Never pay a large setup fee for ongoing work, a long contract you cannot exit, or a fee to own your own website, domain or content. You should also never pay for guaranteed rankings or for listings and profiles you can create yourself for free.
Setup fees are the first one to question. A website build is real work and worth paying for. A separate setup fee for starting an SEO plan, on top of the monthly price, usually just pays the agency to onboard you. Long contracts are next. A twelve month commitment protects the agency, not you. If the work is good, you will stay. If it is not, you should be able to leave without buying your way out. Earn the next month, every month.
The one that hurts most is paying to own what is already yours. Some agencies build your site on their own platform, register your domain in their name, or keep your Google Business Profile under their account. When you leave, they charge a fee to release it, or you lose it and start over. Your domain, website, content, analytics and Business Profile should be in your name or transferable at no cost from the start. Get that in writing. Check this before you sign.
A few more to skip: guaranteed first page rankings, which nobody can honestly promise; paid submissions to search engines or AI tools, which do not exist as a real service; and fees for creating free listings like your Business Profile or Bing Places without any ongoing work behind them. At Heights there is no setup fee beyond the $750 build, no contract, and the client owns the site and domain. That is the baseline every business should expect. Hold to it.
Send the site over. We will tell you what is broken, what you could rank for, and whether AI search knows you exist. No charge and no pitch deck.
