What a marketing retainer should actually include

The word retainer means you are holding time. That is a legitimate thing to buy. It stops being legitimate when nobody wrote down what the time produces, because then the only evidence you ever get is an invoice arriving on schedule.

I ran vendor relationships for years where the contract said one thing and the delivery drifted somewhere else. The drift is never announced. It shows up as a report that reads slightly thinner than last quarter's.

What belongs in the recurring scope?

Items with a number next to them.

Four blog pages, topics agreed a month ahead. Two profile posts a week. Twelve citations audited monthly until the list is clean, then quarterly. Review requests configured and monitored, with response drafting for anything under four stars within one business day. Rank tracking across a named grid, reported the same way each month.

That is what a scope looks like when it can be audited. Compare it to a scope built from words like managing, optimizing, and monitoring. Those describe a posture, not an output.

If you cannot tell at the end of the month whether an item happened, it will eventually stop happening. Not from bad faith. Unmeasured work is simply the first thing to slide when a team is stretched.

There is one honest exception. Some months genuinely go to investigation rather than production, and a good agency will tell you in advance that this month is diagnosis. That is different from a scope that is permanently vague.

How do I price a single line against what it can be shown to do?

Which retainer lines are buying a low scoring factor?

Three appear often enough to check for by name, and all three come out of the bottom of that same survey.

Presence of an XML sitemap scored 28. Keywords in meta descriptions across the entire website scored 33. Keywords in image ALT attributes scored 43. For scale, the top factor scored 227.

None of these is harmful. A sitemap should exist, and alt text is an accessibility requirement regardless of ranking. The problem is a recurring monthly line item for work that is finished after one pass and that the panel scores near the floor.

The debunk that costs the most money is the recurring citation line. Directory submissions were a foundational tactic for a decade and the trend in the survey has run the other way for several editions. Citation work is not fraud, it is maintenance, and maintenance has a completion state. Ask what happens to the fee when the list is clean. If the answer is that the list is never clean, ask to see the current error list, with dates.

Where this breaks down: a business that has moved, rebranded, or changed phone numbers genuinely does have a mess to clean, and that cleanup has real value in the months it takes. The test is whether the line has an end date.

How should the retainer describe reporting?

By naming the date, the metrics, and the starting values, and by being honest about which numbers do not exist.

The date matters because a report that arrives whenever is a report nobody reads. Pick the tenth, or the second Tuesday, and hold it.

The metrics should be the ones connected to money. Calls, form fills, booked appointments, map impressions and the actions taken from them. Rankings belong there too, but as an input rather than the headline.

Then check the report against what the platforms actually publish. Google Business Profile performance reports give interactions, searches, views, directions, calls, website clicks, messages and bookings. There is no rank field and no position field anywhere in them. Google Search Console has no local pack dimension either. Any local pack click-through rate table in your report was modelled somewhere else, and the ones in circulation trace back to a 2018 Mechanical Turk test on five San Francisco desktop pages.

The same applies to AI reporting. Google's generative AI performance report in Search Console publishes impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates. Clicks, click-through rate, position and the user's prompt are explicitly not available. A retainer line promising AI click reporting is promising a number Google does not emit.

Every metric also needs a starting value recorded before the work began. Without it you get a monthly number with no meaning, which is the same problem that makes agency case studies hard to read, and a result with no baseline is the flaw to look for in any case study you are shown.

What does a retainer owe me in responsiveness?

Two things: a stated response time and a named person.

A response time of one business day for normal requests is a reasonable standard for a small shop. Same day is a reasonable standard for an agency with staffed coverage, and if you need it, hire for it. That is a real requirement for some businesses and it should be priced in rather than assumed.

The named person matters more than the speed. Ask who it is, and ask what happens when that person is on vacation. A small agency that says the work waits three days is being honest, and you can plan around honesty. What you cannot plan around is finding out in August.

Include a monthly working session in the scope, not just a report. Thirty minutes where you can ask why something was done. Approving work you do not understand is a habit that compounds badly, and there is a short way to ask about a deliverable without pretending to be technical.

Which items should not be in a retainer at all?

Three, and all of them are common enough to check for.

One time setup billed permanently. Profile buildout, initial citation cleanup, tracking installation, template fixes. These finish. If they are folded into a flat monthly fee, ask what replaces them in the scope once they are done. There should be an answer.

Tool subscriptions passed through with an unexplained margin. Paying for tools is fine, and marking them up quietly is not. Ask which tools the fee covers and whether you would keep access if you left.

Strategy hours with no artifact. Strategy is real work, and it produces a document, a plan, a decision. Hours labeled strategy that yield nothing you can read are usually meeting time being invoiced.

Is there a market rate I should compare against?

No, and anyone who hands you one is quoting an agency blog.

This is worth saying plainly because the absence is unusual. There is no published survey of agency retainer pricing with a disclosed sample and method. The ranges that circulate for management fees as a share of ad spend, and for monthly minimums, trace to agency pricing pages citing other agency pricing pages. The same hole exists for website build and maintenance pricing.

That is not a reason to accept any number. It is a reason to evaluate the fee against the scope in front of you rather than against a benchmark that does not exist. Ask in hours, ask for the split, and compare two quotes on what they produce rather than on what they cost.

Then check the scope against the timeline you were given. Local search work takes months to show movement, and the realistic timeline before anything visible happens is longer than most first meetings imply. A scope built to show something in week three is usually a scope built to be renewed, not to work.

If there is an AI visibility line item, ask exactly what gets produced. Appearing in AI answers follows from the same fundamentals rather than from a separate technical product, and Google's own documentation says that optimizing for its generative features is optimizing for search, with no additional technical requirements beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.

What to do this week

Open your current scope of work, or the one you have been sent, and put every line into one of two columns. Countable, or not countable.

Email the not countable column back with one question: what would proof of completion look like for this item? You are not being difficult. You are asking for the same thing you would ask a contractor about a punch list.

Then run the hours arithmetic above on your own fee. Ask for the split, calculate what share goes to reporting and meetings, and decide whether that share is what you meant to buy.

Then ask the question that should be uncomfortable for whoever answers it, including us. Which single line in your own scope would you delete first if my budget dropped, and why that one? An agency that cannot name a weakest line has either never audited its own scope or is not going to tell you. SEOD prices work in units and we would still have to answer that question honestly, so ask it.

Finally, check whether the document names a person, a response time, a report date, and an ownership clause. Those four are usually easier to add than a scope rewrite, and they belong in the contract terms rather than the scope page.

Questions about the scope you are paying for now?

Email me at eric@seod.com with your current scope of work pasted in, no invoice needed, and I will sort the lines into what can be verified at month end and what cannot. You will get back a two column list and nothing else. I am not looking to take over the account and I will say so if the scope looks strong.

There is more on hiring and working with agencies if you want the wider picture first.