The First 90 Days of an SEO Engagement, Month by Month: What Rs.40,000 a Month Ships (2026)

Most SEO retainers in India are sold as a monthly fee and bought as a three-month commitment. Ours is the same: the Foundations tier on our SEO services page is Rs.40,000 a month with a 3-month minimum, so the real first decision is Rs.1,20,000 before GST, or Rs.1,41,600 once 18 percent GST is added. That buys up to 20 tracked keywords, a technical audit with fixes, 10 optimised pages, 2 researched articles of at least 1,200 words and 4 to 6 earned links every month, plus schema work and a monthly report. This guide lays those 90 days out week by week, so you know what should exist at each checkpoint before you sign, and what it is unreasonable to expect yet.

What do the first 90 days of a Rs.40,000 SEO retainer cost and produce?

Two things sit outside those figures. GST is added to the retainer for Indian clients, which is why the second column exists. And tool subscriptions held in your own name, a rank tracker or CMS plugins for example, are not in the fee. Everything else on the list above is, including the audit, the monthly re-crawl and the schema and entity work that makes pages eligible for AI answers as well as blue links.

What happens before the first invoice?

The engagement starts with a free audit and keyword map: a technical crawl, a Search Console review and a competitor gap analysis, delivered as a written keyword map and a 90-day plan within 5 working days. You keep that document whether or not you hire us. It is also the document the next 90 days are measured against, so read it as a contract, not a sales deck. Every keyword on it should have real search demand and one assigned page.

Google's own advice on hiring an SEO is worth following at this stage: if an agency offers an audit, grant read access to Search Console only, not write access, and treat any promise of first place in search results as a reason to find someone else. Ask what results to expect and in what timeframe. The rest of this guide is our answer to that question.

What does month one of an SEO engagement actually ship?

The order is deliberate. Rankings cannot compound on pages Google struggles to crawl, render or index, so the first three weeks are the unglamorous fixes. A month-one report that shows two articles and no technical log has the order backwards. If your site is on Wix or a similar builder, the audit should also say plainly what the platform blocks, particularly around speed and structured data, before you are three months into a retainer.

What changes in month two?

Month two starts with the monthly rhythm the whole retainer runs on: a re-crawl and a Search Console check in week one, then production for the rest of the month. The difference is coverage. Foundations tracks up to 20 keywords, and the keyword map assigns each one to a single page so your own pages never compete for the same phrase. That means at most 20 target pages. At 10 pages a month, on our arithmetic, every mapped page can have its first optimisation pass by the end of month two.

• Pages 11 to 20 rewritten against the map: titles, headings, body copy, internal links and image data.
• Articles 3 and 4 briefed from keyword gaps, approved by you, published with internal links and FAQ schema.
• Another 4 to 6 earned links, taking the running total to 8 to 12.
• Schema and entity details kept in step with the rewritten pages.
• Report 2, which is the first one with a month of change to compare against the baseline.

Month two is also the earliest point where our own page says long-tail movement can typically start: its process places first movement in months 2 to 4. Long-tail means the longer, more specific phrases a page also ranks for, usually low in volume but high in intent. It does not mean your main commercial keyword.

What does month three add, and what is decided at day 90?

With every mapped page given a first pass, the month-three pages go where the data points: second passes on pages that are getting impressions but few clicks, and supporting pages that feed internal links to the page that sells. Articles 5 and 6 and the next 4 to 6 links land. Keywords are re-mapped every quarter, so the end of month three is the first re-map, which moves effort toward the phrases that are showing demand and away from the ones that are not.

Day 90 is also when the minimum term ends. After the first 3 months the retainer runs month to month with 15 days notice, and you keep every page, article, link and report if you stop. That is the moment to read report 3 against the 90-day plan from before day one. If your site also needs to be cited inside AI answers, compare this calendar with our AI SEO month-by-month guide, which runs the same Rs.40,000 tier logic for the AI search optimisation service that sits on top of this one.

What should you expect to see in Search Console by day 90?

Less than most sales decks promise, and that is the honest answer. Our own process puts first long-tail movement at months 2 to 4 and the point where traffic usually bends upward at months 4 to 9. Day 90 sits at the start of that window, so judge it on the things that should already be true.

How do the first 90 days compare on the Rs.75,000 Authority tier?

Authority also adds content clusters and Google Business Profile posting, which matters if a large share of your searches show a map pack. A single-location business that mainly needs the map pack may be better served by local SEO at a lower monthly fee than by moving up an SEO tier. For what each tier buys over a full year rather than a quarter, see our SEO cost guide.

What is not included in the first 90 days?

• Website rebuilds or new page designs beyond on-page edits, quoted as a separate project.
• Paid placements, sponsored posts or any link a publisher charges for.
• Google Ads or any other paid media spend.
• Rank trackers, CMS plugins and other tool subscriptions held in your own name.
• Product photography, video or original illustration for articles; heavier publishing schedules belong to content marketing.
• GST, added to the retainer for Indian clients.

Every figure in this guide comes from the tiers on our published pricing page. The cumulative totals, the GST sums and the two-month page coverage are our arithmetic from those tiers, not separate promises. What we will not put in a 90-day plan is a ranking guarantee, because nobody controls where Google ranks a page.