What you pay for monthly in SEO

A monthly SEO invoice looks like a subscription to something invisible. Nothing is delivered, no file arrives, and the site looks the same as it did at the end of last month. The reasonable reaction is to ask what exactly was paid for.

The answer is hours, spent on a fairly consistent set of tasks.

Why this is a monthly arrangement rather than a one-off job

The obvious question is why the site cannot simply be optimized once and left alone.

Partly because the search engine reassesses continuously and its criteria change several times a year. Partly because competitors keep working, so a site standing still loses ground without changing at all. And mostly because the largest component of the work is producing new pages, which is by nature a continuing activity rather than a task with an end.

There is a genuine one-off version of this work, which is a technical clean-up. Fix what is broken, adjust the existing pages, set up the measurement, and stop. That is a real service and it suits a site that will not be actively promoted, but it produces a floor rather than a trajectory.

Technical work each month

The technical part takes roughly a quarter of the hours and is the most consistent in composition.

• Checking the index. Which pages went missing and why.
• New errors. Broken links, unreachable pages, slow responses.
• Speed. Watched continuously, fixed when it degrades.
• After every site change. A release can break something invisibly.
• Structured data. Kept valid as pages change.

On an established site this is a few hours monthly. On a site that has never had this attention the first two months are much heavier, because years of accumulated faults are being cleared at once.

The item people underestimate is the fourth. Every change made to a live site by anyone, including the client’s own team, can break something that affects ranking, and catching that within days rather than months is a large part of what the monthly arrangement actually buys.

Content and how much of it is needed

Who writes the text

This is where most of the budget goes, and where the arrangements vary most.

Text can be written by the contractor, by the client, or by both together. Written entirely by the contractor it costs more and reads more generically, because nobody outside the business knows the trade well enough. Written entirely by the client it costs less and usually does not happen, because the owner has other work.

The arrangement that works is a division. The contractor prepares the structure, the questions and the search requirements, the client answers the ones only they can answer, in whatever form is convenient, and the contractor turns that into a page. That costs less than full writing and produces text that is actually about your business.

How many articles make sense

The number matters less than the consistency, and both matter less than the choice of topic.

Two to four substantial pages a month is a normal pace for a small site, and it is enough to build momentum over a year. Ten a month is possible and rarely justified, because the bottleneck is usually not the writing but the choice of what to write about and the quality of the answers behind it.

The work behind a single substantial page breaks down roughly like this, and seeing it laid out explains why the number per month is what it is.

• Choosing the topic from data. An hour, and it decides everything downstream.
• Building the structure. What questions the page answers, in what order.
• Getting the answers only you have. Usually a conversation with the client.
• Writing and editing. The largest single block.
• Linking it into the site. From existing pages, to the right destinations.
• Publishing and checking. Formatting, images, how it renders on a phone.

Skip any one of those and the page still appears, which is why the skipped ones are hard to notice. The first and the fifth are skipped most often, and they are the two that decide whether the page brings anything.

The topics should follow measured demand rather than intuition. A page written about something nobody searches for is a cost with no return, and the difference between a topic list built from data and one built from brainstorming is the difference between the whole activity paying for itself and not.

Link building

This is the part of the budget with the widest range of practice, from useful to actively dangerous.

The legitimate version is slow and unglamorous. Industry directories that a real person maintains, professional associations, suppliers and partners who list who they work with, publications that will carry a genuine article. A handful a month is a normal rate, and it produces links that do not need to be hidden from anyone.

The other version is buying links in bulk, and it is cheaper per unit for the reason that it does not work. The consequences of the second approach, and how to check which one you are paying for, are gone through in our article on how to check an SEO contractor’s work.

What separates a link worth having from one worth avoiding comes down to a short set of questions.

• Would the page exist without the link? A real page has its own reason to be.
• Does a person maintain the site? Or is a script generating the pages?
• Is the subject related to yours? Even a loose connection counts; an unrelated subject does not.
• Would you show the page to a client? A useful instinct.
• How many outbound links does it carry? A few is normal, hundreds is a farm.

A reasonable position for a small business is to keep link work to the basics. Industry directories and listings are basic hygiene, and beyond those, if the budget is limited, spending it on pages and on the site itself produces more than spending it on links. The sites that genuinely need sustained link work are the ones competing in crowded national markets.

Analytics and reporting

The second row is the one that matters and the one clients tend to see as overhead. Somebody has to look at which queries appeared, which pages are being found, where visitors leave and what that implies for next month, and that is the thinking that makes the rest of the hours worth spending.

A report produced without that analysis is a data dump. It takes ten minutes to generate and it is why so many SEO reports say nothing.

