What monthly SEO actually includes
A practical look at retainers for UK businesses: the work that compounds, the reporting that matters, and the filler you should refuse to pay for.
Monthly SEO is sold as a package so often that the phrase has started to mean “a bit of everything, every month”. That is not a strategy. A useful retainer is a backlog of work ordered by commercial impact, with enough continuity that technical fixes are not undone by the next website change.
The work that should appear most months
Foundations first: indexation, broken templates, title and H1 logic on money pages, internal links, and issues reported in Google Search Console. Then content that fills a mapped gap. Then local assets if you are a service business. Links only when the page they point to is worth amplifying.
You should be able to answer, every month, “what changed on the site?” If the answer is only a ranking PDF, the retainer is reporting, not SEO.
What you should not be buying
Guaranteed positions. 4,000 words of unfocused blog content. Mass directory submissions. A new “location page” for every village within 30 miles. Those tactics are still common in UK SME sales decks. They are easy to deliver and hard to defend. Google’s spam policies are the reason we will not run them.
How to brief an agency or freelancer
Share how you win work, which pages already convert, and any developer constraints. Ask for a 90-day view, not a 12-month fantasy forecast. If you are in Hampshire, be explicit about towns you truly cover — Southampton is not interchangeable with the New Forest.
Google’s SEO starter guide is a fair public checklist before you buy a retainer. If you want this as an implemented programme rather than a reading list, look at our monthly SEO service.