What is the difference between this and a one-off audit?

An audit tells you what is wrong. A retainer is the part where things get fixed, measured and then fixed again in light of the measurement. The audit comes first, because it produces the list a retainer works through, and plenty of sites should stop there for a few months while the fix list gets implemented. Buying a retainer before anything has been diagnosed usually means paying monthly for someone to keep looking for the problem.

Why do you report non-branded clicks separately?

Because branded searches are people who already know you, and counting them makes any report look better than the work deserves. Somebody typing your company name clicks your result the overwhelming majority of the time, whatever we do. Filtering those out leaves the number that reflects whether people who did not know you are finding you, which is the only part search work can claim credit for.

Our traffic dropped last month. Will you be able to tell us why?

Usually, and the first step is matching the date rather than reading the chart. A drop that lines up with a published Google update is one situation, a drop that lines up with your own redesign or migration is another, and a drop that lines up with a change in how the data itself is collected is a third that looks alarming and means nothing. That last case is real. Impressions can halve while clicks stay flat and average position appears to improve, and reading it as a catastrophe would be wrong.

What do we get each month?

Work and evidence. A prioritised list of what was done, with before and after states for anything verifiable — pages brought back into the index, markup validated, redirects corrected, templates improved. Then the measurement — non-branded clicks, queries that moved, pages that gained or lost, and conversions where they are tracked. And a short list of what is planned next and why it is next.

Do we need to give you site access, or can you send recommendations?

You can buy recommendations, and it is the version most likely to produce nothing. The pattern is consistent — a monthly document arrives, nobody inside the business has the time or the permissions to apply it, months pass, and the retainer gets blamed for a result that was never given a chance to happen. If implementation is going to sit with your team, we would rather agree that explicitly and scope our side around what they can actually absorb.

Can we cancel, or is there a lock-in?

Monthly. The reason retainers usually run long is that the first two months are the most expensive and the least visible, so leaving early tends to waste the part you have already paid for. Nothing in the setup is designed to trap you — the accounts, the data and the properties are all yours, we are only added as users.

SEO & Organic Growth

A monthly engagement where the report separates what we did from what Google decided

Work shipped every month against a prioritised list, reported on non-branded clicks and conversions rather than on totals that flatter everybody.

From: $400–$3,000/mo
Typical time: ongoing
Usually bought by: Serious clients

What a monthly engagement is actually for

Search work does not finish. A site with a clean technical foundation in March has a broken one by September, because a plugin updated, a developer shipped a template change, a category was reorganised, three hundred products went out of stock and somebody added a noindex rule while staging a redesign. Meanwhile competitors publish, Google changes its systems several times a year, and the queries your buyers use drift.

The second thing a retainer buys, which is harder to see and matters more, is a record. Search Console keeps sixteen months of data and then that data is gone permanently. If nobody exported it, a question asked next spring about what happened last autumn is unanswerable. Ongoing work means the baseline exists — the crawls, the query exports, the dated screenshots — so that when something moves, there is something to compare it against.

What it is not for is producing a chart that goes up. Any report can be made to look good. Include branded searches and the number rises because people who already know you kept typing your name. Lead with impressions and the number rises whenever anything is shown to anyone. The work here is scoped and reported the other way round — deliverables we control and can prove, kept separate from goals that Google decides.

How a month runs

Set up once, properly. Access in your own accounts with us added as users, a full export of the last sixteen months from Search Console before another day of it expires, a saved crawl file, analytics checked for whether conversions are actually being recorded, and dated screenshots of the starting position. If enquiries are not being tracked, that is the first job and search work waits behind it. Three to five days in month one.
Rebuild the priority list each month. Not a fixed checklist. Queries sitting between positions eight and twenty with real impressions behind them, pages with strong positions and weak click rates, indexing exclusions that appeared since last month, and anything the site broke on itself. Ranked by likely effect against effort, with an owner against each item. One day.
Ship the work. Titles and page structure rewritten against actual query data, internal links added, markup fixed, exclusions cleared, technical faults corrected or specified for your developer with exact steps. Each item verified after it is applied rather than assumed. Roughly two to three weeks of the month, depending on the tier.
Measure honestly and diagnose anything that moved. Non-branded clicks first, then queries and pages that gained or lost, then conversions where they exist. Any significant change gets its date matched against published Google updates, your own release history and known data changes before a cause is offered. Where a page holds position but loses clicks, we check the result page by hand and say so. One day.
Report, then agree what is next. A short document in plain language — what was done with evidence, what the numbers did, what we think caused it, what is queued for next month. Then a call to settle priorities, because your commercial calendar should be shaping the list. Half a day, plus a thirty minute call.

