You pay for what you get.
Not for how long it took.
Every quote tells you three things: what you get, roughly how long it takes, and a fixed price. I show the hours behind it too, so you can check my working. If it takes me longer, that is on me. All prices in NZD, and the number does not change once I have seen your budget.
The output is fixed. The hours are my problem.
Most agencies sell you time and hope the result follows. I do it the other way round. Here is what goes into every quote, and why it comes in under an agency for the same result.
What you get
A specific list, not “SEO support”. Redirects mapped, schema written, llms.txt live, tracking set up, titles rewritten on every page. Each item says what it fixes and why it matters.
How long it takes
A real timeframe. For most sites, the SEO and AI foundations are finished in roughly one to two months. You also see the hours guide, around 10 hours a month on Foundations, so the price is easy to sanity-check.
A fixed price
One number for that output. Heavy month or light month, the invoice is the same. Work outside the scope is NZ$150 an hour, and I quote it before it starts. No surprise lines.
The usual agency invoice
- Hours logged across an account manager, a strategist, a junior and a PM
- Time spent learning your site billed back to you, every month
- A retainer that pays for availability, not for anything finished
- Price set after the discovery call, against your budget
How I quote
- One person, doing the work, start to finish
- A list of deliverables, a timeframe and one fixed price
- The same end result for every client: foundations fixed, AI signals in, tracking live
- If it is not worth doing, I will tell you before you spend anything
Why it costs less than an agency for the same result
Most of an agency’s hours go on figuring things out. I have written down how I audit, fix, structure schema, write and report, and I keep a context file for every client. AI does the research and crawling against that model and hands me a clear, ordered list of what to do. So my time goes on doing the work, not working out what the work is. The standard is the same. The hours behind it are fewer, and I pass that on.
It is also why two sites that look nothing alike can cost about the same. A 300-page Webflow site lets me automate alt text, CMS and meta edits through its API. A 30-page custom build means doing them by hand. I scope every site properly first, then nudge the price up or down for size, platform and who is implementing.
Same result. Pick how far you want to take it.
Each tier is a defined output with an hours guide beside it. Every one opens with a full technical, AI-visibility and content audit. By default I hand everything over ready to paste and your team puts it live. Want me to do it? Add hands-on implementation for $500/month on any tier.
SEO and AI search, sorted.
The technical and AI foundations fixed properly, then content that gets cited. Usually done in 1–2 months, then ongoing content and AI visibility tracking that builds on it.
- Redirects, sitemap, robots.txt, canonicals and indexing fixed, so Google sees the right site
- New titles, descriptions and H1s for every key page, ready to paste
- Schema and llms.txt, so AI engines know exactly who you are and what you do
- AI crawlers let in, and your brand described the same way everywhere
- GA4, Search Console and conversion tracking, so you can see what is working
- A priority keyword list and a baseline of where AI cites you today
- From month 3: two long-form pieces a month built to rank and be quoted
Content that ranks. Sales that closes.
More content, and sales assets built from what prospects are actually asking rather than what marketing assumes.
- Everything in Foundations, at twice the content output
- Four long-form pieces a month, mapped to where buyers are in the decision
- Comparison and alternatives pages that put you on the shortlist while prospects are still researching
- A sales one-pager each month, built from a debrief on the objections you are actually hearing
- Your sales team armed with something worth sending after the call
- A monthly performance summary in English, not a dashboard screenshot
- Optional: I implement and publish it all, +$500/mo
Foundations Sprint. Fixed once, properly.
For teams that want the foundations fixed without a monthly commitment: a re-platform coming up, an in-house marketer about to start, or you just want it done. I log into your CMS and make every change myself, so nothing sits in a backlog waiting for a developer.
Talk about a sprint →- Schema on every key page template
- New titles, meta descriptions and H1s, written for buyers and AI
- Heading structure cleaned up across the site
- Internal links added and orphan pages rescued
- Alt text across the image library
- Redirects, broken links and crawl clean-up
- AI visibility baseline before, and a re-check after
- A handover note, plus a migration spec if you’re moving platforms
What actually gets fixed.
Every retainer opens with the same audit. It runs across technical health, AI visibility, content quality, search-experience fit and the shape of your topic coverage. Below is what that means for you, rather than a list of the settings I change.
So AI engines can reach you at all
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI can all fetch your pages, instead of being turned away by one line in a file nobody has opened in two years
- Your words exist in the HTML a crawler receives, not only after JavaScript has run
- New and changed pages get noticed in days rather than weeks
- Every page you want found is findable, and the ones you do not are cleanly out of the way
- Google stops splitting your ranking across three near-identical versions of the same page
- Old links keep working instead of dropping people on a dead end
So AI quotes you by name
- Your company, services, prices and reviews exist as facts a machine can quote, not prose it has to interpret
- A plain summary at the root of your domain telling AI engines what you actually do
- Each section answers one question, in its first line, where retrieval looks for it
- Passages sized to be lifted whole into an answer rather than half-quoted
- Your brand described the same way on your site, LinkedIn, G2, Crunchbase and every directory a model has seen, so it has one confident answer instead of three uncertain ones
- Credentials and named authorship attached to the work, so there is a person behind the claim
So you make the shortlist
- Comparison and "alternatives to" pages that put you in frame while a prospect is still building their list
- Content that matches what the search actually wants, so you stop aiming a blog post at a query that wants a pricing page
- Posts that reinforce each other instead of quietly competing for the same term
- The questions buyers ask before they ever contact you, answered on your site first
- Coverage deep enough that you own the topic rather than renting one keyword
- Pages judged from your buyer's point of view, not only the algorithm's
So a sceptical buyer believes it
- A reader can tell who wrote it and why they would know
- Claims carry figures instead of superlatives
- Thin pages that were never going to rank get merged, rewritten or retired
- Nothing reads like it was generated and shipped without being read
- Contact details, terms and ownership visible enough that trust is not a question mark
So the page does not lose them
- Loads before a buyer gives up on it
- Stops jumping around while images and fonts settle
- Reads properly on the phone they actually opened it on
- No browser warnings interrupting the visit
- Images that carry meaning for search instead of being invisible weight
So you know whether it worked
- Which AI engines are citing you, and for which questions
- What you newly rank for, and what slipped
- Which pages are pulling their weight and which are dead freight
- What changed since last month, written in English
- A straight answer when something is not working, rather than a reframed metric
Not everything fits a retainer.
A fixed price per output, with a typical timeframe. Scoped properly before anything starts. No “request a quote” theatre, and no hourly meter running.
What is not included.
No paid media or PPC management. No social account management. No web design or development builds. No PR or media outreach. No link-building campaigns. And no promises about AI citations inside 30 days, because that is not how the retraining cycle works.
If you need one of those, I will tell you and point you somewhere sensible rather than take the work.
Pricing questions
Want to know what yours would cost?
Send me your domain and what you are trying to fix. I will come back with what you would get, how long it would take and a fixed price. And if it is not worth doing, I will say so. No deck, no discovery theatre.