Ongoing SEO for small businesses
Theo builds the website, hosts it and does the ongoing SEO work for $69.99 a month on the Starter plan, free for the first 30 days. The goal is more visitors from Google search and AI search tools, month after month, without an agency retainer or a separate design quote.
Small business SEO services from Theo cost $69.99 a month on the Starter plan, free for the first 30 days, and that price includes the website, hosting and the ongoing work. Pro is $129.99 a month with more weekly pages and posts. Basic, at $29.99 a month, is the site and hosting without the SEO program. Thryv's roundup of affordable SEO services names Third Marble, whose own page lists $499 to $3,499 a month, and a company called Small Business SEO, whose page lists $1,000 to $5,000 a month, both as of October 2026. An agency's website is usually a separate quote. On Starter and Pro, Theo does the same jobs: keyword research, new pages and posts, technical fixes and work toward citations in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. On every plan, connecting Google also submits your sitemap through Search Console, the free tool Google gives site owners. Results compound over months, not days.
Sites Theo built
Sites that get found from search give each question a customer types its own page, with a title that matches the question and the answer near the top: one page for the comparison, one for the worry, one for the town. Below are three sites Theo built that are laid out that way, each with what it gets right and a live version to open. On Starter and Pro, the weekly work drafts pages of this kind for your site.
Built by Theo
Tolverud Metal Roofing
What it gets right
Built by Theo
Tullberry Tax Resolution
What it gets right
Built by Theo
Haverlund House Cleaning
What it gets right
Want to see live customer sites in your industry? Ask the team, and they will share the ones whose owners have agreed. Or see every example.
What the work produces
SEO is a list of jobs done every week, not a report once a quarter. On Starter and Pro, Theo does these jobs on the site it built and hosts. The work never draws on your chat credits, which are spent only on edits you ask for in chat. Each item waits in the Growth tab, your running record of the work, until you publish it. A weekly report adds them up. The six jobs below are the core of the program, in the order they usually happen on a new site. What they did on sites Theo built is shown trade by trade, for accountants, churches, cleaning companies, contractors, dentists, electricians, financial advisors, HVAC companies, insurance agencies, landscapers, lawyers, nonprofits, plumbers, restaurants, roofers, therapists and veterinarians.
Theo finds the searches your customers type, checks which competitors already rank for them and picks the ones a small site can win first. Those picks decide what gets written next. For a plumber that means separating water heater searches from drain cleaning searches and giving each its own page, then adding the towns the trucks actually drive to. Tolverud Metal Roofing, one of the sites Theo built on this page, shows the shape: a page for standing seam or exposed fastener, one for rain and hail, one for metal over shingles and one for barns and cabins, each written around a single question a buyer types. The research is redone as pages start to rank, and the list of target searches changes with it.
Every week Theo drafts pages for the services and areas you want to be found for, posts that answer the questions customers ask before they call, and landing pages for offers that need their own address. Tullberry Tax Resolution, for example, gives each IRS problem its own page, from payment plans to penalty relief and unfiled returns, plus a guide called Got a letter from the IRS? that walks through the first five days. Each new page is written from the research and linked from the pages that already get visits, so it is not an orphan waiting to be found. Pro drafts more pages and posts each week than Starter.
Fixed on the site, not left in a report. Titles, descriptions, headings, internal links, the sitemap and crawl paths stay clean as the site grows. Each fix is drafted on the site itself, ready to publish. Every Theo site is a static site served over HTTPS, so pages load fast without a caching plugin or a hosting upgrade. Page speed work is part of the weekly fixes on Starter and Pro. Once Search Console has enough visitor data, its Core Web Vitals report shows how Google measures each page for loading, responsiveness and layout shift. A rebuilt site starts clean, and the weekly fixes keep it that way as pages are added.
Submitted to Google, not left waiting. A page Google has not indexed cannot rank. Connecting Google submits your sitemap through Search Console on every plan, so Google finds every new page, and every changed one. The Analytics tab can show how many of the pages in your sitemap Google has indexed so far. Google's own guidance says a crawl can take from a few days to a few weeks. That delay is one reason the first weeks of the program look quiet from the outside, even while the work is landing. If the site is not in Google at all yet, the guide on how to get your website on Google explains what indexing means and what to check first.
