Atlanta SEO guides, departing from ATL

Ninety days after you hire an SEO company, you should be able to point to finished work: accounts that are still in your name, an audit with realistic estimates, fixes that have shipped, a complete and accurate Business Profile, improved and new pages that Google has crawled, and a measurement baseline with the first reports against it. What you cannot hold anyone to is a ranking position or a traffic percentage by a date. Google states that “no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google,” and its hiring advice gives no standard timeline; it tells you to ask the SEO what results to expect and in what timeframe.

Because there is no fixed timeline, what actually happens in the first three months is best judged by what each month should produce, what you can check yourself, and which variables move the dates.

Before day one: access stays in your name

Account ownership decides how smoothly the work starts and how cleanly it can end. Before work starts, make sure your business is the owner of each one and the agency is a user:

• Search Console. Google’s permissions page describes an owner as having “full control over properties in Search Console,” while full and restricted users have view rights. During an audit, Google’s advice is to “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access).”
• Business Profile. A profile “can have multiple owners but only one primary owner,” according to Google’s owners and managers help. Managers can edit information and respond to reviews but “can’t add or remove users or remove the profile.” The primary owner should be someone at your business.
• Analytics, hosting, domain registrar, and the site’s admin. Add the agency as a user under your own accounts rather than letting the agency create accounts for you.

Write down your goals, your customers, the areas you serve, and the competitors you worry about before the first meeting. A good SEO asks for that information anyway; Google says “your SEO should ask questions about what makes your business unique, who your competitors are, how search results can help, and how your customers find you.”

Days 1 to 30: audit, baseline, and a written plan

The first month is mostly diagnosis. By its end you should have three documents:

1. An audit with estimates. Google’s advice on hiring an SEO says “an SEO audit should be about giving you realistic estimates of improvement, and an estimate of the work involved.” An audit that lists hundreds of tool warnings with no priority and no estimate is not that.
2. A baseline. Search Console clicks, impressions, top queries, and top pages for the last three months, plus the calls and form submissions you already receive. Without a baseline, month-three figures have nothing to be compared with.
3. A plan with named deliverables. Which pages will be fixed or written, which technical issues will be addressed, what will change in the Business Profile, and when you will see each item.

Ask during this month how the agency measures success and how it will tell you what it changes. Both questions are on Google’s list of things to ask, along with “What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?” and “What’s your experience in my country/city?” The answer to the timeframe question should be a range with reasons, not a date.

Days 31 to 60: fixes ship and pages go live

The second month is when work you can see should start reaching the site:

• Technical fixes from the audit, in priority order: anything that blocks crawling or indexing first, then problems that affect many pages.
• Rewritten priority pages. Titles, headings, and content on the pages that matter most to your customers.
• New pages answering questions your customers ask that the site does not yet answer.
• The Business Profile completed. Google says local results are “mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity,” and for relevance it advises: “provide complete and detailed business info.” Categories, hours, services, and description should match what your business actually does.

Expect a lag between publishing and appearing. Google’s page on asking it to recrawl URLs says “crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.” A page that is indexed is also not yet a page that ranks. Ask your agency to report the two separately: “Google has this page” and “this page appears for these searches.”

Days 61 to 90: the first measurable signals

By the third month, the useful question is which direction things are moving.

• Impressions before clicks. Rising Search Console impressions for the new and rewritten pages are an early sign that Google is showing them for searches, before clicks follow.
• Queries, not one keyword. Look at the full list of queries each page appears for. A page can gain dozens of specific queries while its one tracked head term barely moves.
• Positions with care. Search Console notes that results “are specific to the time, place, device, and recent history of the person searching,” so a search from your own office is a poor check.
• Local actions. What your Business Profile’s performance figures show for customer actions, compared with the same period before the work started. Google counts actions from both organic results and Google Ads in those figures, so note any ad changes in the same period.
• Business results. Form submissions and calls you can trace to organic search or the profile.

If some of these are moving and the work in the plan has shipped, the engagement is producing the early signals a first quarter can produce, even if a single tracked ranking has not moved.

The variables that move the dates

The same plan can produce visible results quickly for one business and slowly for another. Several of the reasons are things you can identify at the start:

• Starting point. A site with existing pages, links, and reviews has something to improve. A new domain starts without that history.
• What you are trying to rank for. Look at who already appears for the searches you care about. If established pages fill the first results, expect a longer climb than for searches where few pages answer the question well.
• How fast work ships. Fixes that need your developer, or drafts waiting for your approval, delay everything after them.
• Which results you mean. Map results depend on distance from the searcher, so a business can appear for nearby searchers and not for someone across the metro area. User location can affect regular web results too, but Google does not describe them with the same explicit distance model.
• What Google changes meanwhile. Google says that “several times a year” it makes broad changes it calls core updates. Its core updates guidance also says that after improvements, “some changes can take effect in a few days, but it could take several months” for its systems to confirm a site’s content is helpful over the long term.

Reports you should receive

A monthly report should let you check the plan without a meeting. It lists the work completed against the work planned, the pages changed and published, the Search Console and profile figures against the baseline, and the agency’s explanation of what moved and why. Google suggests asking “Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?” The answer should be yes, in writing.

A 90-day acceptance check

Use this table at day 90 to decide whether each deliverable is actually finished.

Warning signs in the first 90 days

Google’s hiring advice names several red flags:

• Ranking guarantees. “Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a ‘special relationship’ with Google, or advertise a ‘priority submit’ to Google.”
• Secrecy about the work. “Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.”
• A link back to the agency as a condition. “You should never have to link to an SEO.”
• Link schemes and mass submissions. Google says to avoid SEOs “that talk about link popularity schemes or submitting your site to thousands of search engines.”
• Write access before you have decided. Read access is enough for an audit.

Add two of your own: no deliverables by the end of the first month, and reports that list activity without any figures you can compare with the baseline.

Google’s advice includes a sentence worth keeping: “Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.” That is the reason to read every report.

After day 90

The end of the third month is a checkpoint. If the planned work has shipped and impressions, queries, and profile actions are rising against the baseline, the next quarter builds on the same pages. If the work has not shipped, execution is the first problem to solve, and a new strategy will not ship it. If the work shipped and nothing moved, ask the agency to show which assumption in the plan was wrong.

If you are comparing Atlanta agencies before you sign, ask each one, including firms such as Southern Digital Consulting Atlanta, for a written 90-day plan you can check against these milestones.