SEO Packages: What Should Be in One, and What Is Padding

Every SEO company sells a package now. Three columns, a price at the top of each, a list of bullets underneath, and a highlighted one in the middle that the company would like you to pick. Owners tell me they read all three and still cannot say what they would actually get for the money.

That is not a reading problem. Most packages are written to be compared on price and on length, not on work. I built the plans page for our own done for you service, and I cut lines from the first draft that would have made the cards look fuller and done nothing for a client. This post is how to read a package the way I read one: what has to be in it, what is padding, how a real ladder scales, and how to tell which level a small business actually needs.

What should be in an SEO package?

Those are the categories, and I covered what a good month looks like inside each one in my post on what done for you SEO should include. This post asks a harder question. When two packages both claim all of those categories, which one is real?

The answer is in how each line is written. A real deliverable is countable, and it lands somewhere you can go and look at. “Four blog posts a month, published on your site under your name” is a deliverable. “Content marketing” is a category. “Two authority links a month from established sites in your industry” is a deliverable. “Link building” is a category.

How do you read an SEO package line by line?

Run the test on a package you have in front of you and the bullets sort themselves into two piles.

The lines that pass are the ones you would notice if they stopped. Posts have a count and land on your site. New pages have a count and land on your site. Links have a count and land on other websites you can type into a browser. Profile posts land on your Maps listing every week. Listings corrections land on the directories where your old phone number used to be. Each of these is something you can check without asking the company.

The lines that fail are the ones that read like a job description. “Ongoing optimization.” “Keyword research.” “Competitor analysis.” “SEO strategy.” “Dedicated account manager.” None of them has a count, and none of them lands anywhere you can see. They are not fake, a company has to research keywords to know what to write, but research is how the company decides what to do. It is not what you bought.

A third kind of line trips people up: technical fixes, the robots and llms files, Search Console and Analytics management. They land on your site but carry no count, because they are maintenance. That is fine. They belong in every package at every level, like an oil change in a service plan, and they are never the reason to pay more.

What is padding in an SEO package?

Plumbing as a premium feature. “XML sitemap submission.” “Google indexing.” “Meta tag optimization.” “Monthly site audit.” These take minutes once the site is set up correctly, and they should be happening on the cheapest plan the company sells. When they appear only on the top tier, the company is charging you for the maintenance it would have to do anyway.

Process as a deliverable. Strategy sessions, keyword research, competitor analysis, reporting dashboards, account management, priority support. One strategy call a month is reasonable. Five bullets about meetings and research are the company describing its own calendar. You are paying for what reaches your site, not for how many people at the agency look at it first.

Volume with nowhere to land. “One hundred directory submissions.” “Social bookmarking.” “Press release distribution” to free wire sites nobody reads. “Fifty backlinks a month” for a price that could not pay one writer. These lines have counts, which is what makes them convincing, but the places they land are worthless or worse. Links from sites that exist only to sell links are the pattern Google’s spam policies describe by name, and when that debt comes due it is your site that pays, not the agency’s.

Here is the first hand part. When we wrote our own plans, the first draft carried lines for priority turnaround, a quarterly data study, conversion testing and call tracking. Every one of them read well on a card. Not one of them would have put a page, a post or a link on a client’s site, so not one of them survived to the published page. The test I used was the one above, and it is the one I would run on anyone else’s package before I ran it on the price.

Should the package scale, or just the price?

A sane ladder has a shape. The base level is the full engine: content every week, your profile and listings, the technical work, tracking and a report. The next level adds the two things content alone cannot do, which are links and new pages, and it roughly doubles the content. Above that, each step adds more of each and starts adding reach, like press coverage, for a business that wants to own a category rather than show up in it.

You can see that shape on our plans page. Posts go from four a month to eight, twelve and sixteen. Links and new pages are absent on the base plan and then run two, four and eight a month on the levels above it. Every step answers the question “what do I get for the extra money” in one line, and if a package cannot do that, the tiers were drawn to hit three price points rather than three amounts of work.

