After the three-month minimum, yes. Cleanly.
How cancellation actually works
After month three, retainers are pure month-to-month. To cancel:
- Email me with 30 days notice
- I deliver everything in flight (citations being claimed, content in production, GBP changes deploying)
- Final invoice is for the 30-day notice period
- All access (analytics, GSC, GBP) is handed back to you
No termination fee. No clawback. No re-engagement penalty if you come back later. No contracts that auto-renew you into 12 more months because you missed a 60-day cancellation window.
What the 30-day notice covers
The notice period exists because there’s typically work in flight at any given moment — citations claimed but not propagated, content drafted but not published, schema deployed but not indexed. Thirty days lets that work finish landing rather than getting orphaned mid-stream.
Concretely, in a typical 30-day notice period:
- Week 1: pause net-new work, complete any in-progress publishing
- Week 2: deliver final round of citations, finish review-velocity campaigns in progress
- Week 3: finalize reporting, write a transition document for whoever’s picking up
- Week 4: handoff calls, access transfers, final monthly report
You don’t lose 30 days of work; you get 30 days of orderly closeout.
Why the three-month minimum is firm
The minimum isn’t a contract trick; it’s calibrated to how local SEO timelines work. Map pack movement typically takes 30-90 days, and pulling out at month two means most of the investment hasn’t had time to compound. The engagement looks like a failure even when it’s working.
Detailed reasoning on the minimum here, including the genuine-emergency exceptions (business sale, medical) where I’ll pause mid-minimum.
What happens to deliverables when you leave
Everything I’ve built belongs to you. That includes:
- All citations claimed and verified
- All content written and published on your site
- All schema markup deployed
- All GBP optimization completed
- All reporting templates and dashboards (you keep Looker Studio access)
- Any documentation produced — process docs, runbooks, competitive intel
The only thing that doesn’t transfer is my proprietary tooling and templates that pre-existed the engagement (audit frameworks, citation automation, etc.). Those aren’t deliverables to begin with.
What happens if you come back
A meaningful share of past clients come back — usually 6-18 months after leaving — when their next vendor doesn’t pan out or when they decide to bring SEO back in-house with senior support. There’s no penalty, no re-engagement fee, no “you should have stayed” lecture. We just pick up.
I keep historical context (audits, prior strategies, prior reports) for past clients precisely because the come-back path is common enough to plan for.
What’s NOT month-to-month
Two things to be explicit about:
- The $197 audit is one-time, not a retainer. There’s nothing to cancel.
- The $2,497 Strategy Engagement is a one-time deliverable, paid in full upfront or in two installments. Once started, it runs to completion.
- Hourly consulting at $125/hr is project-scoped. Cancel anytime by simply not booking more hours.
For everyone on a monthly retainer past the three-month minimum: cancellation is a one-email process. That’s the whole policy.