Monthly marketing retainers, including the SEO retainer. Ad budget stays on your card.

An SEO retainer is a standing monthly arrangement for search work. You pay an agreed fee each month and the same specialist keeps improving how your site is found in Google, instead of you buying one job and starting again when something slips. In law and other professional services, a retainer is a fee paid to reserve someone’s time; here the fee should pay for work done in the month, not for someone being on call.

It is sold monthly because a site’s place in search is never finished: Google changes how it ranks pages, competitors publish and rewrite, old pages drift out of date, a theme update quietly breaks something, and Search Console starts showing queries you have no page for. An audit records one day; a retainer keeps reading that data and acting on it.

Here, SEO can be the single channel on Starter, one of two on Growth, or part of Full stack. The SEO packages on the pricing page are a separate, counted route; both are priced below.

Agencies that want this work delivered under their own brand should read the white label SEO pricing page instead: the per-client fees, the margins and the account-ownership rules are set out there.

The first month is groundwork. I audit the site for crawl and indexing problems, set up or correct Google Search Console and GA4 inside accounts you own, put conversion tracking in place, and research the searches your buyers use, split by intent, so every important page gets one clear target. Months two and three are mostly page work: titles, headings, copy, internal links and schema on the pages that should earn money. The order, and a realistic timeline, are on the SEO service page.

After that, a typical month contains:

• A weekly read of Search Console. New indexing errors, pages losing clicks, and queries with impressions but no page built to answer them.
• Repairs to whatever broke. Redirect chains, a canonical altered by an update, a template that drags down Core Web Vitals, a page that fell out of the index.
• Page work against the keyword map. Pages improved or written in the order the map and the latest data agree on.
• Links only where they are worth having. Relevant directories, trade bodies, suppliers, partners and publications. Nothing is bought.
• AI answers. Whether AI Overviews, AI Mode and assistants such as ChatGPT name the business for its buying questions.
• The Business Profile, if you sell locally. Categories, services, photos and the review routine kept current.
• Measurement you can check. A rank tracking sheet you keep, updated monthly, and a written report each week on what was done, what moved and what comes next.

What a month never contains is a promised position. Nobody controls Google’s ranking systems, so the commitment is to the work and to honest reporting, even in quiet months.

Which of the three suits you depends on whether the problem has an end.

One-off projects fix a defined problem and stop. The SEO Foundation package is the example here: £850 one-off, paid in advance and delivered in two to three weeks, covering an audit with a ranked list of fixes, keyword research sorted by buying intent, on-page work on ten priority pages, schema and internal links, Search Console and GA4 set up under your ownership, and a six-month content plan with briefs. It suits a business with someone in-house to carry the plan forward.

Hourly work buys time rather than an outcome. It suits advice: a review before a migration, a second look at another provider’s plan. Its weakness is that you end up managing the hours yourself. No hourly rate is published here; work is priced as a flat monthly fee or a fixed project quote, in writing.

Retainers earn their fee when each month’s decisions depend on the previous month’s data. The routes combine, too: a project puts the base right and monthly work picks up from there, with nothing rebuilt or paid for twice.

First, establish what each quote is counting. Five fee models are worth recognising, and two of them are used on this site.

Counted deliverables. The fee buys a fixed number of things each month. The SEO packages on the pricing page work this way: Basic is £299 a month ($379) for 7 keywords and 4 blog posts; Standard is £449 ($579) for 15 keywords and 8 posts, with technical fixes and a monthly strategy call; Professional is £649 ($829) for 25 keywords and 15 posts, with link outreach every month. Delivery is easy to check; ask what happens when the data says the effort belongs elsewhere.

Channels and depth of management. The levels on this page are priced by how many channels are run: Starter at £650 a month ($800) for one, Growth at £1,200 ($1,500) for two combined, and Full stack from £4,000 ($5,000) for Meta Ads, Google Ads and SEO with website and landing page work. Sterling figures are indicative; the exact amount is confirmed in writing on the invoice.

A bank of hours. A set number of hours each month, drawn down against requests. Ask whether unused hours roll over or vanish.

A percentage of ad spend. It applies only to paid channels and ties the fee to the budget’s size rather than the result. Nothing here is charged that way.

Payment by results. Fees tied to ranking or traffic targets. It can reward picking phrases that are easy to rank for and rarely bought from. No fee here depends on a ranking, and no ranking is promised.

