The monthly cycle, in detail
This is the long version of the four steps on the home page: what happens in which week, who does it, what you receive, what we need from you, and what happens when something goes wrong.
Before you sign: the crawl and the call
Send your URL through the contact form. Before the call we crawl the site, read your Search Console if you grant read-only access, and look at who is being cited for your topics in AI answers. The 30-minute call is about those numbers. If the smallest plan cannot move them, we say so. If SEO is the wrong lever for you right now (a site that needs rebuilding first, a market with no search demand, a budget that would be better spent on ads for a launch), we say that too. You get a written proposal the same day, and you decide.
Month 1: audit, plan, foundations
| Week | What happens | What you receive |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Full technical crawl, index coverage review, Core Web Vitals field data per template, log sample if available, schema and rich-result inventory, AI-crawler access, competitor and AI-citation gap analysis. Measurement audit: what is tracked, what is missing, what is wrong. | The audit document, with every issue ranked by pages affected and likely impact |
| Week 2 | The 90-day plan: what we will do in which order, who does each item (us or your developer), and the dates. A baseline of every number we will report, captured before anything changes. | The plan, which you sign off before work starts |
| Weeks 3 and 4 | Foundations: indexing and canonical fixes, speed and render-blocking issues, schema on templates, internal-link structure, robots.txt and sitemap, crawler access, and tracking (GA4 key events, Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, AI-referral segment). | Fixes shipped or tickets delivered, each verified in the tool that found the problem |
| End of month | First report and call. | What was done, what has moved already, what starts in month two |
Every month after
- Publish: new or rebuilt pages from the plan, written with your subject-matter input, structured to rank and to be quoted by assistants. Two a month on Starter, four to six on Growth, ten or more on Scale.
- Refresh: pages that already rank are updated on a schedule, because freshness is both a ranking and a citation signal and because facts go stale.
- Earn: data-led assets and digital PR for links and brand mentions, on Growth and Scale, once there are pages worth pointing at.
- Maintain: a monthly recrawl of key templates for reverted fixes, new errors and blocked crawlers, and a check that every tracked lead type still fires.
- Measure: rankings, citations, clicks, leads and revenue in one dashboard you can open any day.
- Report: in the last week of the month, in the same five sections every time. One call, one decision list.
Months 2 to 3, 4 to 6, and after
Months two and three are where foundations finish and the first pages go live; the numbers you see moving are usually indexing, impressions and rich results. Months four to six are where content and, on Growth and Scale, PR start to show in clicks and citations, and where we make the first real reallocation of hours based on what worked. From month six the plan is reviewed each quarter against results, and the budget conversation is based on what search is now worth per month rather than on promises.
How often we talk
| Plan | Calls | Between calls |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | One 30-minute call a month with the report | Email, replied to within one business day |
| Growth | Fortnightly 30-minute calls | Shared live dashboard and email |
| Scale | Weekly call with a named lead | Dashboard, email, and engineering time for integrations |
What needs your sign-off
Three things always: the 90-day plan, any page that goes live under your name, and any change that affects the whole site's structure (URL changes, a migration, a robots.txt rule). Everything else is in the plan you approved and we get on with it, reporting what we did rather than asking permission for each fix.
What we need from you
- Read-only access to Search Console, GA4 and Google Business Profile, and a CMS login or a developer contact who will take tested tickets.
- About an hour a month from someone who knows the business, for content input and approvals. This is the single biggest factor in how fast pages go live.
- Honesty about past agencies, penalties and paid links, so we are not surprised.
- A decision within a week when the report asks for one, so the next month's hours are not spent waiting.
When something goes wrong
Traffic drops. Sometimes it is a tracking break, sometimes a core update, sometimes a deploy that reverted a fix. The protocol is the same each time: within one business day we confirm whether the drop is real in Search Console, identify the pages and queries affected, check the dates against Google's update history and your deploy log, and tell you what we think happened and what we are doing. If the cause was our work, we say so and fix it. If it is a core update, we explain what recovery takes, which is often longer than anyone likes; our guide on recovering from a core update describes it.
What you always keep
Every account in your name, every page and asset we build, every report, the plan, and the tickets. If you leave, you leave with all of it. Plans are month-to-month with 30 days' notice, and the last month includes a handover: a list of what was done, what is in progress, what we recommend next, and the removal of our access.
Who does the work
Senior people at Four Cents, a Toronto software studio with 20+ years of product work. The person on your call is the person in your Search Console. Engineering is in-house, which is why technical fixes get done rather than recommended. We use AI tools for research, outlines and QA; people with your subject-matter input write and edit the pages.
Find out what is holding your site back.
A 30-minute call with the person who will do the work, after we have crawled your site. No slides, no pressure.