Our published range for SEO services and content strategy is $2,000 to $8,000 per month. This article is about the bottom of that range, because the bottom is where the most money quietly goes nowhere.
At $2,000 a month you are buying roughly two days of skilled work. Where those two days go is the entire question, and most proposals answer it in language vague enough to cover doing very little.
The five things the low end should still include
Technical health checks. Crawlability, canonicals, sitemaps, page speed. Someone should be checking whether search engines can reach your pages, whether duplicate URLs are collapsing to the right canonical, whether the sitemap matches what is actually live, and whether the site is fast on a mid-range phone on mobile data. This work is unglamorous and it is where the biggest single-fix wins usually sit.
Query and intent research. A keyword list is raw material. The deliverable is a map of what people type and what they want when they type it, which tells you what to write and what format to write it in. A query where searchers want a price comparison will not reward a 2,000-word essay.
A content cadence. Something has to publish on a schedule. At this budget expect a small number of substantial pieces each month, and get clarity in the proposal about who writes them. If the plan quietly assumes you supply the drafts, that changes what you are buying.
Internal linking. The cheapest ranking work available and the most commonly skipped. New pages should be linked from relevant existing pages the week they go live, and your important pages should accumulate internal links over time. Nobody puts this on a slide because it does not photograph well.
Measurement. Search Console and analytics, reviewed monthly, reported in plain language. You should be able to read the report and know what changed, what caused it, and what happens next month.
| Line item | What you should see every month |
|---|---|
| Technical health | Issues found, issues fixed, with URLs |
| Query research | Specific queries and the pages targeting them |
| Content | Published work, on the agreed cadence |
| Internal linking | Links added, and to which pages |
| Measurement | Impressions, clicks, positions, in plain words |
Where the money goes at $8,000
The top of the range buys more of the same work, plus scope the low end cannot support. Higher publishing volume. Dedicated strategist time. Outreach and digital PR to earn links. Deeper structural work for large catalogs. It is the same discipline with more hours behind it.
Nothing at the top of the range is a different kind of magic. If a proposal at $8,000 describes activities that sound categorically unlike the ones at $2,000, ask what they actually are.
Nobody can guarantee rankings
Search engines do not sell positions and do not take requests. Anyone promising position one for a competitive term is either buying it with ads and calling the result SEO, or quietly targeting terms with no search volume so the promise is technically true.
What a retainer can honestly aim at is ranking you earn and keep. Earned ranking survives algorithm updates because it rests on pages that answer the query better than the alternatives. Bought ranking stops the day the invoice stops.
Any agency that puts a ranking guarantee in a contract has told you something useful about the rest of the contract.
The monthly PDF problem
There is a common shape of retainer that produces a report and nothing else. The report is thorough. It lists rankings, traffic, competitor movement. It is delivered on time every month, and the site it describes has not changed in a year.
The test takes one question: what changed on the site last month? If the answer is a document, the document is the whole service. Ask for the URLs that were edited, the pages that were published, the redirects that were added. A working retainer generates a trail of changes in your codebase and CMS, and the report exists to explain that trail.
The second test is who is doing the work. At $2,000 a month you are not getting a senior strategist full time, which is fine; you should still know whether the two days are skilled hours or a junior running a tool and pasting the output into a template.
Retainers on a site we built
On our builds, SEO goes in from the first commit rather than getting bolted on later: URL structure, metadata, structured data, sitemaps, performance budgets. A retainer on that kind of site starts from a better position, because the first three months are not spent undoing decisions from the build.
If your site came from somewhere else, expect the opening stretch of any retainer to be repair work. That is a normal and reasonable use of the first months, and it should be described that way in the proposal instead of being presented as strategy. If a build is also on your roadmap, bundling it with the retainer across our digital services earns a discount and avoids paying twice for the same fixes.
Send us the proposal you are weighing up, or the site you want to improve. We will tell you plainly what the SEO services budget you have in mind can cover and what it cannot. When you are ready, start a project.