SEO Systems

Most SaaS companies treat SEO as a content marketing tactic, write blog posts targeting keywords, publish weekly, hope rankings appear. What they end up with is an accidental SEO surface: pages competing with each other, no clear topical authority, and no compounding mechanism.

The deeper issue is structural. Without a topical map, every new page risks competing with the existing ones. Without an internal linking model, authority leaks. Without semantic coverage, the site looks shallow to both Google and AI retrieval systems. The harder a team works without architecture, the more brittle the system becomes.

I treat SEO as a three-layer architecture problem: entity graph, topical clusters, and internal linking model. Get those three layers right, and content velocity becomes a force multiplier instead of a tax.

The engagement starts with a forensic audit of where the existing system leaks authority, where topical coverage is incomplete, and where the entity graph is ambiguous. From there, we design the architecture in dependency order, clusters before pages, links before content, semantic anchors before publication velocity.

The output is infrastructure your team can run for years. Not a list of recommendations gathering dust in Notion.

For businesses that win customers within a service area, the work is Google Business Profile, citations, location pages and reviews, priced per location. In Ahrefs’ poll of 439 SEO providers, those serving local markets charge $1,557 a month on average, rounded here to $1,550. Fixed engagements are that figure pro rata: 2 weeks is $715.94, rounded to $700, and 4 weeks is $1,431.87, rounded to $1,450.

Reviews have the clearest rules. Google’s policy on fake engagement prohibits paid or incentivised reviews and reviews from people with a conflict of interest, and says businesses may not discourage negative reviews or selectively ask for positive ones. I do none of these.

Links from sites your market reads, earned through outreach, digital PR and content worth citing. Google’s spam policies describe buying or selling links for ranking purposes, exchanging goods or services for links, and advertorials whose links pass ranking credit as link spam. So links are earned, never bought, with no private blog networks and no fixed number of links. You get a report of every link instead.

No reliable survey prices earned link building as a retainer, so it is priced as SEO work by the hour: the average rate in Ahrefs’ poll was $111, and at 19 hours a month that is $2,109, rounded to $2,100 a month. Fixed engagements are that figure pro rata: 2 weeks is $969.98, rounded to $950, and 8 weeks is $3,879.91, rounded to $3,900.