A “90 day SEO trial” sounds like a fair deal on paper. You get a taste of results without committing to a long retainer. If it works, you continue. If it doesn’t, you walk away.
The problem is that plenty of SEO providers use the word “trial” as a polite way of saying “we’ll do some activity for three months and hope you don’t ask too many questions”. For a construction business owner, that’s the quickest route to the familiar frustration: reports full of jargon, rankings for keywords nobody searches, and no meaningful change in the quality of enquiries.
A proper 90 day SEO trial can be a smart, controlled way to de-risk your investment. But only if you go into it with realistic expectations, clear commercial measures, and a scope designed for early traction, not vanity.
Ninety days is long enough to prove whether an SEO approach is competent, whether communication is straightforward, and whether the fundamentals of your website and local visibility are being fixed properly.
It is not always long enough to prove final outcomes in competitive areas, especially if your site has technical debt, thin service pages, or a history of poor link building. In many UK construction niches, you’re competing against firms that have been active for years. Google does not hand over trust because you ran a few title tags through a checklist.
So what can you realistically expect by day 90?
You should expect measurable progress, not miracles. That progress might look like:
If someone promises page-one rankings across the board in 90 days, treat it like a lad on site promising he can rewire a Victorian house in an afternoon.
Most construction business owners aren’t buying “SEO”. They’re buying stability.
You want fewer quiet patches, less reliance on referrals, and fewer time-wasters who only ring to beat you up on price. A trial only makes sense if it is structured to move those needles.
That means the trial has to focus on two things at once:
First, visibility in the right places – local search, map pack, and service keywords that match the work you actually want.
Second, conversion – turning that visibility into calls and form fills from people who are serious.
If the proposal talks about “impressions” and “domain authority” but can’t explain what will change on your money pages, how enquiries will be tracked, and how lead quality will be improved, it’s not a trial. It’s a stall.
The easiest way to sniff out fluff is to ask one direct question: “What will be different on my website and my Google Business Profile by day 30?”
If the answer is vague, you’re about to pay for busywork.
A credible provider should be able to describe the work in plain English, with prioritisation based on impact. In construction, the biggest wins usually come from getting the basics brutally right: service pages that match real search intent, location targeting that reflects where you’ll actually travel, proof of workmanship, and a site that doesn’t feel like it was knocked together to “tick the box”.
You also want to know who is doing the work. If you’re sold by one person and passed to an account manager who reads updates off a script, you’re not getting a trial. You’re getting a production line.
There are different ways to run a trial, but the substance should be recognisable.
A real trial starts with a technical and commercial baseline. Not a generic PDF export, but an explanation of what is broken, what is missing, and what’s been holding your site back.
At minimum, you should come out of the first couple of weeks knowing:
If the “audit” doesn’t lead directly into fixes, it’s theatre.
This is where most SEO goes wrong for construction firms. The provider fiddles with meta descriptions and writes a couple of blog posts, while the actual revenue pages remain thin, vague, and unconvincing.
In a good 90 day SEO trial, you should see deliberate changes to the pages that matter. Expect work like tightening service page structure, clarifying service areas, improving internal linking so Google understands your priorities, and adding proof elements that reduce friction (project photos, accreditations, process, guarantees that you can genuinely stand behind).
Technical improvements should also happen here. If the site is slow, bloated, or riddled with duplicate pages, you can’t out-content your way past it.
For local construction searches, your Google Business Profile often moves the needle faster than the main website. Reviews, categories, service areas, photos, and consistent citations matter more than most people admit.
At the same time, you need to build authority in a way that won’t come back to bite you. Cheap link packages and dodgy directories can give a short bump and then leave you cleaning up a mess later.
By this point in the trial, you should be seeing clearer signals that Google is taking you more seriously: improved map visibility, more impressions for the right terms, and early ranking lifts that align with your priority services.
The last month should not be “more of the same”. It should be about turning whatever traction exists into a plan.
You should finish a 90 day SEO trial with:
If the end of the trial is just another report, you’ve learned nothing.
Rankings have their place, but they are not the business result. Especially in construction, where one good job can be worth more than fifty “leads” from people who want a bargain.
In 90 days, focus on measures that connect to revenue.
You want to see an increase in relevant visibility, but you also want to see whether the right pages are getting traffic, whether calls and forms are increasing, and whether lead quality is improving. Are people asking for the work you want? Are they in the right postcodes? Are they mentioning that they found you on Google rather than “someone down the pub”?
If tracking is weak, you will end up arguing about opinions instead of looking at facts. A trial should remove doubt, not create it.
There are cases where a 90 day SEO trial is not the best approach.
If you need leads immediately because the diary is empty, SEO alone is unlikely to save you in 90 days. That’s when paid search can carry the short-term load while SEO compounds underneath.
If your website is fundamentally unfit for purpose, a trial that avoids rebuilding or restructuring it is a false economy. You can polish a poor site for three months and still lose enquiries because the trust isn’t there.
And if your market is extremely competitive, the trial can still be useful, but the goal should be to prove progress and execution quality, not to promise domination by day 90.
The biggest trap is paying for a trial that is built around output rather than impact. Ten blog posts are not a strategy. A list of “completed tasks” is not a commercial result.
Another trap is letting the provider choose the targets without challenge. Some agencies will chase easy keywords that look good on a report but don’t bring work. If you’re a £1M to £5M construction firm, you don’t need more visibility for irrelevant, low-intent searches. You need to win better enquiries.
Finally, be wary of trials that require you to do all the thinking. If you’re paying for expertise, you should be getting direction and decisions, not a to-do list.
You don’t need a long checklist. You need a few direct questions that force clarity.
Ask what will be delivered by day 30, how calls and forms will be tracked, which services and locations will be prioritised first and why, and what the provider believes is currently holding your site back. Then ask who will actually be doing the work and speaking to you week to week.
Straight answers here are usually a reliable preview of the working relationship.
If you want a 90 day SEO trial that is built around measurable progress, direct access to the expert doing the work, and a plan designed to turn visibility into enquiries, that’s the kind of engagement we run at Wicked Spider®. We take on four new clients per month because this only works when it’s done properly.
The best closing test is simple: at the end of 90 days, will you have more control over your pipeline than you do today? If the trial is built properly, you will – and you won’t need hype to see it.
