Ongoing SEO run like a product, not a campaign.
An ongoing engagement where I own the whole of it: strategy, implementation, testing and reporting. One process instead of a set of separate jobs.
What an ongoing engagement covers
How the areas are weighted depends on where the site already is — this is what the engagement includes.
What lands each month
An ongoing engagement is not a subscription to “SEO activity”. Here is what actually reaches you every month.
Roadmap and backlog
A quarterly growth roadmap and a P0–P2 backlog refreshed monthly: tickets with descriptions, acceptance criteria and estimated impact. Your team does not get a wishlist, it gets something that goes into a sprint without translation.
Implementation, not recommendations
Changes I can ship myself — templates, structured data, internal linking, metadata — I make directly, if you give me access. The rest goes to your team with the ticket already written, and I review it once it ships.
Content at scale
Briefs, a topic coverage plan and programmatic content built on your product — not five blog posts a month. On large sites one well-designed template does more than a hundred articles.
AI search visibility
Citation monitoring in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, plus the work to get you cited instead of your competitors. A standard part of the engagement, not a separate service with a separate price.
SEO testing in StatTower
Larger changes get tested on a sample at a 95% significance threshold before they go site-wide. That is the difference between “we shipped it and traffic went up” and knowing whether it went up because of the change or because of the season.
Reporting and strategy review
A monthly report against the KPIs we agreed at the start — traffic and conversions on the pages that earn, not a tool export. Every quarter we go back to the strategy and decide what changes.
Put your site up for a quote
Twenty minutes is enough for me to tell you whether an ongoing engagement is what you need and what budget makes sense in your case. If an audit or a single consultation would serve you better at this stage, I will say so on the call.
When an engagement pays off, and when it does not
This is the most expensive thing I do and it does not pay off for everyone. Here is honestly when it does, and when the money is better spent elsewhere.
This is for you if
- Organic is a sales channel for you, not a supplement to paid
- You already have content and traffic to scale, not an empty domain
- The site is coming out of a migration or a rebuild and needs recovering
- You have a team that ships, or you will give me access to ship myself
- You have worked with an agency before and know what you do not want repeated
Look elsewhere if
- You want a one-off diagnosis rather than someone running it — that is an SEO audit
- You have one specific question or decision — that is SEO consulting
- You need sales this quarter — that is Google Ads, not SEO
- Nobody on your side has time to implement or answer questions
How the engagement actually works
Five stages, and only the first one ends. The rest come back every month in different proportions — depending on where the biggest brake currently is.
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01
First 30 days: diagnosis and plan
A full crawl, Search Console data, competitor analysis and a conversation about what matters commercially. It ends in a quarterly roadmap and agreed KPIs. Until then I promise no growth, because I would have nothing to base it on.
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02
Technical foundations
Indexing, rendering, crawl budget, information architecture and performance. The least impressive stage and the one without which the rest of the work has no way of landing — content Google will not index does not exist.
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03
Topic coverage and content
Content gaps, cannibalisation, briefs and templates for programmatic content. This is usually where most of the new traffic comes from, but only once the previous stage is behind us.
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04
Authority and citability
Internal linking, how authority is distributed across the site, structured data, and the work to get language models citing you. External links I address directly in the FAQ — that part I do not run.
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05
Test, measure, iterate
Every larger change gets tested before it goes site-wide. A report every month, a strategy review every quarter and a decision on what comes next. This is the stage where the effects start compounding.
When the results show up
“At least six months” is a true but useless answer. Here is the breakdown of what happens in that time and how you will know it is going the right way.
| Period | What I focus on | How you know it is working |
|---|---|---|
| Months 1–3 | Diagnosis, technical blockers, quick wins and the first content | Indexed pages and impressions climb in Search Console, long-tail rankings start moving |
| Months 3–6 | Topic coverage, content templates, internal linking and structured data | Organic traffic grows measurably year on year, the first AI search citations appear |
| Months 6–12 | Scaling what worked, testing, and working the competitive terms | Growth stops depending on individual releases — you see it in conversions, not just rankings |
What I need from you
The first three are required; the rest decide how fast we get moving. I collect them on the intro call — nothing to prepare in advance.
- Access to Google Search Console and Analytics 4
- Access to the CMS or the repository, depending on what I ship myself
- Someone on your side who decides and answers questions
- A content budget, if new content is part of the plan
- Agreement to test changes on part of the site before they go site-wide
- The domain's history: previous audits, migrations, penalties, what you have already tried
What an ongoing engagement costs
A fixed monthly retainer, quoted after a call and a look at the site. No packages — two sites of the same size can need entirely different work, and a package always ends with someone paying for things they do not need in order to get the one thing they do.
