Get found by the people already looking for you.
We are an SEO company in Birmingham, Alabama. We get your business showing up on Google when somebody nearby needs what you do — and we measure it in phone calls, not in a report full of positions that moved.
Don’t know which of these you need? You’re not supposed to — that’s my job. Tell me your trade and your town. I pull your actual Google results, see what is keeping the phone quiet, and hand you the plan — free, whether you hire me or not.
Get my planWhy hiring an SEO company usually goes wrong
If you have been burned before, it was probably one of these three. They are industry standard practice, which is exactly the problem.
They report activity, not outcomes
Ten blog posts published, forty keywords tracked, a dashboard full of graphs — and no way to tell whether the phone rang because of any of it. Activity is easy to sell because it always happens on schedule.
Every client gets the same plan
The proposal was written before they ever saw your business. Same audit, same page count, same "content calendar" — whether you fix roofs or clean teeth. The plan should fall out of the market, not the template.
Leaving costs you everything
The agency owns the site, the listing, the tracking, sometimes even the domain. That is not an accident — it is the retention strategy. Every account we touch is created in your name, so staying is a choice.
We look before you spend. Then we build in this order.
Every engagement runs the same four rules, because they are the four places local SEO money actually goes to die.
Your map listing comes before your website
For most searches in Birmingham, the map of local businesses sits above every other result. If your listing is thin or your reviews are old, that beats anything we could write on your site. So it gets fixed first, in week two, before a single page is built.
One page per job, per town
Somebody with a burst pipe at midnight and somebody pricing a full re-pipe are not the same customer, and they will not call from the same page. Separate pages for separate jobs, in the towns you actually drive to.
We count phone calls, not rankings
Call tracking goes in before any of the work starts, so you can see what a booked job actually cost you. A report full of positions that moved is not a report on whether your phone rang.
We will tell you when it is not worth it
Some jobs do not have enough people searching for them to pay for the work, and some towns are already sewn up. You will hear that from us before you spend, not in month six.
The typical agency, and us
Print this and take it to every sales call you sit through. If their answers beat ours, hire them.
| The typical agency | Terry Baker SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Find out on a sales call | Itemized on the page — from $450/mo |
| What gets reported | A rankings PDF | Phone calls, next to what we shipped |
| The contract | 12-month term, auto-renew | 90 days, then month to month |
| Who owns the accounts | The agency, until you notice | You, from day one |
| Ranking guarantees | "Page one, guaranteed" | None — nobody can sell placement |
| When a market is not worth it | You find out in month nine | We tell you before you spend |
I have been ranking things on Google since 1999.
I’m Terry Baker. I have been marketing on the internet since 1999 — long enough to have watched every shortcut this industry ever sold work brilliantly, and then stop working overnight. Article farms, keyword tricks, link schemes: I saw each era rise and burn from the inside. That is precisely why nothing on this site promises a trick.
I built my career as the publisher, not the vendor. The pages were mine, the rankings were mine, and when Google changed, the losses were mine too. Pay-per-lead landing pages, local map-pack work, organic content that had to earn its keep — for the last three years, running my own portfolio of ranked sites has been my full-time work, with AI-driven workflows most agencies have not caught up to yet.
Today that focus is local service businesses — the companies whose next customer is searching Google right now. My deepest disciplines are the two most agencies quietly outsource: content that earns the click, and links that earn the authority.
Terry Baker SEO is twenty-five years of my own money on the line, offered to Birmingham. When we say we look before you spend — it is because the spend used to be mine.
Terry Baker
Founder · Birmingham, Alabama
Contractors & Trades
Trades do not search the word "SEO" — they search leads, marketing and advertising. "SEO for roofers" gets 2,400 searches a month; "SEO for roofing contractors" gets 260. Every industry below is filed under the phrase that trade actually types.
16 industriesProfessional Services
These verticals carry the highest cost-per-click in local search — some past $200 a click — because a single client is worth thousands. High paid costs are exactly what makes the organic and map results worth the work.
9 industriesSmall Business
A small business does not get a second marketing budget, so the demand is worth checking before the spending starts. Every figure below is a dated, sourced pull.
The questions nobody answers.
Can you guarantee I rank #1? +
No. Google does not sell placement in organic results and nobody controls the algorithm. Any agency that guarantees a position is either redefining the word or counting on you not to check.
What does the free audit actually get me? +
We pull the live Google results for the work you want more of, look at your map listing and your site, and send you what we find in plain English. That includes when the honest answer is that a term is not worth chasing. You keep it whether or not you hire us.
How long does SEO take? +
Local map results generally move before organic pages do, but anyone quoting an exact week is guessing. How old your site is, how many competitors you have and how many reviews you carry all change the answer.
What does it cost? +
Every price is public and itemized. SEO runs $395 to $1,250 a month across three plans, content marketing $450 to $900, and advertising management $450 to $800 plus your ad spend. Each service page lists exactly what every dollar buys — feature by feature. If a scope is not worth the money, we will say so instead of selling it.
Where are you based? +
Birmingham, Alabama. We can sit down with you in person, which is the one thing a national agency cannot do.
Tell us the work you want more of.
We will pull the live search results for it and send you what we find. If the demand is not there, or page one is locked up, we will tell you that — it is a faster answer than a proposal.