Kolkata, India / Buyer's guide
There are two completely different kinds of SEO company in Kolkata, and most buyers never find out which one they hired until month four. This page explains the difference, what each type charges, who actually touches your account, and the checks that separate a real company from a reseller. We are one of these companies, so read the last section with that in mind.
The short version
An SEO company in Kolkata will fall into one of two groups. The first sells to local Kolkata businesses at local prices, typically ₹15,000 to ₹1,00,000 a month, and competes largely on being cheap. The second exports its work to clients in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, charges in dollars or pounds, and competes on results because its clients can hire anyone on earth. The two groups look identical from the outside. They are not remotely the same business.
The single most useful question you can ask any of them is who will actually be working on my account, and how many other accounts do they have? Everything else follows from the answer. A company that will not tell you is telling you.
The market
Market 01
Market 02
We sit in the second group. That is not a claim of superiority, it is a statement of who we are set up to serve. If you run a shop in Gariahat and need footfall from local search, a good local agency at ₹20,000 a month will serve you better than we will, and we will say so on the call.
Your options
"SEO company" covers four very different businesses. Picking the wrong category is a more expensive mistake than picking the wrong company inside the right one.
| Option | Good at | Bad at |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | One skill, done well, cheaply. Direct contact with the person doing the work. | Breadth. Holidays. Anything needing a technical specialist and a content specialist at once. |
| Boutique agency, 4 to 12 people | Senior attention across several skills. The founder is usually still on your account. | Scale. If you need forty pages a month, this is the wrong shape. |
| Production agency, 30 to 200 people | Volume, process, never missing a deliverable. | Diagnosis. You get activity, and an account manager between you and whoever is actually working. |
| In-house hire | Total focus on your business. Cheapest per hour at scale. | Range. One person cannot be strong at technical, content and paid at once. |
The pattern we see most often is a business that needs diagnosis buying volume, because volume is what agencies find easiest to sell. You end up with forty blog posts and the same problem you started with, which was that Google could not crawl your product pages properly.
Write down, in one sentence, what you think is currently stopping you from getting more customers from search. If you cannot, your first purchase is not a retainer. It is an audit, and you should be able to get one free. If you can, take that sentence to every company you speak to and see who engages with it rather than talking past it.
Money
The number matters less than the structure. Three pricing models dominate, and they create very different incentives.
| Model | What it rewards | Our view |
|---|---|---|
| Flat monthly retainer | Keeping you long enough to see results, since the fee does not move | What we use. Predictable for you, and it survives a bad month honestly. |
| Percentage of ad spend | Spending more of your money, whether or not it works | Never. It is the clearest conflict of interest in this industry. |
| Per deliverable, per page or per link | Producing things, regardless of whether they were the right things | Fine for a defined one-off. Poor as an ongoing relationship. |
On the number itself: in Kolkata, roughly ₹5,000 to ₹25,000 a month buys you a freelancer's part-time attention, ₹15,000 to ₹1,00,000 buys a local agency's production capacity, and ₹50,000 to ₹3,00,000 buys a national agency's process. Our retainers start at $1,500 a month, which sits deliberately above the local bands, because we are staffed for a different job. There is no setup fee, no minimum term past the first month, and never a share of your ad spend.
Be careful with the bottom of the range. A ₹8,000 retainer is not usually a scam. It is a fee that only pays for six or eight hours of somebody's month, which is enough to publish a few posts and submit some listings. It is not enough to work out why Google is crawling forty thousand faceted URLs instead of your two hundred real pages. The cheap retainer is expensive twice: once for the work, and again for the recovery.
The full breakdown, including what a person costs versus a company, is on the SEO expert in Kolkata page.
Who does the work
Most agency websites describe a team without ever telling you which of them will open your account. We publish the six seats because the honest answer to "who does the work" is the single most predictive thing about whether an engagement succeeds.
Each specialist holds a maximum of five accounts. That cap is the whole business model, and it is the reason we are not the cheapest company in Kolkata. A production agency putting fifteen or twenty accounts on one executive can charge a fifth of what we do. It is a legitimate business. It is a different product.
More about the people is on the about page.
Due diligence
None of these require you to understand SEO. They are all things you can verify in an afternoon, and they filter out most of the market.
If you want the version of this aimed at an individual rather than a company, the seven questions on the SEO expert page do the same job for a freelancer or consultant.
Us, plainly
We are six specialists in Kolkata, founded in 2019, running SEO, Google Ads and Meta ads for service businesses and software companies in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Retainers start at $1,500 a month. Each specialist holds five accounts at most. Your accounts stay in your ownership from day one. We will put you on a call with a current client before you sign, and the first audit is free, written, and delivered within three working days whether or not you hire us.
We are the wrong company for you if:
If none of those apply, the next step is the free audit. It is a real document, not a sales deck, and it will tell you what is wrong with your site whether or not we ever work together. The full engagement terms are on the process page.
Questions
There is no single answer, and any company claiming to be it is telling you something about their marketing rather than their work. The right question is which company is best for your situation. A local restaurant, a national e-commerce brand and a US software company need three genuinely different companies. Decide which of the two Kolkata markets you belong in first, then shortlist inside it.
Local agencies typically charge ₹15,000 to ₹1,00,000 a month, national agencies ₹50,000 to ₹3,00,000, and freelancers ₹5,000 to ₹25,000. Companies serving overseas clients usually price in dollars, commonly $800 to $5,000 a month. Our retainers start at $1,500. Below roughly ₹10,000 a month you are buying a few hours of attention rather than a strategy.
Yes, and a large share of the industry already runs this way. Search work is not location dependent. What matters is whether the company understands your market's search behaviour and buying language, and whether it keeps your working hours. We hold call hours in UK, US Eastern, US Pacific and Australian Eastern time for exactly that reason. Ask any overseas company how they handle your time zone before anything else.
Google Business Profile changes can move local rankings within days. Technical fixes often show within two to four weeks. Competitive organic rankings usually take four to six months, and longer in crowded markets. Anyone promising first page in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches for or is about to do something that will cost you later.
A company gives you several specialists, cover when someone is away, and a process that survives one person leaving. An individual expert gives you direct access to the person doing the work and usually a lower fee, with a single point of failure. If you need technical, content and paid handled together, a company makes sense. If you need one skill done well, an expert is often the better purchase.
Not with us. There is no setup fee and no minimum term beyond the first month. We would rather you stay because the reporting justifies it. Long lock-ins exist mainly to protect agencies from the consequences of underperforming, so treat a twelve month minimum as information about the company offering it.
Named specialists from the six seats, chosen by what your account needs, with the founder on your calls. Each specialist holds a maximum of five accounts. You will know their names before you sign, and you can ask for that in writing from any company you are considering.
Yes. Your Google Ads, Analytics, Search Console and Business Profile are created under your ownership and stay there. We hold access, not the keys. Ask every company on your shortlist this question, because the ones who answer it badly are the ones it matters most with.
Next step
Forty-five minutes, no deck, and a written audit within three working days. Yours to keep whether or not you hire us, and honest about whether you need an agency at all.