A better website or an SEO retainer

Fix the site before promoting it

Search work, and work aimed at an answer engine, amplifies whatever already exists. A site with three thin pages and no answers has nothing to amplify, and no amount of monthly activity creates material that was never written.

So the sequence matters. Pages that answer real questions first, promotion second, and a business that reverses the order pays monthly for very little.

Our page on thin content covers how to tell whether that is your situation. It is usually obvious once somebody asks the question directly.

The same applies to advertising. Paying to send people to pages that do not answer their question turns a content problem into a monthly bill, and the bill does not fix the pages.

What a good retainer actually does

Research into what customers search for, decisions about which pages should exist, writing or commissioning those pages, fixing what is structurally wrong, and measuring the result.

Most of that is content work. The technical half is real and finite: it gets fixed and then stays fixed unless somebody breaks it again.

So a retainer that is genuinely working looks like a publishing operation rather than a technical one, and the deliverables are pages rather than reports.

Ask to see the pages they produced for somebody else. Reading three of them tells you more about what you are buying than any proposal or case study will.

How to tell a poor one

Monthly reports full of metrics nobody acts on. Impressions, rankings for phrases nobody searches, and a summary that says progress is being made.

Promises about position or traffic in a fixed period. Nobody controls those, and a provider offering them is either inexperienced or dishonest. Our page on honest claims covers why.

And activity you cannot see on the site. If a month of work produced nothing you can open and read, ask what was actually delivered.

Questions to ask before signing

The list below separates a publishing operation from a reporting one. A provider who answers all seven clearly is usually worth the money.

• What will exist on my site in three months that does not now
• Who writes the content, and how they learn my trade
• What technical work is needed, and when it is finished
• What you will report, and what decision it informs
• What happens if nothing improves
• What I keep if I stop paying
• Who else in my trade you have done this for

What you keep when it ends

Pages you keep. Links you keep. Accounts and access you keep if they were set up in your name, which is why that has to be agreed at the start rather than at the end.

What stops is the work. A retainer that produced pages leaves a site that keeps earning; one that produced reports leaves nothing at all.

That test is worth applying in advance. Ask what the site will look like a year after you stop, and the answer tells you what you are actually buying.

Get the research too. The keyword work, the page plan and the notes about your market are the parts you paid for and the parts most often kept by the agency.

When a retainer is clearly right

When the site is already good, the market is competitive, and the constraint is genuinely visibility rather than substance. That is a real situation and it justifies real spending.

When you have no capacity to write and would rather buy it. Paying somebody to produce pages is legitimate and it is what most of this money should be buying.

And when the technical position is genuinely broken in ways nobody in the business can diagnose. That work is finite and worth paying an expert for.

The middle option most people miss

Buy a plan rather than a retainer. A few hours of a good strategist naming the pages worth having produces something you can execute yourself over a year.

Our page on site planning covers what that plan contains. It is the part of the work that genuinely needs expertise, and it is a small fraction of the cost.

Then measure yourself. Our page on the performance report covers what to look at, and it takes fifteen minutes a month rather than a retainer.