What SEO actually is

SEO is the work of making your site easier to find in Google. In practice that comes down to three things: the site can be crawled and indexed without obstacles, the pages answer what people are actually searching for, and other sites point at you as a source worth trusting.

That is the long version of one sentence. The rest of this article is what sits behind it, how long it takes, what it costs, and where most businesses lose money.

The three pillars

Every SEO engagement, whatever the niche or platform, reduces to these three groups. If someone is selling you SEO and cannot tell you which of the three their hours went into this month, that is the first red flag.

Technical SEO. Whether Google can reach your pages and understand them: speed, indexing, URL structure, duplicates (usually from product variants and faceted navigation), sitemaps, structured data. This is the foundation. Without it everything else leaks out of a broken bucket - you can publish for months and simply never get indexed.

Content and structure. Whether you have a page for what the person is searching for, and whether it answers them better than the next result. Most projects are decided here, because most sites have pages for what they want to sell rather than for what people type into Google.

Authority. Whether other sites point at you. In a small market this is both the slowest part and the most frequently faked.

How long it takes

The honest answer is 3 to 9 months to a result you can see in revenue rather than only in a report. The spread depends almost entirely on your starting point.

• Existing site with a sound technical base and some authority: first movement at week 6-8, meaningful results by month 3-4.
• Site with a broken technical base: the base gets fixed first, which alone can take 4-6 weeks, and only then does growth start.
• New domain from scratch: realistically 6-9 months, because you have neither history nor links.

Anyone promising you position one within a month either does not understand SEO or is counting on you not to.

What it costs

Below roughly €150/month you are buying a report, not work. Between €250 and €800 a month is where one person or a small team can genuinely put hours into your project. Above that you are paying for teams, content at volume and link building.

My packages start at €499/month, month to month, with no long contract. The full breakdown is on the pricing page. See pricing

A practical rule: if the monthly fee is less than the cost of 3-4 hours of a consultant's time, then nobody is spending more than 3-4 hours a month on your project. Budget accordingly.

What this looks like in practice

A few real results from my own projects, so the orders of magnitude are concrete: All case studies with the numbers

• Natural cosmetics store built from scratch on Shopify: €18,400 organic revenue per month after 6 months.
• Fashion online store: +180% organic revenue in 9 months.
• Law firm in Sofia: position #1 in Google Maps for its core local search, in 6 months.
• B2B SaaS after a technical audit: 94% of pages indexed, up from 12%.

Note the last one. Not a single new word of content was written. The problem was that the site rendered through JavaScript that Google was not executing, so 88% of its pages simply did not exist as far as the search engine was concerned. That is technical SEO, and it is the most underrated part of the discipline.

SEO and AI search

More people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews instead of opening ten blue links. That does not cancel SEO, but it changes what wins.

Language models cite sources that are clearly structured, answer the question directly, and carry machine-readable markup. If your page answers the question in its first two sentences and has correct structured data, your odds of being cited go up. If the answer is buried after five paragraphs of preamble, you will not be there.

There is also a technical trap I see constantly: many modern sites load their structured data with JavaScript after the page opens. Google picks it up on a second pass, but most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript at all. To them, your markup does not exist. More on GEO and AI search

How to spot a bad vendor

The most common way businesses lose money on SEO is buying links. The pitch is familiar: a package of 'high quality dofollow links', usually from a network of sites built for no purpose other than selling links.

I know what it looks like up close, because it happens to my own domain. As I write this, the entire backlink profile of dimitarseo.com consists of eight links, all from one PBN network that added me to its own promotional pages without being asked. Each of those pages carries about 3,000 outbound links. Value: zero.

The difference is that I know what I am looking at. A client sold the same thing as a service sees a rising link count in the report and assumes something is happening.

• Ask which of the three groups this month's hours went into. No clear answer means no plan.
• Ask for Search Console access on day one. If the vendor keeps the data, ask why.
• Ask where the links come from. If the answer is 'a network of sites' or 'our partner sites', that is a PBN.
• Ask who writes the content and whether they understand your niche.
• Are they asking for a 12-month contract before showing anything? Long contracts protect the vendor, not you.

Where to start

If you have no SEO yet: start with a technical audit before paying for content or links. In about half the projects I take on, the biggest gain in the first two months comes from removing obstacles rather than adding anything new. What the SEO audit covers

If you already pay for SEO and are unsure what you are getting: open Search Console, check whether the number of indexed pages is rising and whether impressions are moving. Two numbers, five minutes. If both have been flat for three months, you have a problem regardless of what the report says.