SEO is not a switch, and anyone selling it as one is selling something else

Three things decide whether you are found, and only one of them is technical.

The technical part is real and it is finite. A search engine has to be able to reach the page, read it, and understand what it is about. Pages that load slowly, that need JavaScript to show their text, that have no titles or the same title as forty others, are pages that struggle. This is checkable, fixable, and largely a one-off.

The second part is having something worth finding. A page that answers a question somebody actually typed will out-rank a page stuffed with the words they typed, because search engines have spent twenty years getting better at telling those apart. This is the part that takes real work and never finishes.

The third is other people linking to you, and it is the part that cannot be bought honestly. It follows from the second.

What this means in practice is that the first month of useful SEO work looks like an audit and a list of repairs, not like a subscription. And that anyone quoting a monthly fee before looking at the site is quoting for the subscription, not the repairs.

The measure is not ranking. It is enquiries. A site can climb for words nobody searches and stay exactly as quiet as it was.