Search work, priced, and three sites it was measured on

What it is

Search engine optimisation is the work of making a site reachable by a crawler, worth keeping in an index, and clear enough that an answer engine can quote a paragraph of it. Three jobs, in that order, and skipping the first is why plenty of sites that have already bought SEO still cannot be found.

In practice the work splits three ways. Technical is the crawl: the pages the robots file blocks, the redirect chains, the canonical tags pointing at the wrong twin, the template that ships one title thirty times. Editorial is the pages themselves, written to answer what somebody typed rather than to hold a phrase. Off-site is the slow part: citations, listings, mentions, and the reasons other people have to name you.

All of it is done by one person. Whoever reads your Search Console is also writing the posts and drawing the illustrations in them, so the fixes and the content are never two suppliers arguing through you. The cost is that the calendar, not the price list, is the real limit: a small number of retainers run at a time, and when the pace cannot be kept I say so before the invoice rather than after it.

Who it is for

Small businesses with one location or a handful, selling something specific: a chauffeur fleet, a water treatment company, a silk house. Nonprofits and foundations, where the budget has to be defended to a board and a published price is half that argument. Companies in the Gulf whose buyers search in English and decide inside a week. Businesses that sell across borders and need one site to work in four markets at once.

Two situations recur. A site somebody else built which nobody has looked at since, quietly leaking pages the index never took. Or a business that ranks for its own name and nothing else, so every click search sends it was going to arrive anyway. Both start with the audit, and neither needs a rebuild first.

What it costs

Four rungs, published so you can rank this studio against others before you write to any of them. There is no hourly rate here or on any other page, because an hourly rate makes working quickly a penalty and buys a timesheet instead of a position.

USD is the anchor on every page, quote and invoice. The figure in parentheses is the same price in dirhams at the pegged rate of 3.6725 to the dollar, rounded to the nearest hundred and given as one local equivalent rather than a currency list, correct as of 5 September 2026. Prices exclude any VAT, sales tax or withholding your own country applies to imported services. Invoices are in USD by default, with EUR or GBP on request for clients in the EU and the UK.

Measurement, and who owns it

Every property is set up in your accounts, not mine. Search Console and analytics are created under your email and I am added as a user, so on the day the work ends the access goes and you still hold the whole history. A retainer that leaves you with nothing to read afterwards has sold you a dependency.

What gets watched each month: impressions and clicks by query and by page, average position on the queries that carry money rather than the ones that flatter, index coverage, and the pages that gained or lost. Analytics is consent-aware, which in Europe and the UK means measurement only starts once somebody agrees to it, and the totals are reported as they are rather than grossed up to cover the gap.

Structured data

Structured data is the part of a page written for machines: a small block of JSON naming what the page is, who published it, what a thing costs and where the business operates. It does not move a ranking by itself. It removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is why an answer engine quotes somebody else instead of you.

Every site built here ships it, and the audit checks it across the pages you already have. A full programme, meaning schema designed per template and kept correct as the site changes, is on the Authority rung. One rule holds throughout: nothing is marked up that is not on the page for a person to read. Markup describing what the reader cannot see is the shortcut that gets a site penalised.

How it runs

1. You write the brief in a sentence. The card below takes it. What is needed is the site, the market you sell into, and what a good year would look like.
2. I reply in writing, usually inside a day, with what I think is actually wrong, whether an audit is worth buying yet, and which rung the work sits on.
3. The audit, inside two weeks. The crawl, the index and Search Console review, the content gap, the answer-engine check, and the fixes ordered by what each is worth against what it costs.
4. One call, thirty minutes, to walk the findings and decide what happens next. Plenty of audits end here, and that is a legitimate ending.
5. The retainer runs in the open. Fixes go in as they are ready rather than in a monthly batch, posts are drafted where you can see them, and nothing reaches your site without your say.
6. A written month-end note, with the Search Console read, what was published, what moved and what did not. The properties are yours throughout, so you can check every claim in it.

What it has proved

Three client Search Console properties, exported and handed over on 28 August 2026. This page reads them out of the same file the portfolio prints them from, so the two cannot drift apart. They show what these sites did while the work ran, which is evidence rather than proof: search moves for reasons nobody owns as well as reasons somebody does.

• Orlux Rides. From 302 impressions in the first month at an average position of 75, to 998,307 impressions and 4,464 clicks cumulatively at an average position of 12.5 by 26 August 2026.
• ClearQuest Water. From 15 impressions a day in late May 2026 to 507 a day in August 2026, with the local water guides sitting between positions 5 and 12 for Tampa-area searches. A young engine: the slope is the point, not the total.
• La Soie. An average position of 6.75 across the whole run, with weekly impressions up elevenfold from 147 to 1,650 between 25 May and 23 August 2026. The dupatta guide alone sits at 5.36 in the Pages export.

One finding is worth naming for where it came from. On the water site, seven pages were indexed and twenty-five money pages had never been crawled at all: the commercial half of the site did not exist as far as the index was concerned. That figure is from my own audit of the property rather than from the export series, and it is marked so for the same reason the exports are dated.

There are no testimonials on this site and no star rating in its markup, because it has neither. What it has is three exports, a named client against each one, and a repository you can read.

Who it is not for

Questions people ask before they write

Sources

1. Client Google Search Console exports for Orlux Rides, ClearQuest Water and La Soie, handed over 28 August 2026 (Chart.csv, Queries.csv and Pages.csv in each batch). The index and crawl finding on the water site is the studio's own audit of that property, not part of the export series.
2. Pricing benchmarks and the provider rate distributions quoted above, ShepherdUX research note 18, September 2026, drawing on published agency and freelance rate surveys.
3. United Arab Emirates dirham pegged at 3.6725 to the United States dollar, Central Bank of the UAE, rate as of 5 September 2026.