Monthly SEO retainer

After the audit and the big fixes, sites drift. Plugins update, developers ship new templates, editors publish pages without descriptions, and Google changes what it rewards. A retainer keeps a senior consultant watching your site every month and fixing problems while they're still small.

What a month includes

• Monitoring. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for indexing changes, crawl errors, manual actions, and Core Web Vitals; analytics for unusual drops; uptime and redirect checks on key pages.
• A monthly crawl. Compared with last month's, so new 404s, redirect chains, duplicate titles, and noindex tags are caught within weeks of appearing.
• Hands-on fixes. Metadata, redirects, schema, internal links, and plugin or Cloudflare settings, within the hours on the retainer.
• Developer QA. I review releases that touch templates, routing, or head tags, before they ship when possible and right after when not.
• Content support. Briefs for new pages, edits for SEO, and refreshes of pages that are slipping.
• AI search checks. A stable set of prompts run across the major assistants, tracked over time.
• A report. One page in plain English: what changed, what I did, what I recommend next, and the handful of numbers that matter.

Who it suits

• Businesses without an in-house SEO, whose website is a real source of customers.
• Marketing teams that want a senior specialist on call without a full-time hire.
• Development teams that want someone to catch SEO regressions before they ship.
• Agencies that need technical SEO depth behind their own client work.

How it's structured

A retainer covers a set number of hours each month, agreed in advance and billed at the start of the month, or run as a weekly hourly contract on Upwork. Priorities are set together at the start of each month and adjusted when something urgent comes up. Unused hours don't roll over indefinitely; if months run consistently light, I'll suggest a smaller plan.

Starting a retainer

Retainers usually follow an audit, so the first month starts with a plan rather than discovery. If you already have a recent, solid audit from someone else, I'll review it and start from there.

Monthly priorities

The first week of each month starts with a short written plan: the three to five things I'll focus on, why, and what you'll need to approve. Midmonth surprises, such as a sudden drop or a broken release, take priority, and the plan is adjusted in writing.

Communication

Requests and updates happen in writing, in Upwork, email, or your project tool, so there's always a record of what was asked and what was done. A monthly call to walk through the report is included for anyone who wants one.

Ending a retainer

Either side can end a retainer at the end of any month. When it ends, you get a handover note listing what's in progress, what to watch, and where every login and setting stands, and I remove my access.

Updated October 6, 2026