Here, ad budgets, hosting, domains and any paid tool you specifically ask for, such as a Semrush or Ahrefs subscription, sit outside the fee and are paid by you; the tools I use as standard are on me. UK clients are invoiced in pounds and US clients in dollars. Because I invoice as an overseas sole trader there is no UK VAT on the invoice, so a VAT-registered UK business should check the reverse charge treatment with its accountant. HMRC sets out how the reverse charge works for services bought from a supplier outside the UK in section 5 of VAT Notice 741A.

These apply to any provider, me included.

1. What is the minimum term, and how much notice ends it? Some providers require a six-month minimum; others recommend six months but let you cancel on 30 days’ notice. Mine run on a rolling monthly basis: the first month is paid before work starts, and either of us can end it with a month’s written notice.
2. Who owns Search Console, Google Analytics 4 and the Google Business Profile? You should, with the provider added as a user. Google’s help page on managing Search Console owners, users and permissions explains that only owners can manage users, and that a removed verified owner can verify again unless their verification token is deleted.
3. Who owns the content, the keyword research and the tracking sheet? You should. Everything I produce is built in accounts you own, and when we part, my access is removed and the rest stays where it is.
4. Do you want my passwords, or access? Search Console users, Meta partner access and Google Ads account access exist so nobody needs your login. I never ask for passwords.
5. What does a report contain, and how often? Ask for a sample, and look for what was done, what changed and what happens next. Mine is written and weekly. Google’s own hiring guide, linked below, also suggests asking what results a provider expects to see, in what timeframe, and how it measures success.
6. Who does the work? Some agencies pass the work to a subcontractor. Here the specialist who audits the site is the one who writes the report.
7. How are links obtained? Buying or selling links for ranking purposes is listed as link spam in Google’s spam policies, and the Google Search Central guide on whether you need an SEO suggests asking whether a provider follows Google Search Essentials, and warns that no one can promise a number one ranking. Ask plainly and listen to the answer.

In these situations I would point you elsewhere.

• You need enquiries this month. Low-competition long-tail terms can move within weeks, but competitive city terms tend to need four to eight months and national commercial terms longer. If cash flow depends on the next few weeks, paid ads are the honest first move, with SEO behind them if the budget allows.
• The site is about to be rebuilt. The same Google guide names a redesign or a new launch as a good time to bring an SEO in, the earlier the better. Paying monthly to optimise pages about to be replaced wastes both budgets; build the search groundwork into the new site instead.
• The problem has a clear finish. A broken migration, a batch of indexing errors, a site that has never had its basics done, or a Business Profile never set up properly (the Local Launch package) can be fixed as a fixed-price project. A monthly fee for a job that ends is poor value.
• Nobody on your side can respond. SEO needs someone to approve content, answer the enquiries it produces and, for a local business, complete Business Profile verification. Google decides which method a business is offered; its help page on verifying a business on Google lists phone, text, email, postcard and video options, and a video has to show the location, the business and proof that you manage it. I work remotely from Lahore, in Pakistan, so that step has to be done by you or someone at the business.
• The budget stretches to a month or two. Stopping after six weeks pays for groundwork and leaves before the return arrives; a one-off project uses that money better.

Send me the site and what a customer is worth, and I will tell you which of these applies, including when the answer is not a retainer.

Two other monthly retainers get searched for alongside SEO, and both usually mean something other than what I sell.

WordPress maintenance. A monthly WordPress arrangement normally means core, plugin and theme updates, backups, uptime and security monitoring, and small edits, sold by web developers, agencies and some hosting companies. I do not sell maintenance on its own. Where a site on an SEO retainer runs on WordPress or WooCommerce, hosting, security and updates are reviewed for what they do to search, and the checks after each update (canonicals, schema, redirects, speed) are part of the monthly work, noted in the report. The detail is on the WordPress SEO services page. For maintenance alone, a developer or a managed hosting plan is the better buy.

Social media management. A monthly social arrangement normally means organic posting to a Facebook Page, Instagram, LinkedIn or TikTok, plus replies and community management. What I run is the paid side: Facebook and Instagram campaigns through Meta Ads management, as the single channel on Starter or one of two on Growth, which adds creative testing every month. Organic posting and community work sit outside every level; for those, hire a social media manager and let the paid campaigns run alongside.