What is inside the rate and what is billed separately

Confusion here causes most billing disputes, and it is avoidable by asking once at the start.

The rate normally covers technical monitoring, analysis, planning, reporting, on-page work and a set number of content hours. Design work, development of new functionality, paid content placement, stock photography, and any large piece of restructuring usually sit outside it.

• New page templates. Development work, quoted separately.
• Design of anything new. Not part of an SEO rate.
• Paid placements. The cost of the placement is passed through.
• Translation. Where a second language version is involved.
• Migration or a rebuild. A project, not a monthly line.

The item that most often surprises people is the first one. SEO work can establish that the site needs a new type of page, and building that page type falls under development, so it arrives as a separate quote.

How this differs from advertising in its cost logic

The two are often compared and they behave in opposite ways.

Advertising is rented traffic. It stops on the day the budget runs out, and it does not always start on the day you launch, because ads go through Google review. Each click is paid for again, and the cost per click depends on the auction and your competitors, so it changes. After launch, automated bid strategies also go through a learning period, and part of that period’s budget goes into gathering data.

SEO is built traffic. It costs the same each month whether or not anything arrives, but the more pages rank, the smaller the share of inquiries you have to buy through advertising. The result is that advertising is expensive per visitor and quick to start, SEO is cheap per visitor and delayed, and the sensible arrangement for most businesses is both, with advertising covering the months before SEO produces anything. How long that takes is covered in our article on when the first SEO results appear.

What the figure in the invoice is built from

SEO work runs from $400/mo for a site selling services and from $600/mo for an online store, and then scales with the volume of work. A site with several language versions is on a higher tier, from $900/mo. We take on monthly work for at least three months.

One-off tasks outside a monthly arrangement, including a technical clean-up, are billed at $25/hr. An initial audit with a work plan is a separate one-off job, from $200. If we take the project on for monthly work right after it, the audit is included in the monthly fee.

What moves the monthly figure is the number of pages produced, how competitive the field is, the amount of link work involved and how much of the writing the client’s side takes on. A site in a quiet local market with an owner who answers questions promptly costs meaningfully less than a shop competing nationally with nobody available to explain the products.

This work sits alongside ordinary maintenance and runs under our search engine optimization service.

Where people cut corners and what it costs them

Four economies are common, and three of them backfire.

Cutting the content hours is the most frequent and the most damaging, because content is the part that compounds. Cut it in half and the result arrives much later than the saving suggests.

Skipping the analytics work looks like removing overhead but removes the ability to know whether anything is working. Six months later the question of whether to continue cannot be answered from data.

Writing the text in-house to save money works when somebody is genuinely assigned to it and fails when it is added to the owner’s existing workload. The pages do not get written, the plan slips, and the months are paid for regardless.

The one economy that usually is sensible is dropping paid placements on a small local site. The basic directory listings stay, and what that budget buys in pages is worth more.

How many hours this actually is

An invoice becomes easier to read once it is translated into hours.

On a small site with a modest arrangement, the hours go to technical checks, a couple of pages, the analysis and the report. A larger project with a real content program and competitive queries needs several times as many hours.

The useful test is to divide the monthly figure by an hourly rate and ask whether the resulting number of hours matches what the report describes. If the report describes three hours of work and the invoice implies twenty, that is a conversation worth having.

When a monthly arrangement is not needed

There are sites that are better off without one.

A site with no search demand behind its product, one selling entirely through a marketplace, or one whose customers all come by referral does not need ongoing SEO. It may still need a technical clean-up once, which is a different purchase.

A site that is about to be rebuilt should also wait. Promoting pages that will cease to exist in three months is spending twice, and the sensible order is to rebuild first with the search requirements built in.

The remaining case is a business whose site is fundamentally sound but neglected. There a single audit and a fixed clean-up can be worth more than a year of subscription, and what that involves is described in our article on what a website audit finds. For a broader look at the ongoing care of a live site, see our article on what website support includes.

Conclusions

A monthly SEO fee buys hours, and those hours go mostly on producing pages, with technical monitoring and analysis around them. What drives the figure is the size of the site, how competitive the niche is, how much link work it needs and how much of the writing you take on yourselves. It is a subscription because the largest part of it is a continuing activity.

The figure is easier to judge once you divide it by an hourly rate and compare the result against what the report says was done. Any arrangement that cannot survive that comparison is worth questioning.

If you are considering starting, or already paying and unsure the amount matches the work, send us the site address and the last two reports you received. We will say how many hours the described work represents, what is missing from it, and whether a monthly arrangement is the right purchase for your site at all or whether a one-off clean-up would serve you better.