A search like "electrician near me" pulls from two places: the website and the business listings. Both have to say the same thing. On the website, Theo drafts service-area pages by town and keeps the phone number, address and hours on every page. Haverlund House Cleaning gives its towns and days a page of their own, one route per weekday, so a search for house cleaning in a nearby town has a page to land on. For the listings, Theo's Boost checklist walks you through Google Business Profile, Facebook, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places and Yelp, so the profile that appears in map results matches the site. Theo handles the website half, and the listings themselves stay in your own accounts.
Theo works toward your business being named when someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation. Google's documentation for its AI features says a page needs no special file or markup to appear in AI Overviews, and our guide to showing up in AI Overviews walks through the checks. The page only has to be indexed and eligible to show in search with a snippet, so the indexing work above is the first step. ChatGPT search draws on its own crawler and on Bing's index. A page that Google, Bing and ChatGPT's crawler can all read is eligible for both AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers. The pages themselves put a clear answer near the top, include a question section and state the business's name, location and services plainly. Pages with that shape are easier for those tools to quote.
Who this is for
This is for you if you want more customers from Google and do not want to manage a writer, a developer and an agency. In Theo's audit of 6,861 small business websites, 47 percent of the 4,633 sites with search data got an estimated zero visitors a month from Google search, per The State of Small Business Websites 2026. A site in that position usually needs two things: pages that answer what customers search for, and someone who keeps publishing them. Theo fits a business with one location or a service area, a clear list of services and a budget under $150 a month. Booking, payment and member tools stay where they are, and the site links to them. Rankings take months to earn, and no one can promise them.
Which plan
Three questions settle it for most owners, and none of them need a sales call.
Many do not, and the owner is usually the last to know because the site looks fine on a phone. If Search Console shows searches for the business name and little else, a redesign alone will not fix it. The fix is new pages and time, which is the work Starter and Pro do every week. The free audit reads any site with no login. It estimates the search traffic, checks search health and lists the specific fixes, so you know where you stand before you spend anything.
If you only need a site and hosting and plan to do nothing after launch, Basic at $29.99 a month is the plan. It has no SEO program. If you want visitors from search, Starter at $69.99 a month is the plan that includes the work. It is free for the first 30 days, so the first month of pages and fixes costs nothing. Most owners who reach this page want Starter. Basic suits a site that only has to exist, like a card for people who already know the business. If you want the whole job in one place (the design, your changes and the search work), website management shows how that runs after launch. To see whether the search work pays for itself in your business, is SEO worth it for a small business does the math with your own numbers.
Starter suits one location and a short service list: a handful of service pages and weekly posts cover what people search for. Pro, at $129.99 a month, suits a business with several services or areas that each need their own pages. Pro also fits an owner who wants room for bigger changes in chat (7,000 credits a month against 4,500) or read-only access to the site code. If you are unsure, start on Starter. The free 30 days will show how many pages the business actually needs.
Included
Every SEO plan starts with a site Theo builds from a description of the business, or rebuilds from your current site's URL to match its look. There is nothing to set up beforehand. The first build is free, and you see a draft of the site before any trial begins. Photos go into the chat by drag and drop. The small business website design page covers that build in detail.
Theo hosts the site as a static site over HTTPS. You pay no separate hosting bill, and there is no plugin to update or server to patch. The paid extras are top-up credits and any domain name you buy through Theo. Starter and Pro accounts can also buy the optional paid directory submission packages listed in the Boost checklist. The website maintenance services page explains how hosting, security and your changes are looked after on every plan.
Pages, posts and technical fixes are drafted every week on Starter, with more pages and posts on Pro. They wait in the Growth tab for your review unless you turn auto-publish on. The plan sets the pace, so there is no retainer to negotiate. The work carries on for as long as the plan is active. For anything else, you type the change in the chat and Theo makes the edit. Those edits use chat credits, and the SEO work never does.
Core service pages get clearer headings, a question section, calls to action and internal links, all built around the searches from the keyword research. The pages customers land on then read as answers rather than brochures. Pages that already get visits are improved along with the new ones.
Traffic only helps if the page asks for the call. Over time the same program refines the copy, calls to action, layout and page flow on the pages that get visits. The goal is more visits that end in a call, a form or a booking on the tool you already use.
