seothumb.com pricing: what an SEO retainer actually costs, and why
Three flat monthly retainers, scoped in advance after the audit. No percentage-of-spend, no traffic-based invoicing, no setup fee. This page covers what moves a quote, what is excluded, and how to work out your tier before you speak to anyone.
-
From $2,400/mo
Flat, scoped in advance
-
90-day term
Then month to month
-
30 days' notice
No renewal trap, no exit fee
-
Foundation
$2,400 / month
One site, under ~500 URLs, one or two templates.
It fits when
- A single site with a clean CMS and no faceted navigation
- No prior technical pass, or the last one was over two years ago
- One market, one language, one location
Where the boundary sits You outgrow Foundation the moment a second delivery track has to run in parallel with technical work — usually when content needs commissioning before remediation is finished.
≈15 senior consultant hours / month
Start with Foundation - Most sites start here
Growth
$5,800 / month
Multi-template site or a growing catalog, several tracks at once.
It fits when
- Four or more distinct page templates
- An active publishing schedule that needs briefs, not just edits
- Link acquisition running alongside technical remediation
Where the boundary sits Growth is the tier where technical, on-page and content run in parallel rather than in sequence. The boundary with Scale is not revenue: it is whether one template change touches tens of thousands of URLs, or whether more than one location needs its own rank picture.
≈35 senior consultant hours / month
Start with Growth -
Scale
$11,500 / month
Large catalogs, multi-location operators, direct implementation.
It fits when
- Catalogs above roughly 10,000 SKUs, or faceted navigation generating six figures of URLs
- Ten or more locations needing per-branch tracking
- A release process where SEO changes have to ship as code
Where the boundary sits Scale exists because some sites cannot be fixed through a ticket queue. At this tier we open pull requests or ship in the CMS directly, and a specialist works alongside the lead consultant on technical, content and digital PR.
≈70 consultant hours / month across the team
Start with Scale
Every tier includes the full deliverable list for the tracks it runs. The tier-by-tier deliverables are set out on the homepage pricing section; this page explains the reasoning behind the numbers instead of repeating them.
What moves a quote up or down
Two businesses with identical revenue can sit two tiers apart. These are the factors that actually decide it, in roughly the order they matter.
-
Site size and template count
Templates matter more than URL count. A 40,000-URL catalog on six clean templates is less work than a 900-page site where every section was built by a different agency.
-
CMS friction
If title tags, canonicals and schema are editable at template level, work ships in a sprint. If every change needs a developer ticket and a quarterly release train, the same work costs more to land.
-
Catalog and facet complexity
Faceted navigation, variant duplication and merchant-feed alignment are the most labour-intensive technical work in SEO. A catalog with all three is a Scale engagement regardless of revenue.
-
Number of locations
Each address needs its own page, its own Business Profile pass and its own geo-grid tracking. Location count moves a quote roughly linearly.
-
Competitive difficulty
Where the top ten results are all established publishers or funded competitors, the link and content investment required to reach page one is materially higher, and we will say so before you sign rather than after.
-
An in-house dev team
If you have developers who can merge our specs, we spend our hours on diagnosis and direction instead of implementation, and the quote comes down.
-
Existing measurement
A correctly configured GA4 property with conversion tracking already in place removes two to three weeks of setup from month one.
Why flat monthly, and not percentage-of-spend or hourly
Percentage-of-spend billing ties our fee to your ad budget, which has nothing to do with organic search. Traffic-based billing rewards us for sessions rather than revenue, and the cheapest way to grow sessions is to publish low-intent content that never converts. Hourly billing makes you pay for our learning curve and turns every question into a cost decision.
A flat monthly fee, scoped in advance, means the incentive is simple: get the forecast right and then hit it. You know what you are spending before the first invoice, and we know what we have committed to deliver.
The number is set after the audit, not before. Any agency quoting a fixed retainer before it has crawled your site is guessing, and the guess is priced to protect them rather than you.
What happens if the forecast is missed
The forecast is a model, not a promise, and we say so plainly in the results disclaimer. What we commit to is the scope, the quality and the timing of the work, because those are the things we control.
