Commercial

Why the number is ninety days

If you searched for no contract SEO, start here, because we are not that and we are not going to pretend to be. There is a commitment and it is ninety days. This page is about why that number and not another one.

The mechanics have their own page: what the term is, what happens when it ends, how notice works, and the one condition on the included website. This page is the reasoning.

We are not contract free, and we will not claim to be

No contract SEO is a real search with real volume, and the reason it exists is that people have signed year long agreements they could not get out of. That is a fair grievance. The honest response to it is not to claim there is no commitment at all. It is to make the commitment short enough to be reasonable and then publish the number where you can see it before you talk to anybody.

Most of what markets itself as commitment free has a notice period, a setup fee you forfeit, or a monthly price that only makes sense if you stay. Ours is a ninety day initial term, published, with no setup fee and no deposit underneath it.

90 day initial term, then month to month at the same price. The industry asks for 6 to 12 months.

Why ninety and not thirty

Because thirty days of search work produces nothing you can form an opinion about. In the first month the site gets built. Pages get written and shipped. The technical layer gets done properly. Then the index has to go and look at all of it, which takes as long as it takes and is not a thing anybody can hurry.

A thirty day arrangement would mean one of two things. Either we front load whatever looks busiest so the first invoice feels justified, or we tell you the truth in week three and watch you leave before any of it landed. Both of those are worse for you than being asked for a quarter.

There is a version of this business that sells month to month from day one against a 90 day workload and quietly delivers a thirtieth of it. It converts better than we do. We would rather ask for the quarter and do the quarter.

Ninety days, then you are free.

Search and paid social agencies sign clients for 6 to 12 months because that is how long it takes them to look productive. We ask for 90 days, because that is how long the work takes to show up in the numbers and we would rather be judged on it than protected from it. After day 90 it simply continues, month to month, at the same price. No new commitment, no re-sign, no renewal you have to remember to cancel. If you want to stop at month four, you stop at month four. Ninety days is long enough that we are not optimizing for a good first month, and short enough that if we are wrong you find out this quarter instead of next year.

What the ninety days actually buys

Month one is the custom website, built and launched, with the technical layer done correctly rather than retrofitted. Pages written against the questions your customers actually ask. The Google Business Profile straightened out. Measurement wired into accounts in your name so the numbers are yours and not ours.

Month two is more pages, the internal structure that makes them findable, and the first honest read of what the index is doing with any of it. Month three is the second read, which is the first one worth having an opinion about, plus whatever month two told us to change.

At the end of it you have a website you own, a body of pages you own, a profile you own and a quarter of numbers in accounts you control. That is true whether you continue or not, which is the part that makes the ask reasonable.

What asking for ninety instead of twelve costs us

Predictability, mostly. A long agreement lets an agency plan hiring and absorb a bad quarter. Ninety days means every client is a quarterly re-decision and a bad quarter arrives immediately, in full, with nowhere to put it.

We take that trade deliberately, because the alternative is being paid for months we cannot defend. An agency protected from judgement stops improving, and quietly starts optimising for retention instead of results. It is also the only arrangement in which telling you the truth about flat numbers is not commercial suicide, which is the behaviour we actually want from ourselves.

Where the mechanics live

What happens the day the initial term ends, how notice works, what you keep, and the single condition attached to the included website are all published in full on the commitment page. If you are comparing terms across agencies, read that one next. If you were deciding whether ninety days is a reasonable thing to be asked for, this was the argument.