Once Google Analytics and Search Console are connected, the Analytics tab shows Google clicks, impressions, the average position and the top pages. It can also show how many pages Google has indexed. On Starter and Pro, the weekly report counts the new pages, posts and updates. The Growth tab lists each page, post and fix as it arrives, so you can see what changed without asking. If you are comparing services, ask each one for the same list of last month's pages and fixes, with links.
Process
Describe the business in a sentence or two, or give Theo the URL of your current site so it matches the look. The first preview is usually ready in minutes. You refine it in the chat by typing changes in plain English, such as "move the reviews above the services" or "add a page for water heater repair", and by dragging in photos. Nothing is charged while you build and refine the draft. Publishing is the step that starts the Starter trial or a paid plan, so use the free build to decide whether the SEO plan is worth paying for.
When you publish, the site is live on a temporary address, and your own domain takes over once it points at the site. Theo walks you through it: point both the root and the www version, turn off forwarding and parking at the registrar, and leave the email records alone. The registrar's records usually update within a few hours, and your old site keeps running until the domain switches over. You can also buy a domain inside Theo if you do not have one yet. It is registered in your name and stays yours if you ever leave. Then sign in with Google once, and Theo sets up Google Analytics and Search Console. The SEO work switches on once the domain and both connections are in place, so do this early in the 30 free days of Starter.
Theo researches keywords and competitors first, then drafts pages and posts and fixes technical issues. You approve each item in the Growth tab before it goes live, unless you switch on auto-publish. The weekly email gives a count of what was added, and the Analytics tab shows what Analytics and Search Console report. In the first weeks, Search Console usually shows impressions before clicks. Impressions mean the pages are indexed and appearing in results, and the clicks follow as the pages move up.
Search traffic builds as pages get indexed, earn links from the rest of the site and move up. That takes months, not weeks, and every published page stays on the site. Buy My Lunch, a school lunch service that moved to Theo in June 2026, went from 131 clicks from Google search in one 90-day period to 929 in the next. Over the same two periods, its impressions rose from 7,500 to 61,700 and its average position in search results moved from 13 to 8. All of these figures come from its own Search Console data through September 27, 2026. Theo keeps writing and fixing while the plan is active, and you can ask for any change in chat at any time.
Pricing
The ongoing search work is part of Starter and Pro. Basic is the site and hosting on its own. Starter is free for the first 30 days.
| Plan | Per month | Ongoing search work | Chat credits | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $29.99 | Not included | 1,500 a month | Owners who just want their site live and easy to update. |
| StarterFree for 30 days | $69.99 | Included, uses no credits | 4,500 a month | Owners who want the site handled without heavy publishing volume. |
| Pro | $129.99 | Included, uses no credits | 7,000 a month | Owners who want more capacity, more publishing, and more room to experiment. |
No contract, cancel anytime, and you own the site and its content. The pricing page lists what each plan includes and how chat credits work.
Theo is the best in the game. I was originally forking over hundreds of dollars for a website hosting service only to be on the third page of Google search, but with Theo, I have a gorgeous site constantly optimizing SEO and actually getting me conversions. Truly life changing stuff, couldn’t be more grateful
Theo is a fantastic platform, not only from a build and usability standpoint, but in terms of real, measurable performance. The platform is intuitive, well thought out, and easy to work with. More importantly, we saw significant lifts in a remarkably short period of time, and the analytics gave us a clear view into what was driving it. It has been genuinely impressive to see how quickly Theo makes an impact.
This tool is amazing! Truly the best bespoke AI tool that I've come across in the past year. The website design capabilities are tremendous, and even though I've only experienced 2 months of how Theo can support with SEO, the increases in traction we saw were significant. I've been telling everyone I know who could benefit from Theo to start using it today.
