Do You Need to Pay for SEO Every Month?
In short: most small businesses don’t need to pay for SEO every month. A retainer earns its keep in a competitive market where real work happens each month. For most sole traders and small practices, a one-off project with one clear goal gets more done for less.
Every few weeks I end up in the same conversation. The website is live, it looks good, and the owner would like a few more enquiries coming through it. So they ask around about SEO, and every quote that comes back has a monthly fee on it. Twelve months minimum, sometimes more.
Then they ask me, usually a bit warily:
“Is that really how SEO has to work?”
Honestly, for most of the people asking, no. I’ve been building websites for about 20 years, and these days a fair bit of my SEO work is one-off projects for small businesses. Clients tell me fairly often they don’t want a monthly SEO bill, and most of the time I don’t think they need one. So here’s my take on when a retainer is worth paying for, when it isn’t, and what you can do instead.
The short version:
| Monthly retainer | One-off project | Doing it yourself | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | $1,500 to $3,000 a month (Australian small business) | A fixed quote for the job | Your time |
| Best for | Competitive markets, lots of content, several locations | One goal, a quieter local market, foundations to fix | Owners with time and a site that’s already in good shape |
| Main trade-off | You pay whether or not much changes that month | Nobody watching between projects | Hard to know what to prioritise |
What a monthly retainer actually pays for
A retainer is a standing arrangement: you pay a set amount each month and an agency or consultant does an agreed amount of SEO work in return. Shout Digital tells small businesses to budget $1,500 to $2,500 a month for a reputable agency, and StudioHawk calls $1,500 to $3,000 the sweet spot for most small to medium businesses. For an overseas comparison, Ahrefs’ survey of 439 SEO providers (last updated 2024) found US$501 to $1,000 a month was the most common retainer, and US$75 to $100 the most common hourly rate.
What’s inside that fee varies a lot, and that’s part of the problem. A good retainer pays for work you can see on your site: new content, links from other sites, and technical fixes as things change. A weaker one is mostly a monthly report with some rank tracking attached.
Ongoing SEO really is ongoing for some businesses. Whether yours is one of them is the real question, and the agency selling the retainer isn’t the most neutral party to answer it. So ask them what will be different on your site at the end of each month. If the answer is mostly “you’ll get a report”, you’re paying for monitoring.
When a retainer is worth it
If you’re competing for searches that every business in your industry wants, in a capital city, someone has to keep producing content and earning links month after month, because your competitors are. An emergency service in a big metro area is a good example. So is an online store with hundreds of products.
It also makes sense when content is the engine. Some customers search a lot of questions before they buy, and the business that answers them well, week after week, tends to win. If nobody in your business has time to write, paying someone monthly to do it properly is a fair trade.
Where it falls down is when nobody can tell you what next month’s work actually is.
When it isn’t (which is most small businesses I talk to)
Most of the businesses I work with are sole traders and small practices. They serve a local area, they have a handful of real competitors, and there’s a limit to how many new clients they could take on anyway.
For them, most of the gain comes from getting the foundations right once. That means service pages that say plainly what you do and where you do it, and a Google Business Profile that’s complete and collecting reviews. Under the hood, the site needs to load quickly and make sense to Google. Once that’s in place the month to month work drops right off, and a retainer ends up paying for maintenance that doesn’t need doing.
There’s another case I see a lot. The site already gets visitors, but they don’t enquire. More traffic won’t fix that. If people arrive and leave, the problem is usually on the page itself, and that’s a conversion problem. It’s a fixed piece of work, not a monthly one.
And if your calendar is already full most weeks, think twice before paying to rank for more. You might get more out of ranking better for the kind of work you’d like more of.
What a one-off SEO project looks like
When I take one of these on, the first thing I ask for is one goal. “Better SEO” doesn’t count. “More enquiries for this one service” does, and so does “show up when people nearby search for what I do”. If someone comes to me with three goals, that’s usually three projects, and we decide on the second once the first has had time to show results.
Usually I start with an SEO audit, so the work is based on what your site actually needs rather than a standard package of tasks. Then I fix whatever stands between the site and that goal. Sometimes that’s on-page work. Sometimes it’s the path from the page to the enquiry form, which isn’t strictly SEO, but it’s often where the quickest wins are hiding.
After that, we leave it alone for a while. Search changes take time to show, so I look at the numbers again after about two to three months. You get a fixed quote up front, and when the project’s done, it’s done. There’s no contract rolling on in the background.
Two ways to tackle it
A one-off approach doesn’t look the same for every business. Most of my SEO work falls into one of two shapes, depending on whether you have a specific goal in mind right now or would just like help on hand when something comes up. Neither involves a monthly SEO fee.
A goal-led project
This suits a business that knows what it wants more of. That might be enquiries for one service, or more of a particular kind of client. Rather than trying to rank for everything, we start with that one goal and look at the paths through the site first: where someone looking for that service lands, what they read next, and how easily they can get in touch. Traffic comes second, because there’s not much point sending more people to a page that doesn’t turn them into enquiries. The project has a start and an end, and the next decision gets made once the numbers are in.
SEO as needed, alongside a care plan
This suits a business that already has me looking after their website on a hosting and care plan. SEO isn’t part of a monthly fee. When something comes up, like a new service to launch or a page that isn’t pulling its weight, they ask, and I quote it as a piece of work. In the months they don’t need anything, they don’t pay for anything.
Either way, what makes it work is an owner who knows what they want from the site.
A one-off fix on my own site
Here’s an example from my own site, because it shows how much one fix can matter.
Earlier this year my SEO audit service page wasn’t appearing in Google at all. Zero impressions in Search Console. The page itself was fine. The problem was that my homepage, the strongest page on the site, didn’t link to it once. Five links from the homepage went to other services and none went to the audit page, so Google had very little reason to think it mattered.
The fix was small. I added a services section to the homepage that links to every service, and mentioned the audit where it belonged. Google has since crawled and indexed the page, and it now appears in search results for audit searches. I didn’t need a monthly plan to find that, just someone looking at the right report.
Most small business SEO problems I find look like this one: something specific is in the way, and fixing it once is enough.
Not for you
A one-off project is the wrong fit if competitors in your market publish every week and actively build links. A single project gives you a lift that slowly wears off, and you need ongoing work, from a retainer or from someone in-house.
It’s also the wrong fit if you’d like someone else to own your search results entirely, with a report and a phone call every month. A retainer gives you that. A project doesn’t.
And if you’re hoping a one-off project will put you at the top of Google for something broad like “plumber Melbourne” within a few weeks, it won’t.
If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, an SEO audit is a sensible place to start. It tells you what your site actually needs, and you can decide from there.
