What does an SEO agency actually do?
The honest practitioner answer: six deliverable pillars, with explicit time allocation, what's deliberately not the agency's job, and what a credible 12-month engagement actually looks like week by week.
The six pillars of what an SEO agency does
A credible monthly retainer in 2026 includes work across all six. Pillars vary in proportion month to month; none should be entirely absent.
Discovery and audit
- •Comprehensive technical audit covering crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, mobile responsiveness, JavaScript rendering, internal-link architecture
- •Content audit identifying ranking opportunities, content gaps, and pages requiring rewriting or consolidation
- •Backlink-profile analysis with toxic-link identification and disavow recommendations where applicable
- •Competitive analysis against the 5–10 most-relevant ranking competitors in your category
- •Local SEO audit including Google Business Profile health, citation consistency, and review-acquisition workflow
- •AI-search visibility audit covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and AI Overview citation status
Technical SEO
- •Implementation or remediation of technical fixes from the initial audit
- •Schema markup implementation (Organization, LocalBusiness, Article, Person, FAQPage, HowTo, Service, Product as applicable)
- •Core Web Vitals optimisation (LCP, INP, CLS) and PageSpeed remediation
- •Internal-link architecture work to flow authority to commercial-intent pages
- •Sitemap management, robots.txt configuration, and crawl-efficiency improvements
- •Migration support and technical-SEO oversight on platform changes, redesigns, and URL restructures
Content production and optimisation
- •Substantive new content creation aligned to commercial-intent and informational keyword opportunities
- •Existing-page optimisation: rewriting underperforming pages, adding depth where thin, restructuring for snippet eligibility
- •Topical authority cluster building — interconnected content covering a subject area in depth
- •Service-page and product-page optimisation for commercial conversion
- •FAQ and answer-format content for AEO and AI Overview surface eligibility
- •Author byline structure and Person-schema-marked bios for E-E-A-T signal building
Earned media and link work
- •Digital-PR campaigns producing newsworthy content that earns authoritative coverage
- •Statement-making research, industry surveys, or proprietary-data publication that earns natural backlinks
- •Citation work in legitimate industry directories, professional associations, and trade publications
- •Relationship-based outreach to relevant publications and content creators
- •Resource-page and broken-link reclaiming where ethically applicable
- •Critically: refusal to engage in link buying, PBN networks, or other tactics that risk manual penalties
Measurement and reporting
- •Monthly performance reports with narrative analysis, not just dashboards
- •Quarterly business-outcome reviews connecting SEO work to revenue or qualified leads
- •Real-time tracking of organic traffic, conversion, and ranking trends in shared dashboards
- •Anomaly detection and rapid response to ranking volatility, algorithm updates, or technical regressions
- •AI-search citation tracking via Profound, Otterly, Peec AI, or equivalent
- •Attribution analysis connecting organic-search activity to closed revenue
AI-search and AEO/GEO work
- •Surface-specific optimisation for ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot
- •Schema patterns engineered for LLM citation eligibility
- •Direct measurement of AI-assistant citation frequency and named-mention tracking
- •Content restructuring to maximise extraction-friendly passage formatting
- •Authoritative third-party mention earning from sources LLMs heavily weight (Wikipedia where applicable, Reuters, industry-leading publications)
- •Iterative testing and refinement of the AI-search visibility moat
What a 12-month engagement actually looks like
Onboarding, access provisioning, comprehensive audit kickoff, stakeholder interviews, baseline measurement establishment
Audit findings review, strategic plan presentation, prioritised roadmap with quick wins identified, OKR or KPI alignment
Technical foundation execution, GBP rebuild, first content pieces published, schema implementation rollout
Sustained content production, ongoing technical hygiene, first earned-media campaigns, first measurable lift typically appears
Compound execution, monthly business-outcome reporting, quarterly strategic review, scope refinement based on early data
Topical authority maturation, AI-search citation work scaling, programmatic content (where applicable), full ROI compounding becomes visible
What an SEO agency typically does NOT do
Confusion about scope is the most common source of friction in agency engagements. Here is what is typically out of scope unless explicitly negotiated.
Running paid search campaigns
PPC and SEO are different disciplines. Some agencies offer both as bundled services; pure SEO agencies do not. Bundled offerings vary in PPC quality.
Building or rebuilding the website itself
Most SEO agencies don't ship websites. Some have web-design partner relationships; some have in-house design pods. Clarify scope during proposal.
Email marketing or marketing automation
Conversion-rate optimisation work overlaps with SEO; full email/automation programs typically require a separate vendor.
Social media management
Social signals are a minor SEO factor. Active social management is usually a separate function or a separate vendor.
Customer-service responses to bad reviews
Agencies can train your team on review-response best practices; the actual responses should come from people with knowledge of the customer matter.
Fixing fundamental product or service problems
If customers are leaving negative reviews because the product genuinely under-delivers, no SEO program can offset that. Fix the underlying business first.
In-house SEO team vs agency vs hybrid
Three structural models. The right choice depends on company stage, scale, and how strategic SEO is to the business.
Agency only
SMBs through mid-market where SEO is one of several growth channels and the company doesn't need a full-time SEO hire's worth of work.
Lower fixed cost; access to broader expertise; vendor coordination overhead; less embedded knowledge of the company.
Hybrid (in-house + agency)
Mid-market and growing companies where SEO is strategically important. In-house lead handles strategy and stakeholder management; agency provides execution capacity and specialist depth.
Best for most growth-stage companies; requires the in-house lead to be senior enough to manage agency effectively.
In-house team only
Enterprise scale where the volume of work justifies a multi-person team and where company-specific knowledge is critical to strategy.
Highest fixed cost; deepest embedded knowledge; risk of insular thinking without external benchmarking.
Common questions about what SEO agencies do
See what we'd actually ship for your business
Tell us about your situation. The first call walks through which of the six pillars matters most for your category and what realistic month-by-month execution looks like.
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