Compare
| Theo | Typical agency | DIY builder, web guy or your nephew | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $69.99 on Starter, free for 30 days; $129.99 on Pro; Basic at $29.99 is the site and hosting without the SEO program | Third Marble $499 to $3,499 and a company called Small Business SEO $1,000 to $5,000, per their own pages as of October 2026. The rest of Thryv's roundup lists no monthly price | Your time plus a builder plan, or his rate, if search is his thing |
| Website included | Yes, built and hosted by Theo, first build free | No, usually a separate design quote | Yes, the site is usually the whole job |
| Who writes the pages and posts | Theo drafts them every week from its own keyword research, for your review | The agency's writers, on a retainer schedule | You, mostly; he may tidy up what you send |
| Technical fixes and indexing | Drafted on the site for your review, with your sitemap submitted through Search Console, included | Varies by agency | Whoever knows where the settings are, when someone thinks to check |
| Local listings | The website side, by Theo, plus a Boost checklist on Starter and Pro for Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp and Facebook | Often a separate local SEO service | You, one listing at a time, unless he offers to help |
| AI search (ChatGPT, AI Overviews) | Worked toward on Starter and Pro | Varies by agency | Up to you, and whatever you both read about it |
| Reporting | Growth tab plus a weekly report | Periodic reports | Whatever you set up, or a screenshot he sends now and then |
| Commitment | None, cancel anytime | Usually a contract term | Usually none, beyond a plan or a family promise |
FAQ
At Theo, it is $69.99 a month on the Starter plan, free for the first 30 days, with no build fee on top. That price includes the website, hosting and the weekly SEO work. Pro is $129.99 a month for more weekly pages and posts. The two companies from Thryv's roundup named above start at $499 and $1,000 a month. Third Marble quotes the website separately, and Small Business SEO includes one only on its plans from $1,500 a month. The pricing page has the full plan details and explains chat credits.
Search traffic builds over months, not weeks. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO puts the payoff at four months to a year. In the first 30 days, expect the site live, the first pages published, your sitemap submitted to Google, and impressions starting to appear in Search Console; clicks follow as the pages move up. On Starter and Pro, those first pages and posts wait in your Growth tab. Connecting Google submits your sitemap on every plan, and Google rereads it on its own, so each page you publish is on the list it checks. From there the work compounds, because every published page stays on the site and gives Google more to show. No one can promise a ranking, and anyone who does is not being straight with you. Buy My Lunch, which moved to Theo in June 2026, is a fast case, not a promise. Along the way, the Analytics tab shows Google clicks, the average position and the top pages, and the weekly email keeps count of the new work.
You do, always. Theo hosts the site, and every page and post on it belongs to your business, along with the photos and copy you added in chat. Pro customers can also read and copy the site code through GitHub. If you leave, save the text and images you want to keep before the plan ends.
Yes, at any time, with no long-term commitment and no contract term. The cancellation confirmation gives the date the subscription ends, and your site keeps running until that day. After that date the site comes down, so save the words and photos you want to keep before it ends.
At Theo, the package is the plan, and there is no separate SEO add-on to buy. Starter includes the site, hosting, 4,500 chat credits a month and weekly content and fixes. Pro raises the credits to 7,000 a month and adds more weekly pages and posts, more room for bigger changes and read-only code access. The SEO work itself never uses credits. Credits pay only for changes you ask for in chat: a small edit uses a little, a new page more and a redesign the most. Top-up credits roll over and never expire.
In Thryv's roundup, the lowest listed monthly price is Third Marble's, which its own page puts at $499 as of October 2026, and the website is usually quoted separately. Theo is $69.99 a month on Starter with the site included, because it builds and hosts the site itself. The work stays in one place, with no handoffs between a designer, a developer and an agency. Theo links to the booking, payment and member tools you already use rather than building custom code. No service can promise a ranking, so read a ranking guarantee as a warning sign.
The website half, yes: pages for the services and the towns you serve, click-to-call and the address on the site, technical fixes and indexing, all part of Starter and Pro. Those same plans add Theo's Boost checklist for the listings that feed map results. It walks you through Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp and Facebook one at a time. Each listing then shows the same name, address and hours as the site. Theo is not a listings or review-management agency, so the profiles themselves stay under your control.
Theo does the work on a site it builds and hosts, so the first step is rebuilding yours. Give it your current URL and it matches the look, then you refine the preview in chat. Your old site stays live until you point the domain at the new one. Connecting Search Console also submits your sitemap, on every plan, so Google finds every page you publish. On Starter and Pro, the search work's SEO repair then redirects the old addresses that still get search traffic to the matching new pages, and on any plan you can ask for a redirect in chat. If you are on Wix or Squarespace, the move guides cover what carries over and what to expect in the first weeks.