Why would I pay monthly once the site is built?

The objection

If we built it properly, why does it need changing?

Because on launch day nobody has used it yet. The audit that shaped the build was a snapshot of a site that no longer exists, and every decision in the build was the best guess available at the time. The data that tells you whether those guesses were right does not exist until the site has been live and gathering it.

Nothing rises from unknown to the top of search on a single change. It gets there by making a change, seeing what moved, and making the next one.

What the month actually contains

On a site we did not build, we work through your site’s editor. We publish content and edit page titles and descriptions. We never touch plugins, themes, code or hosting, so anything that needs those goes in the report for you or your developer.

Who is already on it

The Pickle Jar Therapy, a practice our founder Alex Harvey co-directs, has been on this model since 2025. We built the site, and we have run search for it ever since, rebuilding it in August 2026. What is on the work page is a year of that, not what launch day produced. It shows dated lab results and the search figures from the site’s first month.

This site is on it too. The audit corpus you are reading is the same loop turned on ourselves: we check what we get found for, write the answers that are missing, and check again.

What it costs, and why there is a minimum

From £400 a month on a site we built, and from £550 a month on a site we did not, where the audit comes first and the work has to fit inside somebody else’s platform. What sets the figure above the floor is how many locations and services need their own pages, how much content you want each month, and how competitive the terms are. The quote fixes your monthly allowance in writing before anything starts.

There is a three month minimum, then it runs rolling monthly with 30 days written notice on either side. Notice can be given at any point, but it cannot end the agreement before the end of month three.

The minimum is there for the reason this whole answer is about. Content published in month one is what there is to measure in month three. Less time than that produces an invoice and no answer, which is a bad deal for you and an argument we would rather not have.

Why it compounds and a one-off does not

Each cycle starts from better information than the last. The first month works from launch data, the third from a quarter of real behaviour, the sixth from a pattern. Competitors are also moving, and search itself is moving faster than that: the assistants that recommend businesses today did not exist in their current form two years ago.

A single website change is a bet placed once. This is the same bet placed repeatedly, with the result of the last one in hand.

When not to buy it

If your site is new, give it a quarter first. There is nothing to realign against until there is data, and we would rather say that than bill for a month of guessing.

If your enquiries do not come from search at all, this is the wrong spend, and we will say so on the call rather than after the first invoice.

And if you genuinely only want the site built, that is a real option and we will build it and leave you to it. We just will not pretend that launching and crossing your fingers is the same thing as getting found.

How to tell whether we are earning it

The same test we would tell you to apply to anyone else applies to us, so here it is pointed the right way.

Every month you get the work itself, not a summary of it. Pages published, problems fixed, listings corrected, with links to the actual thing. If a month ever arrives as a report and nothing you can click, that is the month to ask what happened.

The numbers we report are the ones you sell, not your own business name. Ranking for your name proves nothing, because you were always going to. A report built around it is a report designed not to be checked.

Review it properly at six months. If the work has been delivered and the numbers on your services are moving, that is the middle of it working. If the work has been delivered and nothing has moved at all, the approach is wrong and we should change it or stop. After the three month minimum, it is 30 days notice either way, and we would rather you used it than stayed out of politeness.

What we need from you

A named person who can approve content, replies to review requests inside five working days, and access to Search Console, analytics and the Google Business Profile. Where the writing needs a factual check, clinical or legal, that review has to come from you.