If you'd rather get those enquiries without hiring or managing an agency, Heddle's AI agents find what your customers search for, publish pages that answer them and draft a reply to every enquiry, and a free search audit shows where you're missing today. We sell Heddle, so the section on who should choose something else is meant to cost us a sale when it should.
What a small business actually buys
Page one for this search is agency service pages and agency directories, and agencies usually write the directories too. SEO.com's list of small business SEO companies is written by WebFX and puts WebFX first. Omnius's list puts Omnius first. That doesn't make the lists useless. We'd read them as sellers describing a market they're part of, which is also how you should read this page.
Strip away the branding and the work is fairly standard. On The Map Marketing describes six workstreams it expects from any partner:
- local SEO, meaning your Google Business Profile, reviews, and directory listings with a consistent name, address and phone number
- on-page work on titles and page content
- technical fixes so Google can crawl and index the site
- content aimed at what buyers type
- link building
- reporting tied to leads
WebFX's service page lists much the same work, plus AI search optimization for visibility in tools like ChatGPT.
What changes between businesses is the order. Rankller's guide puts local SEO first for a plumber, dentist or salon, followed by service pages, reviews, content and links. A brand-new site needs its technical foundation before anything else. We agree, and we'd go further. A proposal that sells every workstream at once to a single-location business is selling you a menu. The useful question is which two things come first for you, and why.
What it costs where prices are public
Prices on page one cluster, but they overlap a lot.
- On The Map gives $750 to $2,500 a month for local SEO and $2,500 to $5,000 for national or competitive markets. It says that below roughly $500 the work tends to be templated. It puts the average agency rate at $134.66 an hour ($128 for local work), a full audit elsewhere at $650 to $14,000 (it offers free ones), and a single quality backlink at $100 to $1,500.
- SEO.com gives $100 to $300 an hour and $1,500 to $5,000 a month. The agencies on its list mostly start at $1,000 or more.
- WebFX publishes a starting price of $2,900 a month with an initial six-month commitment.
Rankller's budget table is the most useful one for an owner, because it says what each band buys. At $500 to $1,500 a month it expects local SEO, basic on-page work, light content and monthly reporting. At $1,500 to $3,500 it adds regular content and some link building.
Our view is that the price band tells you little on its own. Two quotes at $1,500 can hide very different amounts of work, so compare the scope behind the number. Contract length matters as well. WebFX requires an initial six-month commitment, while On The Map lists no long lock-ins among the things to look for. Neither approach is wrong, but you should know which one you're signing. Our SEO pricing guide breaks the pricing models down further.
How to judge the work without being an SEO expert
You know your customers. That's enough to judge SEO work, provided the seller gives you four things before you compare prices. If any one is missing, ask again or walk away.
- Counted deliverables. You need to know how many pages, fixes and links you get each month, so you can check they happened. On The Map adds that you should ask for the URLs of links an agency has built for other clients.
- A dated baseline. This records where you rank and how many people find you today, so a seasonal bump can't pass for progress.
- Ownership. The content, the site changes and the accounts should stay yours if you stop.
- Reporting tied to calls and form fills. Rankller warns against any package missing conversion tracking. On The Map puts it bluntly: "If a report cannot tell you how many leads SEO produced last month, it cannot tell you whether the spend was worth it."
A local business has one more check, which is where its rankings are read from. A page on one of our own sites was reported at #48, but it was #3 when read from the city it targets. A report run from somewhere else can be wrong in either direction.
Be wary of anyone promising first place by a date, which On The Map also names as a red flag. Rankings are Google's to give, and a seller who says otherwise is telling you about themselves. If you're not sure SEO suits your business at all, is SEO worth it for a small business covers that question first.
Where Heddle fits
Heddle is for an owner who wants enquiries from search without hiring or managing an agency. We set up 14 AI agents with you, and they do the following:
- research what your buyers search for
- write and publish pages
- fix pages that slip
- draft link pitches and directory listings
- draft a reply to every enquiry
Anything that speaks for you outside your own site waits for a person on your team. The agents draft pitches and replies, and you send them. The agents page shows what each one hands you.
That covers the same workstreams an agency sells, with two differences we think matter for an owner.
First, every built page goes through 32 checks before it ships. They include uniqueness against sibling pages, claims backed by evidence and a buyer test. Those checks came from mistakes on our own sites. Two city pages on one of them once shared 67% of their sentences, so Heddle now measures every page against its siblings with an 80% ceiling.
Second, a weekly email says what each agent did, what it found and what it cost. You get the counted deliverables from the section above without having to ask for them.
Every engagement runs the same eight stages, and each stage has a written definition of done. The first stages produce a record of what you can claim and a dated baseline. Your first pages go live in three to five weeks.
The first decision on whether to build more or prune lands about two and a half months in, as how it works lays out. Heddle is set up in your own repository and accounts, so you keep everything if you stop.
There's no published price. Our plans page explains that each plan is quoted after a free search audit, because a business with a handful of searches worth winning needs less than one with hundreds of locations. Every business starts on the Search plan, and ad spend is never part of the fee.
Proof is the gap to weigh. The method runs on our own sites, but Heddle has no measured traffic or ranking result to show yet, and it names no client results.
Who should choose something other than Heddle
In these situations another option is the better buy.
- You need a price for this week's budget. Pick a provider that publishes one. WebFX lists a starting figure.
- You're a single-location business in a light market. A complete Google Business Profile, steady reviews and a small local package from the lower price bands above may be all you need.
- You want someone to send pitches and replies for you. An agency will do that, and Heddle won't.
- Nobody on your team can approve the agents' work. Heddle needs a named person to approve each agent's work, plus read access to Search Console. Without both, it won't run well.
- You want every word written by a person. WebFX says its own copywriters write and review all client content. Heddle's content is written by agents and checked before it ships.
- You need case results from paying clients before you buy. On The Map and WebFX both publish case studies, and we don't have one yet.
- You need the phone to ring next week. Paid search does that faster than any kind of SEO.