SEO is not one discipline. It is four core ones, plus a handful of specialties, and most businesses only need to be great at one or two. Knowing which is yours is the difference between a budget that compounds and a budget that evaporates.
You read the mechanism. Now see it for your site.
The estimate sketches the SEO system we would build for your business, at your scale. About a minute, no opt-in.
The four core types
- On-page SEO: titles, headings, copy, and internal links. Moves whether a page matches a query and earns the click.
- Off-page SEO: links and mentions from other sites. Moves how much Google trusts you against competitors.
- Technical SEO: crawlability, indexing, speed, structured data. Moves whether your pages get into the race at all.
- Local SEO: Google Business Profile, reviews, and local pages. Moves the map pack, where near-me buying decisions happen.
The specialties
Ecommerce SEO scales product and category pages. International SEO handles markets where Google is not the default engine. Content SEO builds the editorial engine. And answer engine optimization, AEO, earns citations in ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, which is where a growing share of answers now come from.
Which type your business needs first
- Local service business: local SEO, then on-page. The map pack is your storefront.
- Ecommerce: technical plus on-page at catalog scale. Crawl problems compound with every SKU.
- B2B services: content plus on-page. Your buyer researches for weeks before a call.
- Everyone, before any of it: fix technical basics once. A site Google cannot crawl wastes every other dollar.
They share one budget
The types are not a menu where you pick everything. Sequence them: technical once, then the type that matches how your customers buy, then the others as the first one compounds. What each slice costs is in the SEO pricing guide.