we’d rather say so at the quote stage than take the order. Our link building guide covers the readiness threshold in more detail.

Scenario B: an established site with a plateaued money page

Effort split: 20% on-page tidy-up, 80% placements. This is the scenario a link insertion (also called a niche edit) was built for. The page sits at 18 for a query worth having, the content is comparable to the top five, and the gap is referring domains. We’d start with a short on-page pass — usually internal links from the site’s own stronger pages, which costs nothing and is skipped remarkably often — then place a small first batch and watch for movement over eight to twelve weeks. A mid-competition page commonly needs something in the range of five to ten placements before the trend is readable, spread out rather than dropped in a fortnight. Pacing logic is in how many backlinks per month makes sense.

Scenario C: a local business selling within a radius

Effort split: 60% local SEO, 25% on-page for location and service pages, 15% links. Local is the scenario where buying placements first goes wrong most predictably. The map pack responds to category selection, proximity, review velocity and citation consistency long before it responds to a DR 52 blog mentioning you. Where links do help a local business is the organic result underneath the pack, and for the service-plus-city pages that sit outside the pack entirely. So the sequence is profile and citation work first, location pages second, a handful of placements third — often at the Starter tier, since local queries rarely need Authority-tier hosts to compete.

How an engagement gets scoped before any work starts

Nothing begins on a phone call and a handshake. Every engagement, whether it’s a single $87 placement or an audit, gets a written scope by email before we take payment, and that document is short enough that you’ll actually read it.

1. You send the situation, not the brief

   The URL you want to move, the query you’re chasing, and what you’ve already tried. Skip the strategy document. What we need is enough to check whether the page is close to ranking or nowhere near it.

2. We check before we quote

   We pull the page, look at where it sits, and look at what the top ten hold. This is unpaid and takes us under an hour. It’s also where roughly the most useful conversation happens, because it’s where we find out whether links are the constraint.

3. The written scope arrives

   One email, plain language, containing everything listed below. If something in it is wrong, you say so and we amend it before anyone pays anything.

4. You approve, then work starts

   Payment is against the agreed scope. For placements, you still approve every host URL individually afterwards — agreeing the scope isn’t agreeing to whatever sites we find.

What a scope contains, every time:

• The exact deliverable — number of placements and tier, or the specific sections an audit will cover
• The total price in figures, with any bulk discount already applied and shown as arithmetic
• The timeline, stated as a range — 7 to 14 days per placement, and what happens if a host goes quiet
• The target page or pages, named as URLs, plus the planned anchor mix across the whole order
• What’s explicitly excluded, so nobody discovers a gap in week three
• What happens if we can’t deliver a line item — refund on that line or a substitute at the same tier, your choice
• The 12-month replacement commitment restated in the same email, not buried in a linked policy

What will we tell you not to buy?

Quite a lot, and it’s rarely a sales tactic. Turning down work that can’t succeed is cheaper for us than delivering it and then arguing about why the rankings didn’t move.

We’ll tell you not to buy placements when the page isn’t indexed, when the content answers a different query from the one you’re targeting, when the site sits below roughly DR 20 with a handful of thin pages, and when you’ve just been hit by a core update and want to buy your way out. We’ll tell you not to buy an audit when you can already articulate the problem in one sentence — if you know the page is on page two and the top ten hold three times your referring domains, you don’t need us to confirm it for a fee. We’ll tell you not to buy thirty links in one month for a page that needs eight, because the extra twenty-two buy you a pattern rather than a position.

Turning down work protects both sides in a way that isn’t sentimental. On our side, a campaign that was never going to work becomes a client who reasonably believes we’re bad at this, and a new business can’t afford many of those. On your side, the cost of a wrong service isn’t the invoice — it’s the two or three months you spent waiting for it to work before diagnosing properly. That’s the expensive part, and it doesn’t show up on any invoice. The other side of this is our published position on risk: paid links sit outside Google’s guidelines, we reduce risk rather than remove it, and our full answer on that doesn’t get softer if you’re about to pay us.

Working alongside in-house teams and other agencies

We don’t ask for exclusivity, and we don’t ask you to move your other SEO work to us as a condition of buying placements. Most of the situations where link insertions make sense are situations where somebody competent is already doing the on-page and technical work — an in-house SEO with no outreach time, or a full-service agency whose link supplier stopped returning emails.

Practically, that means a few things. We’ll take a target page list from your in-house team without second-guessing the strategy behind it, though we’ll flag it if a nominated page looks unready. We’ll work to an anchor plan you already have, as long as it isn’t exact-match on every placement. We’ll report in whatever format your existing reporting uses, including a plain spreadsheet, rather than sending a branded PDF nobody opens. And we’ll happily talk to your agency directly if that’s less friction than routing every question through you.

We also hand over the methodology rather than protecting it. The vetting standard, the relevance test, the anchor ratios, the prospecting approach — all of it is published, and if your team wants to run it in-house after working with us, that’s a legitimate outcome and we’ll answer questions about it. Link building isn’t a secret; it’s four to six hours of unglamorous work per placed link that most teams don’t have the hours for. If you’d rather build that capability internally, our SEO strategy guide and quality evaluation walkthrough are the same material we work from.

More questions about our SEO services

The fastest route through all of this is the diagnosis table above — find your symptom, then read the service page it points at. If two rows describe you, or none of them do, send the URL and the query to SerpInsight and we’ll tell you which one it is within 24 hours. Prices for everything are published on the pricing page, and the full service list is on our services overview.