In order to really help businesses to achieve greater search engine visibility, there are four main area of seo that should be understood. All professional seo companies understand this and follow these four main pillars of seo, if they do not then they are only doing a fraction of the necessary work that goes into ranking pages on your website.
This is a rather simplified explanation of the work an seo does for every month, but if any of these are missing then you are not getting the full picture and this means you may not be getting good value for money.
In order to decide how to rank your pages on the first page of search results, the audit of your own website and research into your competitors must be analysed and then used to out rank them.
It is a complicated process without the correct skills and knowledge, also of course it is a little time consuming, but once the foundations are strong on your own website, the other work of building backlinks powerful enough to do the job can begin.
It may not always improve your positions quickly, at times it will push you higher almost immediately and at other times it can take several week before the true picture emerges.
People who promised immediate page one rankings for a small fee will never deliver on their promises unless it happens that the keywords used in their campaigns have zero competition or worst of all, have zero traffic potential.
If your intention is to invest in seo and get the best results, you should budget for a 6 month campaign. It may be more than you would like to pay, but you will save a fortune in paid ads over the same time and beyond.