What sets the fee

The range is $400–$3,000/mo and three factors place a business inside it.

How much implementation sits with us. Advising is the cheap version. Doing the work inside your CMS, coordinating with your developers, testing on staging and verifying afterwards is several times the effort and is the version that actually produces movement.

The size and volatility of the site. Twenty pages that change rarely is a different monthly commitment from four thousand products where availability, pricing and categories move constantly and a template change can quietly de-index a section overnight.

Whether content production is included. A retainer covering technical and on-page work is one price. A retainer that also produces pages every month carries the writing cost as well, and it is worth pricing those separately so you can see what you are buying.

The three ways retainers waste money

The report leads with totals. Branded and non-branded clicks added together, impressions presented as growth, average position quoted as a headline. Every one of those can improve while the business gets nothing, and one of them can collapse while the business is fine. There is a real case where impressions halved, clicks barely moved and average position improved — the change was in how results were being counted, not in the site. A report that cannot tell that apart from a disaster is not a report.

Recommendations pile up with nobody to apply them. Twelve monthly documents, each sensible, none implemented, because the person who can edit the site has a queue of their own and search work sits at the bottom of it. This is the most common way a retainer fails and it is nearly always predictable on day one. The question to settle before signing is who applies the work and how much of their time exists for it.

Nothing gets exported until it is needed. Search Console holds sixteen months and then drops the oldest data permanently, the results of a crawl live only in the file somebody saved, and screenshots are only evidence if they are dated. A retainer that has been running a year without an archive cannot demonstrate its own before and after, and the conversation about whether it has been worth the money becomes a matter of opinion.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

What is the difference between this and a one-off audit?: An audit tells you what is wrong. A retainer is the part where things get fixed, measured and then fixed again in light of the measurement. The audit comes first, because it produces the list a retainer works through, and plenty of sites should stop there for a few months while the fix list gets implemented. Buying a retainer before anything has been diagnosed usually means paying monthly for someone to keep looking for the problem.
Why do you report non-branded clicks separately?: Because branded searches are people who already know you, and counting them makes any report look better than the work deserves. Somebody typing your company name clicks your result the overwhelming majority of the time, whatever we do. Filtering those out leaves the number that reflects whether people who did not know you are finding you, which is the only part search work can claim credit for.
Our traffic dropped last month. Will you be able to tell us why?: Usually, and the first step is matching the date rather than reading the chart. A drop that lines up with a published Google update is one situation, a drop that lines up with your own redesign or migration is another, and a drop that lines up with a change in how the data itself is collected is a third that looks alarming and means nothing. That last case is real. Impressions can halve while clicks stay flat and average position appears to improve, and reading it as a catastrophe would be wrong.
What do we get each month?: Work and evidence. A prioritised list of what was done, with before and after states for anything verifiable — pages brought back into the index, markup validated, redirects corrected, templates improved. Then the measurement — non-branded clicks, queries that moved, pages that gained or lost, and conversions where they are tracked. And a short list of what is planned next and why it is next.
Do we need to give you site access, or can you send recommendations?: You can buy recommendations, and it is the version most likely to produce nothing. The pattern is consistent — a monthly document arrives, nobody inside the business has the time or the permissions to apply it, months pass, and the retainer gets blamed for a result that was never given a chance to happen. If implementation is going to sit with your team, we would rather agree that explicitly and scope our side around what they can actually absorb.
Can we cancel, or is there a lock-in?: Monthly. The reason retainers usually run long is that the first two months are the most expensive and the least visible, so leaving early tends to waste the part you have already paid for. Nothing in the setup is designed to trap you — the accounts, the data and the properties are all yours, we are only added as users.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

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