What a Monthly SEO Retainer Should Actually Include
September 9, 2026 · SEO retainer · local SEO · accountability
There's one question that separates a real SEO retainer from an expensive subscription to nothing: show me what shipped last month. Ask it out loud. The answer tells you everything.
A real answer is a list of specific, checkable work. A fake answer is a vague gesture at "ongoing optimization," maybe a screenshot of a dashboard nobody acted on, possibly — and I've seen this — a changelog of plugin updates presented as if keeping software from breaking is the same as growing your business. It isn't. That's maintenance billed as marketing.
What "shipped" should actually mean
The retainer that earns its keep produces artifacts you can point at every single month:
New content, published. Actual pages and posts that went live — answering real customer questions, targeting real searches — not "a content strategy is in the works." Content is the thing that compounds; if none shipped, the month was idle.
Search Console, reviewed and acted on. Someone looked at what you're actually ranking for, what's slipping, what's newly indexed and what isn't, and did something about it. Pulling the report isn't the work. Responding to it is.
Existing pages, improved. Rankings decay. Pages that were fine last year drift down as competitors publish. A real retainer rewrites, tightens, and re-optimizes what already exists — not just adds new pages on top of neglected old ones.
Indexing, verified. A page Google hasn't crawled is a page that doesn't exist. The work includes making sure new URLs actually get found — and being able to prove it. I submit every URL I ship to Google within a day and keep the submission log in version control, so "did it get indexed and when" is a question I answer with timestamps instead of a shrug.
The evidence standard cuts both ways
The reason I lead with logs and shipped lists isn't to trash other vendors — it's that evidence is the only honest basis for a retainer, and it has to apply to me too. So here's the symmetric version: ask your current provider "what shipped last month," and then ask me the same question about your account. If either of us can't produce a specific answer, that provider is the problem. Accountability you can't turn back on the person selling it isn't accountability.
What the number buys
My operating retainer is $1,500/mo, and I'll tell you exactly what it's for: content shipped on a schedule, Search Console reviewed and acted on, pages rewritten as they age, indexing verified with a log, and the Google Business Profile kept active rather than left to go stale. It's an itemized what-for, not a mystery line item — the same profile work and content cadence that a local business needs to keep, kept, every month, by someone whose job it is.
The test is free and you should run it this week, on whoever you're paying now. If the honest answer to "what shipped last month" makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is the finding. Inquire about a project →