How to price an SEO retainer in a proposal

Pick the pricing model first

SEO work comes in four shapes, and mixing them up is where most pricing goes wrong.

Monthly retainer. Ongoing work with a defined monthly output. This is the default for SEO, because the results build over months and the client is buying a programme.

Fixed project. A technical audit, a site migration, a one-off content plan. Price it as a project with a clear deliverable and end date.

Hourly consulting. Advising an in-house team, answering questions, reviewing their work. Hourly is honest here because the scope really is unknown.

Performance-based. Paid per ranking or per lead. It sounds client-friendly, but it ties your income to an algorithm you don’t control and invites arguments about attribution. If you offer it at all, offer it as a bonus on top of a base retainer.

The rest of this guide is about the retainer, because that’s the hard one.

Build the number from deliverables

A retainer price should come from what you’ll actually do each month. Start by writing the monthly deliverables in countable terms, estimating the hours each takes, and multiplying by your effective hourly rate. Your effective rate is what you need to earn per working hour after unpaid time like sales, admin and learning. It isn’t what you’d quote for an hour of consulting.

Here is a worked example. Every number in it is illustrative. Swap in your own hours, rate and tools. It is not a statement of what SEO should cost.

Two checks before you use the number. First, value: does the plausible upside for the client clearly exceed the retainer? If extra search traffic only brings a handful of low-value enquiries a year, no price will feel good, and the honest answer may be a small audit instead of a retainer. Second, capacity: how many clients at this many hours can you actually serve well? If the answer is “not enough to make a living,” your rate is too low, not your hours too high.

Turn it into three tiers

Once you know what one well-scoped month costs you, build tiers by changing the output, not the price tag on the same work. For example: a Foundation tier with technical upkeep, reporting and two content briefs; a Growth tier that’s the worked example above; and an Authority tier that adds more content and outreach. The middle tier should be the one you’d recommend, and the proposal should say so.

Each tier needs its deliverables listed in numbers: articles briefed, pages optimised, outreach targets contacted, reports delivered. Vague tiers (“basic SEO,” “advanced SEO”) force the client to compare prices, because there’s nothing else to compare.

Price setup separately

Month one isn’t like month five. You audit the site, set up tracking and reporting, research keywords and fix the backlog of technical issues. Price that as a one-time setup line, so the monthly retainer reflects ongoing work and the client sees why the first invoice is bigger. It also stops a client from cancelling after month two having received the most expensive work at the retainer price.

Set a minimum term, and say why

SEO results take months to show up, and month one is mostly setup. A minimum initial term, somewhere from three to six months, protects both sides: you aren’t judged on a timeline the work can’t meet, and the client gets a fair test. After that, move to rolling monthly with a notice period, such as 30 days. Explain the reasoning in a sentence. A minimum term with no explanation reads like a lock-in.

What to promise, and what not to

Promise what you control: the deliverables, the response time, the report and the metrics in it. Don’t promise rankings, traffic numbers or positions for specific keywords. You don’t control the search engine, and a guarantee you can’t keep becomes a refund conversation. Say plainly in the proposal that rankings can’t be guaranteed. Serious clients trust that more than they trust a promise.

Wording for the pricing section

Put the price review in writing too: “Retainer pricing is reviewed every twelve months with 60 days’ notice.” It makes future increases routine instead of awkward.

Putting it into the proposal

Our free SEO proposal template has the structure: mini-audit findings, strategy, deliverables, timeline, pricing and terms. Related templates cover digital marketing and PPC. For the rest of the document, see how to write a freelance proposal.

We make ApeiroCraft, where those templates open. Setup and retainer go in as pricing line items, the client signs on the proposal link, and the accepted proposal becomes the first invoice in one click. One honest limit: ApeiroCraft doesn’t send recurring invoices automatically. For months two onwards, you save the invoice as a template and send it each month. Your invoice links to your own payment page; we never process the payment.