Somebody has offered to do your SEO for a monthly fee. Maybe they messaged you on WhatsApp, maybe they emailed to say your business is not showing up on Google. Here is how to tell whether what they are selling is real, what a legitimate arrangement looks like, and what to do first that costs nothing.

The useful thing is that Google publishes its own guidance on hiring an SEO, and most of what gets sold in this market contradicts it directly.

What Google itself says to watch for

This is not our opinion. From Google's own documentation on whether you need an SEO:

• No one can guarantee a number one ranking. Google states this plainly and advises finding someone else if an SEO promises first place.

• Be sceptical of anyone claiming a special relationship with Google, or offering a "priority submit."

• Be sceptical of unsolicited outreach, especially cold messages claiming your site is not listed in search engines.

• Avoid link schemes and mass submissions to thousands of search engines or directories.

• You should never have to link back to your SEO.

• Grant read access to Search Console for an audit, not write access.

• Google does not endorse third-party SEO tools. Be wary of any tool claiming Google approved it.

• Check whether recommendations cite official Google documentation.

Google also says you are responsible for the companies you hire — if an SEO puts deceptive content on your site, your site can be removed from the index. The consequence lands on you, not on them.

If you read nothing else before signing something, read that page.

What you should expect: the honest timeline

The range that matches reality is 3 to 6 months for early measurable results, and 6 to 12 months to reach meaningful positions for competitive search terms.

That is not a hedge. Indexing takes time on its own — Google's guidance on recrawling says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and that requesting a crawl "does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all." Authority accumulates slower than that.

The practical consequence for a seasonal Dominican business: SEO started in October does not deliver for the December high season. Plan backward from when you need customers, not from when you want to start.

What you should expect: named deliverables

A legitimate monthly engagement produces things you can point at. Ask for this list before you pay.

• Which pages were created or rewritten, by URL

• Which technical fixes were made, specifically

• What is being tracked, and the baseline it is measured against

• Access to your own Search Console and Analytics, in your own account

• A plain-language explanation of what was done and why

If the monthly invoice is accompanied by a report and nothing else, you are paying for a report. Reports are not work.

What you should not expect

A number one ranking. Google says it cannot be guaranteed. Anybody guaranteeing it is either misinformed or lying.

Results in weeks. See above.

Rankings without content. SEO is largely the work of having pages that answer what people search for. If nobody is writing those pages, there is very little for an SEO to optimise.

Rankings for terms nobody searches. Ranking first for a phrase with no search volume feels like success and produces nothing. Ask what the term is and roughly how often it is searched.

A fix for a site that does not load. We measured 36 Punta Cana and Bayahibe hotel websites and found a median of 17.1 seconds for the main content to appear, with exactly one site in 36 under four seconds and none reaching Google's 2.5-second threshold. No amount of monthly SEO outranks a page customers never see.

The DR-specific red flags

Things we see sold here that are not sold as aggressively elsewhere.

"AI SEO" packages. Google's AI features documentation is explicit that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, that you do not need special schema.org markup, and that you do not need new machine-readable files or AI text files. We also tested what AI assistants actually do: run-to-run overlap across our study averaged 0.63, and one platform swapped half its list between two runs minutes apart. Any single AI visibility score is a coin flip.

Google Ads sold as SEO. Paid placement is a legitimate thing to buy. It is not SEO, it stops the day you stop paying, and it should be a separate line with its own budget and reporting.

Reports of rankings you cannot reproduce. Search results are personalised and localised. A screenshot showing you at number one may show something nobody else sees.

Work done on a site you do not own. If your site sits inside a hosting company's builder and your SEO cannot edit titles, descriptions or structure, there is a ceiling on what any fee can achieve.

What to do before you pay anyone

In our experience this sequence makes more difference than the first six months of most SEO retainers, and the first three steps are free.

1. Fix your Google Business Profile. For most Dominican businesses this brings in more customers than the website. Correct category, current hours, a working website link, real photographs, your name spelled identically everywhere. The thirty-minute version is here.

2. Click your own website link from your listing, on a phone. We found 22% of Dominican restaurants had a website or menu link that was dead, expired or a placeholder.

3. Put your core information on the page as readable text. Prices, services, menu, hours. Not inside a photograph or a PDF. We checked 64 restaurants and 84% had no working online menu, largely because the content was locked in images.

4. Make the site load on a phone on mobile data. Then worry about rankings.

We put a number on how much of this is undone across the market in a separate post. The short version is that the basics are the opportunity.

When monthly SEO is genuinely worth buying

We should say this, because the post so far reads as an argument against the category.

A retainer makes sense when your site is already fast, your listing is correct, your core content exists as text, and you are now competing against businesses doing the same things properly. At that point the work is real: new pages for terms you do not cover, internal linking, structured data, earning genuine mentions.

It also makes sense when you need someone to write the content, which is most of the actual work and the part businesses most often cannot staff. Internal linking alone is a real, unglamorous lever most Dominican sites leave unused.

What rarely makes sense is paying monthly before the free things are done.

What we do

We are not an SEO retainer business. We build websites with the technical groundwork included — structure, speed, bilingual hreflang, structured data, sitemap — and our standard bilingual business site is $950 with the first year of hosting and maintenance included.

If you want ongoing content work, we will tell you honestly whether you are at the stage where it would pay. If the answer is that you should fix your Google listing and come back in three months, that is what we will say.

DR Web Studio works with businesses across the Dominican Republic — send us a message. We publish the research behind these posts, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.