Month one is the keywords, the plan, and all of your service pages.
We start with a comprehensive keyword list — not just a primary and a secondary keyword, but keywords for the entire site, including the blog. From that we build the plan: the website design, the development side, and how the content has to be made. That plan goes to whoever is in charge of your website, which is often you, and we work from your feedback before anything gets built.
Then the service pages get done. The content for every service page, the design for every service page, the sitemap, the internal links, and the technical errors fixed. That is the minimum you should have in the first month. We do not build out the whole blog in that time.
You do not get a dated timeline before the work starts.
Before you sign, you see the keywords and how we do SEO, you get references to the work we have done, and we tell you what we can do for you. Once you are happy with that, we sign a contract.
The dates come after that. Only once the comprehensive keyword research is done and we have researched your competitors can we give you a dated timeline — which service pages we start with, and what we need from you. That research is what tells us the scope. Five service pages we can finish easily; a site with a lot of service pages and a lot of design work takes longer.
We do not promise rankings in month one. What we commit to is that this work is finished.
From month two we start on citations — your directory and local listings — and on blogs. How many blogs depends on what you need each month.
From month three it is backlinks, quality ones, along with more blogs written with input from your end, and ongoing maintenance of the site.