What an Indianapolis SEO Company Does in 90 Days

Google publishes a page for business owners who are hiring search help, and the service list on it is a fair description of the job: “Review of your site content or structure”, “Technical advice on website development”, “Content development”, “Keyword research”, and “Optimizing for generative AI” (Do you need an SEO?). A local provider adds the parts that only matter inside one metro: your Business Profile, the service area you'll genuinely drive to, and pages that speak to Fishers or Greenwood honestly. Those two halves together are what an Indianapolis SEO agency should be selling you.

Everything below assumes a normal local business with one site, one phone number and a few services worth real money. A clinic in Zionsville and a restoration company covering all of Marion County follow the same sequence, even though the pages and the keywords differ.

Month one is unglamorous, and that's the point. The agency needs read access to Search Console and your analytics, manager access to your Business Profile, and a login for the site. Google's hiring guide is direct about the first one: “If your SEO offers to do an SEO audit for you, be sure to carefully consider what's involved and only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access).” Keep every account in your own name while you're at it, so you can hand it to someone else later without a fight.

The technical floor is smaller than most sales decks suggest. Google's technical requirements come down to three lines: “Googlebot isn't blocked”, “The page works, meaning that Google receives an HTTP 200 (success) status code”, and “The page has indexable content”. Plenty of sites pass two of the three and quietly fail the last one, usually because a platform change flipped a setting nobody thought to review. When Trojan moved its own site onto Cloudflare in September 2026, a managed robots.txt setting turned on AI crawler blocks nobody had asked for, and they had to be switched back off. Platform defaults like that are why a crawl check belongs in week one and again after any migration.

Month one should also capture a baseline you can argue with later. Export clicks, impressions and average position by page and by query before anything changes, and save the file. A month of guesswork disappears when you can open the export and compare. The method is written up in turning Search Console exports into an action plan.

By day 30 you should hold a written list of blocked or broken URLs with the fix and the date it shipped, a map of which page targets which search, and your starting numbers. If none of that exists, month one didn't happen.

Most local sites earn from four to eight pages. For a roofer that's roof replacement, roof repair, storm damage and the main service area page. For a dental office it's the two or three procedures people search by name. Month two goes into those pages and leaves the blog alone.

The rewrite is a sales job with a search constraint. Say what the service includes, who it suits, how the visit or the estimate works, what you charge for in plain terms, and what a customer in Brownsburg should do next. Google's content guidance asks you to evaluate your own pages first: “Evaluating your own content against these questions can help you gauge if the content you're making is helpful and reliable”, and it suggests judging work by “Who, How, and Why” (creating helpful content). Padding the page with “Indianapolis roof repair” over and over does the opposite. Google defines keyword stuffing as “filling a web page with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate rankings in Google Search results”.

Two checks belong here. First, confirm each page is actually indexed before anyone argues about position, because a page Google hasn't indexed can't rank at all. That split is worked through in diagnosing indexation against ranking. Second, make sure the pages link to each other in a way a customer would follow, so your storm damage page points to the estimate page and the estimate page points back.

Month three adds the local layer. Your Google Business Profile has to match reality, since Google's guidelines say “If your business either has a physical location that customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are, you can create a Business Profile on Google” (representing your business on Google). Hours, services, categories and photos all get checked, and the business name gets left alone: “Including unnecessary information in your business name isn't permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile.” If you want the full profile walkthrough, start with Business Profile optimization.

Area pages come next, one or two at a time. A page for Carmel earns its keep when it names the neighborhoods you work in, the jobs you've done there, the response time from your shop, and the permit or HOA quirks that apply. Spinning up thirty near identical city pages invites the opposite result. Google calls that doorway abuse, “when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries”, and scaled content abuse, “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users” (spam policies).

Links in month three should come from things you already do: the chamber you belong to, the supplier who lists installers, the youth league you sponsor, the local reporter who needed a quote after a hail storm. Paid link packages sit inside Google's definition of link spam, which includes “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links”. Ask your agency where each link came from and how.

A monthly report should let you retrace decisions without a phone call. Search Console gives the four numbers worth arguing over, and Google defines them exactly: clicks are “The number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results”, impressions are “How many times your site appeared in Search results”, CTR is “The click count divided by the impression count”, and average position is “The average position of the topmost result from your site” (performance report). Recent figures move, since “The newest data can be preliminary, meaning it's still being collected and might change in the next few hours”.

If a report arrives with a rankings grid and nothing else, ask for the work log behind it. This list of questions that make an agency report useful gives you the wording.

Google's Search Essentials carries the sentence every buyer should read before signing: “Just because a page meets all of these requirements and best practices, doesn't mean that Google will crawl, index, or serve its content.” That's Google describing its own system. Any Indianapolis provider who promises a position is selling you something Google declines to sell.

The same hiring guide warns you off sellers who allege a “special relationship” with Google or advertise a “priority submit” to Google, and it tells you to check references and ask whether the seller cites Google documentation for its recommendations. Both are cheap questions, and they thin out a shortlist quickly. If you're still comparing firms, our guide to choosing a digital marketing agency in Indianapolis covers contracts, ownership and scope.

At the 90 day review, four things tell you whether the money did anything. Your priority pages should be indexed and written for buyers, and your Business Profile should match how you actually operate. Search Console should show impressions and clicks on the terms those pages target, even while positions are still moving around. The fourth one is the hardest and the most useful: calls and form fills that you can trace back to a specific page. Position in the map pack across Hamilton County moves on its own schedule, so read it as a trailing number and read the work log as the leading one.

If you'd rather scope this out before you hire anyone, read what an Indianapolis SEO company should hold itself to and compare it line by line against the proposal sitting on your desk.