Watch for keywords tracked as the main thing that changes between levels. Tracking should grow with the plan, because a bigger plan is aiming at more searches, but tracking is watching. It costs the company almost nothing to watch more. A ladder whose only step is more tracked keywords over the same four posts is a ladder of reports.

Which SEO package does a small business actually need?

Start by searching for what you sell, in the town or the state you sell it in, and look at who is above you. If the companies on page one have a few pages each and nobody is publishing, the base level will get you found.

If the companies above you have been publishing every month for years, have service pages for every town and every job, and have other sites linking to them, then content alone is bringing a knife to a gunfight. You need links behind the pages and new pages for the places you serve, and that is why we mark our Growth plan as the one to start on rather than the cheapest one. Not because it costs more. Because it is the first level with the two things that move a competitive search.

There is also a case for no package at all, and an honest company will tell you when you are in it. If you are already found by name, nobody in your market is publishing, and the monthly fee is more than one new customer is worth to you, do the free basics yourself. Verify and complete your Google Business Profile, fix your listings, and put a page on your site for each service. Come back when a competitor starts publishing. I laid out that math in whether SEO is worth it for a small business, and the question of whether to hire anyone at all is its own post on hiring an expert, an agency or doing it yourself.

Buying small and moving up is the right way to be unsure. It only works when the plan is month to month. If stepping up means a new twelve month agreement, the flexibility was a sales line, and my post on SEO contracts covers what to strike before you sign anything.

What do “monthly SEO services” and “affordable SEO services” really mean?

The monthly part is right. A one time project makes sense for a technical cleanup or a site migration. But content, links and pages build on each other over months, and a company that sells SEO as a one time job is selling the setup and leaving before the part that works. The retainer is the correct shape. The question is only what sits inside it.

Affordable is where owners get caught. Two packages can carry very different fees and the cheaper one can cost more per deliverable. A low fee that includes two posts and nothing else is expensive content. A higher fee that includes eight posts, two links and two pages is cheaper per piece of work. Divide the fee by the countable lines before you decide which one is affordable. The pricing models themselves, what makes one business cost more than another, and how to compare two quotes line by line are in how much SEO costs for a small business, so I will not repeat them here.

What should you ask before you buy an SEO package?

How many, by count. Posts, pages, links. If the answer is “it depends on your needs,” ask what it would be for a business like yours this month. A company doing the work already has the number.

Where does each one land. Posts and pages on your site, under your domain, that you own when you leave. Links on other sites you can visit. Profile posts on your Maps listing.

Who writes it and who approves it. Your name goes on the posts, so you should see them first. We send every post to the client for review and nothing publishes without their sign off, and the author is a real person at their company. Ask whether that is true of the package in front of you.

What the setup fee covers. A fee for real onboarding work, tracking setup, technical fixes, profile and listing cleanup, is legitimate. It should be itemized. Ours is printed on the plans page and waived on every plan. A setup fee with no list attached is a first month’s padding.

Is it month to month. Yes or no. Anything longer needs a reason you believe, and the exit terms belong in writing.

What the report shows. The work done, by name: which posts, which pages, which links. Then what moved. A report that is only a list of keyword positions is a report that is hiding what did not get done.

If you want to see how we answer those six, how it works walks through our month, SEO company for small business covers the Google side of what we do, and AI SEO services covers how the AI tools fit in.

Hold the package up against your own site

A package is only as good as the gap it fills. Before you compare three columns from anyone, including us, find out what your site is missing right now: whether Google is indexing it, whether your profile and listings agree, whether a buyer asking an AI tool who to call gets your name or a competitor’s. The free audit shows you that in a few minutes.

Then read any package you are considering against the gaps it found. If the posts, pages and links in the package point at the pages that bring you business, and every line passes the three questions, you have found a real one. Every plan starts with a seven day free trial, month to month, with the counts printed on the page where you can hold us to them.