A realistic month is five things. Profile upkeep, one genuine content piece, review requests and replies, a small number of technical fixes, and a report that opens with how many people got in touch. That is it, repeated, for long enough that it compounds.
We are writing this down because the most common question on a second or third monthly call is some version of what are you actually doing. That is a fair question and the honest answer is unglamorous, which is exactly why it is worth saying out loud rather than hiding behind a dashboard full of charts.
Week one: the profile and the fixes
Check the Google Business Profile against what has changed in the business. New service, changed hours, a holiday coming up, photos from a job worth showing. Post something short. Reply to anything that arrived since last month.
Then the technical list. Broken links, an image somebody uploaded at four megabytes, a page that lost its meta description in an edit, a form that stopped emailing. Small, boring, and the sort of thing that quietly degrades a site over a year if nobody owns it.
Week two: the content piece
One thing, answering a real question, with the answer near the top. We take the question from what clients tell us people are asking on the phone, which is a better source than any keyword tool because the intent is already attached.
This is the part with the longest lag and the largest eventual effect. A page published in September may be producing inquiries the following spring. Judging it in October is how good work gets canceled, and part of our job in month two is to say that clearly enough that nobody is surprised in month three.
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Get a free website and marketing auditWeek three: reviews
Requests out to the customers served since the last round, one link, no filtering, no incentive. Replies to everything that came in, including the good ones, kept short and specific.
This is the highest return half hour in the month for most local businesses and it is the one most often skipped when a business does its own marketing, because it feels like asking a favor. The trick that makes it easy is asking at the moment the job finishes and the customer is happy, rather than a week later by email.
Week four: read the numbers, decide something
Contacts first. How many calls, how many form submissions, how many booked. Then where they came from, then the traffic underneath that.
The point of reading it is to decide something. Which page is producing, which one is not, whether a service needs its own page, whether an advertising test is worth running. A report that produces no decision is a report nobody needed.
| Week | The work |
|---|---|
| One | Profile upkeep, a post, and the small technical fixes |
| Two | One content piece answering a real customer question |
| Three | Review requests out, every review replied to |
| Four | Read the numbers, contacts first, and decide one thing |
What happens in a month when something breaks?
The recurring work still happens and the fix comes out of the flexible part of the plan. That is the reason a plan should be a scope with slack in it rather than a fixed timesheet.
Things break more often than clients expect. A hosting company changes something, a plugin update takes a form offline, somebody at the business edits a page and deletes a section by accident, a listing gets a suggested edit from a member of the public that changes the hours. None of those are anybody's fault and all of them cost the month a few hours. A plan with no slack in it turns every one of those into an awkward conversation about extra billing, which is a poor way to spend the goodwill you are trying to build.
What is not in a normal month
Dramatic changes. If somebody is redesigning your site every month, they are not doing local search work, they are keeping busy. Search work is repetitive on purpose, and the repetition is where the value is.
Also not in a normal month: chasing every algorithm update. Most of them do not affect a small local business in any way it can act on, and the ones that do show up in the numbers within a few weeks. We look, we tell clients when something actually moved, and we do not send an email every time the industry gets excited.
How long before this is worth what it costs?
Assume two to three months before anything moves and six before you can judge it fairly. That is uncomfortable to sell and it is the truth, and businesses that are told it up front stay long enough to get the benefit.
The clearest example we have is Portasoft, which holds first page positions for its relevant terms and gets a steady flow of inquiries from them. That did not come from a clever month. It came from this list, repeated, for a long time.
What sits inside a plan is on the pricing page, how the search work connects to everything else is on the Growth Engine page, and the detail of the search and content side is on the digital marketing page.