What should be in a monthly SEO retainer

A monthly SEO retainer should come with a specific list of what happens inside it every month, and most don't say what that list actually is. The proposal names a price and a term, and what the fee buys gets discovered later, usually around month three, when someone asks what's been done and the answer is a screenshot of a chart trending up.

A chart isn't a list of work. A retainer should produce a specific, checkable set of things every month, and a reasonable buyer should be able to name what that set is before signing anything.

What a working month looks like

Ongoing SEO work breaks down into a small number of jobs, not a general state of "optimisation". Someone should be checking the site for crawl errors, broken links, slow pages and indexing problems, and fixing what turns up rather than filing it for later. New or updated pages should go up against demand that's actually there in Search Console or elsewhere, not a quota of two blog posts a month regardless of whether anyone's searching for them. Someone should be looking at who outranks you and why, and saying honestly when that gap isn't worth chasing. And the numbers at the end of the month need to connect to enquiries and traffic, not only to position, because a keyword climbing four places with no change in clicks hasn't done anything for the business yet.

That's roughly the shape of it, and it's worth comparing against whatever list your own provider gives you. Our SEO page lays out the same four areas, which is less a pitch than a checklist most legitimate agencies cover some version of.

What the report should show

A report that only shows position changes is reporting on the tool, not the work. Ask for the actual list of what happened this month: which pages were published or fixed, which technical issues were closed, which links were reviewed. Then ask what that produced. If a ranking moved and nobody can say which change caused it, or whether it just happened to land inside a core update rolling through that had nothing to do with either of you, the report is decoration rather than evidence.

Contract terms worth reading before you sign

Since November 2023, Australia's unfair contract term protections apply to small businesses as well as consumers, and the threshold is generous: any business with fewer than 100 employees is covered. The ACCC's own guidance gives a term that lets one party change the price at any time while the other side can't exit as a worked example of what "unfair" looks like in practice, which is closer to a standard retainer clause than most people realise.

Read the document for three things specifically: the minimum term, the notice period to cancel, and what happens to the work when you leave. Do the pages that were written stay published. Does account access get handed over cleanly. None of that should require a phone call to find out; it should be written down.

Before you buy twelve months of it

If nobody's looked at the site's technical health in the past year, a retainer isn't the first purchase. Fix the foundations, watch what a month of reporting on the fixed site actually shows, then size an ongoing engagement to what that report says is worth doing. Small business SEO, in order covers where a retainer sits in that sequence in more detail.

Ask whoever is proposing a retainer to show you the specific list of what they did for another client last month, not the plan for you next month, before you sign anything.