When results run behind the model, the monthly memo says so in the first paragraph rather than the last. We re-run the assumptions, name what changed — a core update, a competitor's investment, a release that shipped late on your side or ours — and revise the plan in writing. If the revision means the engagement no longer clears its own cost, we will tell you that too.
You are on 30 days' notice after the first 90 days precisely so that conversation has a real exit attached to it.
The 90-day committed term, and why it exists
The first 90 days are committed. It is the shortest honest window in which technical work can show measurable effect: the audit takes two weeks, remediation takes four to six, and Google needs time to recrawl and reprocess what changed.
A 30-day rolling contract from day one sounds friendlier and produces worse work, because it pushes an agency toward whatever looks busy in month one rather than whatever compounds by month nine.
After day 90 the retainer is month to month with 30 days' notice. There is no auto-renewing annual term, no cancellation fee, and no clause that makes leaving expensive.
What you keep if you leave
Everything produced during the engagement is yours, handed over on the way out and not held hostage:
- The full technical audit and every subsequent crawl export
- The keyword-to-URL map and the revenue forecast model
- All content briefs, published and unpublished
- Tracking configuration, GA4 events and the Looker Studio dashboard
- The link placement log with live URLs, anchors and dates
- Documentation for anything we built inside your CMS
Accounts and properties stay in your ownership throughout. We work inside your Search Console and your GA4, never inside a reseller account you cannot access.
How to tell which tier you need without a call
Count your templates, not your pages. Under three templates on a clean CMS with a single location, start at Foundation. Four or more templates, or an active content programme that needs briefs commissioned monthly, start at Growth. A catalog with faceted navigation, ten or more locations, or a release process where SEO changes ship as code, start at Scale.
If that still leaves you between two tiers, the audit settles it. Send your domain and the document will name the tier and the reason, and it costs nothing to find out. The full service detail sits on the services overview.
What the retainer does not cover
Listing this is cheaper for both of us than discovering it in month three. Anything below is either billed separately as a scoped project or referred to someone who does it better than we would.
-
Paid media
Google Ads, paid social and shopping campaigns. We will tell you when paid is the faster answer, and we will refer you rather than pretend to run it.
-
Web development beyond SEO fixes
We ship SEO changes in your CMS or as pull requests. Redesigns, new features and platform migrations are separate projects, though we will spec the SEO requirements for them.
-
Brand, design and creative
Logo, identity, photography and video. Content briefs and copy editing are included; art direction is not.
-
General PR retainers
Digital PR for link acquisition is included in Growth and Scale. Corporate communications, crisis PR and media training are not.
Questions about SEO pricing
-
Do you quote a fixed price before seeing the site?
No. The tiers on this page are real prices, but which one fits is decided by the audit. An agency that commits to a number before crawling your site is pricing its own risk, not your scope, and that padding is always paid by the client.
-
Is there a setup fee or onboarding cost?
No. The audit that opens every engagement is free and stays free whether or not you sign. Month one of a retainer covers the forecast, access setup and the start of remediation, at the same monthly rate as every other month.
-
Can we start with just an audit and no retainer?
Yes, and that is a normal outcome rather than a failed sale. You get the 12-page document and the prioritized fix list, and if your own developers can clear the list in a two-week sprint, that is the right answer and we will say so.
-
What happens to the price if our site grows?
Scope is reviewed at the 90-day mark and quarterly after that. If a catalog doubles or you add locations, we re-scope in writing before any change takes effect. Prices do not move mid-quarter and never move without your written agreement.
-
Do you offer a discount for annual prepayment?
No. A discount for locking in twelve months transfers risk to you at exactly the point where you have least information about whether the work is landing. The month-to-month arrangement after day 90 is the better deal for a client, and we would rather keep it honest.
The audit tells you which tier you need
Send your domain and the audit names the tier and the reason, before any retainer is scoped. It is free, it lands inside five business days, and you keep it either way.
Five business day turnaround. No call required to receive it.