Decision · Team
Why we're stateside-only.
Almost every agency at our price point uses some flavor of offshore execution. We don't. Every client-facing person is in California or another US state on US time. The reason is operational: when an SEO problem surfaces at 3pm Tuesday, the person who can fix it shouldn't be 12 hours into their sleep cycle. The reason is also cultural: a Korean restaurant owner in Cupertino and a marketing agency in Manila have a 14-timezone, language-context-loss gap that costs more than the labor savings.
Counterargument we considered: "the money saved could be passed to the client as lower pricing." Verdict: the businesses we work with are not primarily price-shopping. They are trust-shopping, and stateside delivery is part of that trust.
Decision · Tools
Why our tools are free with no email gate.
The Local SEO Scorecard, the Schema Generator, every diagnostic tool on the site, they're free, they require no email signup, and they don't drip-market you afterward. The reason: gated tools attract bad-fit leads (people who'll give a fake email to grab the tool) and underperform ungated ones (real prospects bounce because of the friction). We'd rather have the tool be useful and have buyers who actually call us be the ones who self-selected based on the tool's quality.
Counterargument we considered: "email lists are valuable." Verdict: only when the list is qualified. A list of people who downloaded a tool because it was free and never engaged after isn't a list, it's a graveyard.
Decision · Reporting
Why we report weekly, not monthly.
Most agencies send 30-page monthly reports nobody reads. We send 1-page weekly snapshots that take 90 seconds to scan: rankings up/down, traffic delta, conversion delta, what we changed, what we're testing next. Weekly cadence catches problems before they become quarterly catastrophes. And it forces us, the agency, to actually do something every week worth reporting.
Counterargument we considered: "weekly reporting takes more team time." Verdict: it does. We'd rather spend the time on the work than on producing 30-page PDFs that get archived without being read.
Decision · Pricing transparency
Why we publish prices on the website.
Most agencies hide prices behind "talk to sales." We publish what can honestly be published. SEOD Foundation starts at $3,500. SEOD Care is $250 a month. Growth and Operations are scoped after a Business Growth Review, because the work genuinely differs business to business and a number attached to unknown scope is a guess with a price tag on it. The reason for publishing anything at all: buyers self-qualify before they call. We waste fewer hours on calls with businesses we are too expensive for, and the people we do speak with arrive ready to evaluate fit rather than negotiate price.
Counterargument we considered: "hidden prices give us pricing flexibility." Verdict: yes, and at the cost of buyer trust. Pricing transparency is the differentiator, not the constraint.
Decision · Marketing
Why we don't run our own paid ads.
SEOD doesn't run Google Ads or Meta Ads against itself. Every client we have came from organic search, referral, or our own SEO/AEO work. The decision is partly principled (if our own SEO doesn't generate enough inbound to fill our pipeline, why would a buyer trust us with theirs?) and partly economic (paid acquisition for SMB-marketing-agency keywords runs $50-100/click; the ROAS is brutal).
Counterargument we considered: "running ads would 10× the lead flow." Verdict: probably. But it would also rebrand SEOD as the agency that bought its way to top-of-funnel, which contradicts the rest of the positioning.
Decision · Geography
Why Bay Area onsite still matters.
Proximity is a real advantage for some of this work. Bay Area is where Eric has run businesses, hired teams, and built the operator network, and the onsite walkthrough that makes Operations work well is something you cannot do from another time zone. So Bay Area onsite stays part of what we offer.
That is not the same as refusing everyone else. SEOD is Bay Area based, with a strong focus on California and Hawaii, and works with businesses across the United States. Most of the work is remote regardless of where a client sits. What we will not do is promise an onsite visit outside the Bay Area that we have not agreed to.
Counterargument we considered: “pick one, local or national.” Verdict: the honest answer is both, stated precisely. Onsite is a Bay Area offer. The rest of the work travels fine.
Decision · Sales
Why we review before we recommend.
A longer sales call does not produce a better recommendation. It mostly produces a longer sales call. What actually improves a recommendation is looking at the business: the brand, the site, the search presence, the advertising, and the numbers. So we stopped promising a call length and started promising a process. The first conversation exists to get enough context to know where the business is, what already works, what looks broken, and what the owner wants to change. Then we run a Business Growth Review and tell you what we would do and what it costs.
We do not need to manufacture a 45-minute call to reveal pricing, because the prices we can publish are already published. We also will not pretend one conversation is enough to diagnose an entire business. It is enough to work out whether we are the right people, which is a different question. Listen, review, recommend, then scope the work.
Counterargument we considered: “a fixed short call is a cleaner promise and easier to market.” Verdict: it is, and we ran it that way for a while. It was also the wrong promise, because it advertised our calendar instead of our judgment. The review is the thing worth committing to.
If any of these sound right
You're probably a good fit.
If most of the decisions above sound right to you, the call will go well. If half of them sound wrong, go with someone whose principles match yours better.
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