What an SEO package should actually contain

SEO shows up in 2,240 of the 27,169 project briefs we hold, with backlinks in 245 and content writing in 574. It is one of the most requested services and, by some distance, the one where what is bought and what is delivered are most likely to be different things.

The root cause is how packages get priced. A retainer sold on outcomes is hard to quote and harder to guarantee, so almost everybody sells deliverables instead: this many articles, this many links, this many keywords tracked. That is legible and comparable, and it quietly creates an incentive to produce many cheap things rather than a few effective ones.

The three kinds of work, and their shapes

The first is finite. A site's crawl access, redirects, canonicals, structure and Core Web Vitals get fixed, and after that they need watching rather than working. A package charging a constant monthly fee for technical SEO in month nine is charging for monitoring at the price of remediation.

The second and third genuinely are ongoing, because competitors keep publishing and the search results keep moving. Those are the lines that justify a retainer.

Reading the line items honestly

• Keyword research — real work, once, then refreshed quarterly. Charged monthly at full rate, it is padding.
• Ten blog posts a month — almost always a warning sign. Volume at that rate means thin articles that satisfy the invoice and rank for nothing.
• Twenty backlinks a month — ask which sites. If the answer is not a list you can visit and judge, assume the worst, because links that can be bought at that volume are the ones with no value left.
• Monthly reporting — necessary, but it is the record of the work, not the work. A package where reporting is a headline deliverable is thin underneath.
• On-page optimisation — real, and mostly finite per page. Useful when tied to specific pages with specific problems.
• Technical audit — real, and the correct first month. A package that starts producing content in week one, before anyone has looked at whether the site can be crawled, has the order wrong.

What the price should follow

Sensible SEO pricing follows three variables: how competitive the space is, how bad the starting position is, and how much content the site needs that it does not have. None of these are the number of pages on the site, which is what most estimators ask for first.

Competition is the dominant term and the one clients most often underestimate. Ranking a local service business in a mid-sized city is a substantially different undertaking from ranking a software product against venture-funded competitors with content teams. The same package applied to both produces a good result in one case and no visible result in the other, and the difference is not effort.

What to expect, and when

Technical fixes can move things within weeks, sometimes dramatically if something was actively broken. Content and authority work on a horizon of months, and the first few months of a well-run engagement often look like nothing is happening, because publishing precedes ranking by a considerable margin.

That lag is why the diagnosis month matters so much. It produces a baseline and a priority list, which are the only things that let you tell, six months later, the difference between an engagement that is working slowly and one that is not working at all.