What month one actually looks like

A content retainer often gets judged in month one on whether the phone rang more. It’s the wrong measure, and it’s also how month one can end in an argument neither side planned for.

Something still has to be judged. Here’s what.

Why traffic can’t answer the question in 4 weeks

A piece published on day 10 has to be indexed (listed by Google) before it can appear anywhere. Then somebody has to search the exact thing it answers. On a suburb-level trade question that isn’t a daily event.

The volumes are the other half of it. A good page on a trade site can get only a handful of visits a month. Month one sits inside the noise of a normal week, and any chart of it is a chart of nothing.

Nothing should be judged on traffic for at least a month, and that goes into the retainer wording rather than being said once on a call. An expectation nobody wrote down turns into a refund conversation in week 3. If someone quotes you a lead number by a date, ask them what it’s based on.

Week 1. One call, and writing down where you started

The month opens with a recorded conversation about jobs you have already finished. You do no writing and no homework, and nothing depends on you sending anything through afterwards.

Before a word gets written, the starting numbers get recorded and dated, and that file is never edited afterwards. A correction becomes a second dated file. That discipline matters most in month 6, when everyone has a different memory of what things looked like in August. Write your own version down before you hire anyone, whoever you end up hiring.

Nothing is published in week 1. If a piece goes live in week 1, it was written before anyone spoke to you, which tells you exactly what it is made of.

Week 2. The first piece goes up, and the check results come with it

The piece is drafted from the recording. AI does the typing, which is why a piece a fortnight fits inside Hold Your Patch at $1,997 a month (or a piece a month on Stay Found at $1,297) instead of an agency writer’s day rate. Then a person reads it, runs the checks, and publishes it.

What lands in your inbox with it is the part worth paying attention to:

• The live URL and the date it went up.
• The structural check for that page, every line of it, warnings included.
• The site-wide duplication result, with your existing pages in it, not just the new one.

The tell is that the warnings are still printed. Results showing a few warnings are real results. If every line is clean, ask to see the warnings.

Week 3. Nothing is published, and that is the plan

Fortnightly means a gap, and week 3 is the gap. It is also where the doubt turns up, because one piece has been live for 6 days and nothing has visibly happened.

Week 3 has one job that only you can do. Read the piece that went up and check the facts in it. A wrong part, a price that belonged to a different job, a street you never worked in. Nobody else can catch those, and they get cheaper to fix the earlier you say something.

The other thing that should happen in week 3 is the next call getting booked. If the second conversation is being squeezed into the last day of the month, the second piece will be thinner than the first, and it will be thinner for a reason that had nothing to do with you.

Week 4. The second piece, and one page of plain English

On Hold Your Patch that’s two pieces in month one; on Stay Found it’s one. Not 8, not one a week. That’s what honest conversations support, and padding is how a site ends up with pages that repeat each other.

Then a report, on one page, in English: what went up, on what dates, what the checks returned, and what changed. Not a dashboard with 14 gauges on it. If a number went the wrong way, it should say so and say what it means.

Which complaints are fair in week 4

These are fair, and you should make them the day you notice:

• A piece didn’t go up, and nobody told you before you worked it out yourself.
• You were never called, and something got written anyway.
• The piece is about a job you didn’t describe, or reads like it could be about any business in your trade.
• You asked for the check results and got a summary of them instead.
• A fact about your business is wrong on a live page and it is still wrong a week later.

These are not fair yet, however reasonable they feel:

• The phone hasn’t picked up.
• You still sit below the mob down the road.
• You’re not in the map pack (the 3 businesses shown on the map).

Not because you shouldn’t want all 3. Because 4 weeks is not when any of them get decided.

What month one is not

Checking the claims already on your site isn’t part of the retainer. Licence numbers, hours, suppliers, accreditations: that part stays with you, and it is not in the price. It gets sold when it exists.

Google Business Profile copy gets drafted for you and published by hand, so you see each one before it goes up. Review-request messages are drafted too, and you send them from your own number, which is a better message anyway.

And none of this runs on its own. A person rings you, a person checks the draft, a person pushes it live, and a person reads what the checks return.

What moves first, and when you would actually know

The first thing that moves is not calls. It is whether the new page exists as far as a search engine is concerned, and whether it turns up for anything at all. After that, whether the things it turns up for are questions a customer would type rather than phrases a marketer likes.

Three things you can watch yourself in the meantime, none of which need us. Whether the page is indexed at all, which you check by pasting its address into Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool and reading the one-line verdict. Whether the page turns up for its own title, which you check by searching that title in quotes. And whether Search Console’s Performance report has started recording impressions for it, which is the first honest signal that anyone is being shown the page, well before anyone clicks it. Impressions before clicks, clicks before calls. In that order, always.

We don’t put a date on the first extra call, because nobody honest can. What we do instead is keep the same 2 checks running over everything, hand you the output every time, and leave the starting file unedited so month 6 has something real to be compared against.

That is the standard we would rather be held to. In week 4 the fair question is whether the work happened: did the pieces go up on the dates, did the checks run across the whole site, did you get the files. Answer those 3 honestly and month 3 gets to be a conversation about the work instead of a conversation about whether any of it was done.