- Size of the site and how many templates we work across
- How competitive the terms are, and how many markets and languages
- How much of the implementation I take on versus your team
- Whether content at scale is needed and who produces it
- How far the AI search visibility work goes
Billed monthly, no commission on rankings and no tool fees added on top. The first quarter is the minimum below which there is nothing to judge — after that it runs with a month's notice.
Ongoing work, an audit or consulting
Three different things, and the three most often confused with each other. Here is what actually separates them.
| Criterion | Ongoing SEO | SEO audit | SEO consulting |
|---|---|---|---|
| When to pick it | You want someone to run organic growth for you | You do not know what is blocking growth and want a full read | You have a specific question or a decision to make |
| Turnaround | Continuous, first results in 2–3 months | 5–21 working days from getting access | A slot within 2 weeks, the session itself is an hour |
| What you get | Strategy, implementation, testing and monthly reporting | A report with the reasoning and a P0–P2 backlog | Direction and priorities, settled live |
| Who implements | Me, alongside your team | Your team, after the walkthrough and with a re-check | Your team (or me — implementation priced per project) |
| Billing | A fixed monthly retainer | Quoted per project | Hourly rate |
Who runs your growth
Over 10 years in organic growth, mostly at scale: Allani, Domodi and Homebook, then Brainly — dozens of markets from the US to India — and Ceneo, the largest price comparison site in Poland. Those were ongoing engagements rather than one-off jobs: the same sites for years, accountable for the numbers rather than for sending a report.
That is where StatTower came from, my framework for testing SEO changes at a 95% significance threshold. I run a handful of engagements at a time and no more — you work with me, not with a team that was handed your account, so the number of clients is capped by how much can be done well.
Common questions about ongoing SEO
How long before ongoing SEO shows results?
The first signals — indexing, impressions and long-tail rankings moving — usually within 2–3 months. Measurable year-on-year organic growth in 4–6 months. Competitive terms and compounding effects are a 6–12 month horizon. On a site coming out of a failed migration or a penalty, the first months go on recovering lost ground rather than growth — I say that at the start, not in month four.
What does it cost and what drives the budget?
Quoted after a call and a look at the site, as a fixed monthly retainer. The figure follows the size of the site and the number of templates, how competitive the terms are, how many markets and languages are involved, how much of the implementation I take on, and whether content at scale is needed. No package pricing — a package always ends with someone paying for things they do not need in order to get the one thing they do.
How long is the commitment?
The first quarter is the minimum — under three months there is nothing to judge, because the first month goes on diagnosis and planning. After that it runs open-ended with a month's notice. I do not bill against rankings: a position on a chosen term is a metric that is easy to lift and need not have anything to do with your sales.
Do you do link building?
I do not run link campaigns and I do not buy links. I work on authority with what I do well: site architecture, internal linking, how authority is distributed between pages, structured data, and content other people want to cite. If the link profile turns out to be a real brake in your case, I will say so plainly and point you to someone who does that work — rather than adding a line to the budget for something I know less about.
An agency, a hire, or one person?
An agency gives you capacity and process, but a senior usually writes the strategy while someone else does the daily work — and that shows in the results. A hire gives you full availability at the cost of a salary plus recruitment, and the risk that the knowledge walks out the door in a year. I am the third option: the same person writes the strategy and ships it. If you need ten pieces of content a day and six channels covered at once, an agency is the better call and I will tell you so.
Is it too early to work on AI search?
A share of the queries that used to end in a click now end in an answer in ChatGPT, Perplexity or AI Overviews. You do not have to take that on faith — you can check in the data how many of your queries already look like that, and that is what I do at the start. The craft is largely the same as classic SEO anyway: structure, structured data and content that can be quoted. Which is why it is part of the engagement rather than a separate service with a separate price.
How do we measure results?
KPIs get set in the first month and they are commercial metrics — organic traffic on the pages that earn, conversions and organic revenue — not an average position across a keyword list. You get a report every month and we revisit the strategy every quarter. Plus the test results: on larger changes you can see whether the lift came from the release or from seasonality.
What do I keep if we stop working together?
Everything that was produced: documentation, the backlog, briefs, templates, measurement setup and test results — in your tools, not mine. I do not build dependency on being the only one who knows how it works. At the end I hand over to whoever picks it up, so they do not start from zero.
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