Here is a familiar shape.
You pay somebody monthly for SEO. Each month a report arrives. It has your logo on it, a competitor comparison, some keyword rankings, a few charts, and a section headed “work completed this month” listing things like keyword research, on-page optimisation, technical audit.
You have never been entirely sure what any of it means. The phone has not rung noticeably more. But it feels like something is being done, so it continues.
I want to explain what is actually happening, and then explain why the industry is built this way, because the second part is more interesting than the first.
Where that report came from
The report is very likely not written by the person who sent it.
There is a whole industry of white label SEO providers whose business is producing reports and deliverables that agencies rebrand and pass on. You send them a domain, they send back a document, the logo gets swapped, and it lands in your inbox looking bespoke.
That is not fraud, and I am not going to pretend it is. White labelling is normal in plenty of trades and the underlying work can be perfectly competent.
But it does explain a few things you may have noticed.
Why the report never quite refers to your actual business. Why the recommendations are generic enough to apply to anybody. Why the competitor analysis names companies you do not really compete with. Why nothing in it ever seems to connect to a decision somebody made about you.
It is a template with your name in it, because that is what it was designed to be.
The activity problem
Then there is what the retainer actually buys.
A monthly fee needs monthly activity, and it needs that activity to be listable. So the work gravitates towards things that can be done repeatedly and described plausibly.
Adding a few more keywords to track. Another round of on-page tweaks. A fresh audit that finds broadly what the last one found. A handful of directory submissions. Meta descriptions rewritten again.
None of that is wrong, exactly. It is just not where the difference gets made, and it can carry on forever without anything fundamental changing.
I have looked at plenty of sites that had been on a retainer for two or three years and were structurally identical to how they started. Slow, badly organised, missing the pages they needed, with a lot of small optimisations layered on top of a weak foundation.
Somebody had been busy. Nobody had fixed anything.
Now the bit that actually explains it
Here is the uncomfortable structural point, and it is not about anyone being dishonest.
If you fix a website properly, there is less to do next month.
Get the foundations right, get the pages that need to exist built, get the profile sorted, get the site fast and clean, and a lot of the monthly work disappears. What is left is genuinely valuable but it is much smaller: keep publishing, keep the reviews coming, watch what happens, adjust occasionally.
That is a problem for a business model that depends on billing for activity every month.
So there is a quiet pressure, in the whole industry, away from the deep fixes and towards the perpetual small ones. Nobody sits down and decides to do this. It is just what a monthly-activity model rewards over time, and people tend to end up doing what their model rewards.
The incentive is not aligned with getting you sorted. It is aligned with there always being something to report.
What I do instead, and its obvious drawback
My approach is the other way round, and I will be honest that it has a commercial disadvantage.
Build it right first. The site is fast, structurally sound, properly organised, with the pages that need to exist actually existing, and the technical foundations correct from day one rather than patched later. Internal linking, structure, speed, the lot. Not as billable tasks, just as part of building something that works.
That is the bit that gets skipped when SEO is bolted onto an existing site, because fixing foundations retrospectively is expensive and awkward and does not make an impressive report.
Then recommend what will actually move the needle, which varies enormously and is often not what people expect.
For a lot of local businesses, the honest answer has nothing to do with the website. It is that your Google Business Profile is half empty, you have got eleven reviews and the newest is from 2023, and your competitor has ninety. No amount of on-page work competes with that.
Sometimes the answer is that you need three pages you have not got. Sometimes it is that your prices are not published and people cannot compare you. Sometimes it is that the phone is not being answered.
And sometimes the honest answer is that there is nothing worth doing this month.
That is the sentence no retainer survives, which is precisely why you so rarely hear it.
And sometimes the answer is to start again
Here is the other thing you will rarely be told on a retainer, because it is one large job rather than twelve small ones.
Occasionally a website is not worth patching. The structure is wrong, it is built on something that fights you, half the pages should never have existed, and every fix is a workaround on top of a previous workaround. At that point, carrying on optimising is throwing good money after bad, and rebuilding is cheaper than the next two years of tinkering.
People are frightened of that, and the fear is reasonable, because it is genuinely possible to rebuild a site and destroy years of accumulated search equity in an afternoon. I have been called in to clean that up more than once.
But it is entirely avoidable. The rule is simple:
Whatever ranks, keeps its address.
Before anything is touched, you work out which pages currently earn you impressions, clicks and enquiries. Those pages keep their existing URLs, exactly as they are. No tidying, no restructuring, no improving them for neatness. A page that ranks has earned its address and there is nothing to gain by changing it.
For everything else:
Pages with genuine value that are moving or merging get a 301 redirect to their closest equivalent. That passes most of what they have built up to the new page. Closest equivalent means the page that actually replaces it, not whatever is nearest to hand.
Genuinely worthless pages should be allowed to disappear. The old news section nobody read, the seventeen thin location pages somebody generated in 2019, the tag archives. Let them go properly. There is no benefit in keeping dead weight alive, and a site full of pointless pages is harder for both people and machines to make sense of.
And never redirect everything to the homepage. It is the most common shortcut and it does not work. Google treats a mass redirect to the homepage as though the pages simply vanished, so you get none of the benefit and all of the work.
One last thing people forget. Your old URLs are not only in your own site. They are in your Google profile, your directory listings, other people’s links, and anywhere you have ever pasted a link. Mapping the redirects is the job. Checking what still points at the old ones afterwards is the other half of it.
Done properly, a rebuild loses you almost nothing and fixes everything underneath. Done carelessly, it is the most expensive mistake in this trade.
Why my model is not immune either
I should be even-handed here, because I also charge monthly and I am not pretending that is noble.
The difference I have tried to build in is that the monthly fee is not sold as a quantity of SEO work. It covers the site being hosted, maintained, kept secure, and content being published, plus the search and profile work as part of that rather than as a line item.
Which means when there is nothing clever to do in a given month, nothing bad happens. Nobody has to invent activity to justify the invoice, because the invoice was never a bill for hours.
That is not me being virtuous. It is that I did not want to build a business where I would eventually be tempted to pad.
And you should test it. If a month goes by and I have not told you plainly what was done and why, ask. If the answer is vague, that is exactly the thing I have spent this post complaining about, and you should hold me to it.
What to ask your current provider
Four questions, and none require you to understand SEO.
“What did you do last month, and why that rather than something else?” The reason matters more than the list. A good answer connects to a decision about your specific business.
“Which of these numbers connects to somebody actually contacting us?” I have written about why most SEO reporting measures the wrong things, and this question sorts it quickly.
“What is structurally wrong with my website, and what would it cost to fix properly?” If the answer is that nothing much is wrong, look at your site on a phone and decide whether you believe that.
“Is there ever a month where the right answer is to do nothing?” Watch what happens to their face.
The short version
Most SEO retainers are not scams. They are just shaped by a model that pays for activity rather than outcomes, and the predictable result is a great deal of activity.
Build the thing properly, then do the small number of things that genuinely matter, and be willing to say when that number is zero.
It makes for a much less impressive report. It tends to make the phone ring more.
Want an honest assessment of what would actually move the needle? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself, and I will tell you if the answer is that you do not need me.