How often should an SEO company update my strategy?
Your strategy should be reviewed on a schedule you agree with the company and updated whenever something important changes, rather than on a fixed number of times a year. The schedule gives you a regular moment to ask whether the plan is still right. The changes that justify an update between those moments fall into four kinds: a change in your business, a change in search, new evidence from your own results, and a move by competitors. What matters more than frequency is what an update contains: a clear record of what stays, what stops, and what changes, with the evidence for each.
The four reasons to update between reviews
A change in your business is the one most easily left unsaid. A new product or service, a new area served, a location opened or closed, a change in pricing, or a different kind of customer all change what the strategy should support. Tell the company when these happen; it cannot see them from the data.
A change in search, such as a broad Google update that moves your rankings or traffic, calls for an assessment once its effect can be measured, and then a decision about whether the plan needs to change. Movement during an update is not, by itself, a reason to rewrite the plan.
New evidence from your own results is the third. A group of pages that clearly underperforms, a topic that converts better than expected, or a tactic that has stopped working should feed back into the plan when it becomes clear, not months later.
A move by competitors is the fourth. A competitor that starts ranking for searches you relied on, publishes strong new content in your area, or earns notable links may change which work deserves priority.
What an update should contain
Ask for each update to be written down in three parts: what is being kept because it is working, what is being stopped because it is not, and what is being added or changed. Each item should point to the evidence behind it, whether that is a change in your business, a result in your data, or a shift in search. A record like this lets you see why the plan moved, and lets you check later whether the change was right.
What does not count as a good update
Constant reversals are not responsiveness. If the plan changes direction every few weeks, nothing in it runs long enough to show whether it works, and the company is reacting to noise. Ask how long each new piece of work will run before it is judged, and expect that period to be respected unless one of the four reasons above appears.
The opposite problem is a plan that never changes. A strategy written at the start and never revisited can drift out of date as your business and search both change. If you cannot remember the last time the plan was updated, or what changed, ask for a review.
Setting the review schedule at the start
Agree how often the plan will be formally reviewed, how you will tell the company about business changes, how quickly it will assess a significant change in search or in your results, and in what form you will receive the update.