What's Included in Local SEO for $400 a Month: A Line-by-Line Breakdown

Why a line-by-line breakdown

Most local SEO offers are hard to compare because they describe outcomes instead of work: "we optimize your online presence," "we boost your visibility." That language makes it impossible to tell what you are paying for, or whether anything happened last month.

So here is our Local SEO plan at $400 a month, one line at a time: what each item is, why it matters for a Charleston business, and what you should be able to see. Even if you never hire us, use it as a yardstick for any local SEO offer you are weighing.

The plan is built for a business that wants to show up in the Charleston map pack and rank for its core services. It runs month to month after a six-month minimum.

Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is the listing that appears in the map pack, and it is the strongest local ranking signal you control directly. Five lines of the plan live here.

Full profile optimization: categories, services, attributes, description, hours. Categories decide which searches you can appear for at all, so we check the primary category against what you actually sell and against the businesses already winning your searches, then add secondary categories that fit. Services get listed one by one, because each one is another search you can match. Attributes, the description, and hours get filled in completely and kept accurate, including holiday hours. You should see a profile with no empty fields and nothing in it that is not true.

Four GBP posts a month. Posts are short updates on your profile: a seasonal offer, a recent job, a reminder before hurricane season, a new service. They show Google the profile is active and give a searcher one more reason to call you instead of the next listing. You should see roughly one a week on your profile.

Photo uploads and Q&A management. Real photos of your work, your team, and your place of business, added regularly, because profiles with fresh, genuine photos look alive. Q&A is the public question section on your profile, where anyone can ask or answer; we watch it, answer accurately, and make sure a stranger's guess is not the answer people see.

Review responses within two business days. Every review gets a reply, positive or negative, specific to what the customer said. Prospects read the answers as closely as the reviews. A calm, useful reply to a bad review often does more for you than another five-star one.

Spam and duplicate listing reporting. Fake listings and duplicates of your own business both cost you map pack spots. Duplicates split your reviews and confuse Google about which listing is real; fakes take places that belong to real companies. We report them through Google's own channels.

If you want to do this part yourself, our Google Business Profile checklist walks through the setup.

On your website

The profile and the site are two halves of the same job. Google trusts a listing more when the website behind it clearly backs it up.

Two new pieces of content a month: service pages or blog posts, keyword-targeted. This is the line that compounds. Over the six-month minimum, that is twelve new pages, each aimed at a search your customers actually make. For most businesses the first pieces are missing service pages, because a site with one page listing everything loses to a competitor who gave each job its own page. Later pieces answer the questions customers ask before they call.

On-page optimization of existing pages, as needed. Titles, headings, descriptions, and copy on the pages you already have, tuned to the searches they should win. "As needed" means we fix what is holding a page back, not rewrite things that already work.

Internal linking and schema updates. Internal links point your own pages at each other so Google understands which page answers which search, and so a visitor can find the next thing they need. Schema is structured data in the page code that tells Google your business name, phone, service area, and services in a form it can read without guessing.

A monthly technical health check: speed, indexing, broken links. Pages that load slowly, drop out of Google's index, or link to dead ends quietly lose rankings. We check every month and flag or fix what we find.

Off your website

Citation audit and cleanup on the core directories. A citation is any listing of your business name, address, and phone: Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, industry directories, the chamber. Google cross-checks them, and every mismatch, an old phone number or an address from a move years ago, chips at its confidence in who you are. We audit the core listings and correct what is wrong.

NAP consistency monitoring. NAP is name, address, and phone. After the cleanup, we keep watching, because data aggregators and old directories have a habit of putting the wrong details back.

Reporting and support

A monthly report: map pack rankings, keyword positions, calls, form fills, and GBP actions. GBP actions are the things people do from your profile: calls, direction requests, and website clicks. The report shows whether your business is getting found and whether being found is turning into calls. Rankings matter, but calls and form fills are the reason you are paying.

Email support. Questions between reports go by email.

What the $400 plan does not include

Knowing what is out of scope is as useful as knowing what is in it. These live in other plans or other services:

• Link building and local PR outreach. Earning mentions and links from local directories, sponsorships, partners, and Charleston publications is part of Growth SEO at $800 a month, along with competitor backlink monitoring.
• More content and service-area pages. Growth SEO raises content to six pieces a month and adds local pages for the areas you serve. If you genuinely serve more than one area, service-area pages can be added to Local SEO.
• A review generation system. Local SEO responds to every review. A structured strategy for getting more of them, with follow-up templates, is part of Growth SEO.
• Conversion work and a quarterly technical audit. Changes to calls to action, forms, and layout on your top pages, and a full technical audit each quarter, are also Growth SEO.
• Ads. If you need calls this week, pay-per-click management is $500 a month plus ad spend, and it works alongside SEO rather than replacing it.
• A new website. The plan runs on the site you have. If the site itself is what is holding you back, we will say so plainly; a small business website is $400 a month on a 12-month term or $3,500 one-time.

Every plan and price is on our pricing page.

Why there is a six-month minimum

Local SEO is not instant, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something else. Map pack movement often shows within the first two or three months, because profile and citation fixes take effect quickly. Organic rankings for your core services usually take three to six months. The minimum is how long the work takes to prove itself; after it, the plan runs month to month. Our SEO timeline walks through what happens in each stretch.

How to judge any local SEO offer

Whether you talk to us or someone else, a few questions sort real offers from vague ones:

• What exactly happens each month? You should get a list like the one above, not a description of outcomes.
• Who does the work, and who do I talk to? You should have one point of contact who can answer for the work.
• What is in the report? Calls, form fills, and map pack positions, not just traffic charts.
• Who owns my Google Business Profile? Your business should own it. A provider should be added as a manager, never become the owner of your listing.
• Do you guarantee rankings? A guarantee is a red flag. No one controls Google's results.
• How do you get reviews? Bought reviews, incentives for reviews, and asking only happy customers all break Google's rules. The answer should be honest asking and honest replies.

If you want to see how other Charleston companies price this work, our guide to what SEO costs in Charleston covers the pricing models you will run into and what drives the number.

Is Local SEO the right plan for you?

Local SEO fits a business whose customers are nearby: contractors and home service trades, professional practices, dental and medical offices, restaurants, and the small shops in between. It is built to get you into the map pack and ranking for your core services. Growth SEO is for a business that wants to own its category rather than appear in it. If the top three in your category are clearly spending real money on SEO, our Competitive Markets tier is quoted after we have seen what they are doing.

Not ready to hire anyone? Our local SEO checklist covers the steps you can start this week. Want to see what the content looks like for a trade? Our posts on HVAC SEO and plumber SEO show the kind of service pages that win local searches.

When you are ready, tell us about your business and we will tell you which plan fits, or whether you need one at all yet.