Managed SEO retainers.

What's included

A retainer is ongoing work, not a one-time audit that gathers dust. Each month goes into the things that compound.

What a month on a retainer looks like

SEO is not a switch. It is a series of small, compounding improvements to the same site, month after month — which is why it is sold as a retainer rather than a one-off project. Here is what the work is actually made of.

Keyword and competitor strategy

Establishing what your customers actually type, which of those searches are worth pursuing, and who currently occupies them. Plenty of high-volume terms are worth nothing to a specific business, and plenty of low-volume ones are worth a great deal. Getting that list right is what stops the following months being wasted on the wrong pages.

On-page optimisation

The work on the pages themselves: titles and descriptions that match what people search and earn the click, headings and structure that make the page easy to read, internal links so the pages that matter most are the ones the site points at hardest, and content with enough depth to be the most useful answer rather than the shortest one.

Technical SEO

The plumbing that decides whether any of the above gets counted — crawlability, indexing, canonical tags, structured data, sitemaps, page speed and Core Web Vitals on mobile as well as desktop. This is the part that is invisible when it is right and expensive when it is wrong.

Content

Search engines and answer engines both reward pages that genuinely answer the question. That means writing the depth a subject needs — the process, the pricing, the questions buyers actually ask — rather than padding a page to hit a word count.

Monthly reporting

Every month ends with a plain-English report: what changed, what it moved, and what is planned next. Positions and traffic are reported as they are, including the months that go sideways, because a report that only ever contains good news isn't a report.

Traditional SEO and AEO

Search is splitting into two front doors: the classic ranked list, and the AI answer. The same foundations serve both — clean structure, fast pages, structured data and genuinely useful content — but AI answer engines reward it differently. Retainers are built for both, so you're cited in the answer as well as ranked in the list.

The practical difference is in what gets prioritised. A ranked list rewards a page being the best result for a query; an answer engine rewards a page stating a fact clearly enough to be quoted — a price, a timescale, a straight answer to a question — and marking it up so a machine can read it without guessing. Building for both costs nothing extra when it is done from the start.

What SEO can and can't promise

Worth saying plainly, because plenty of the industry doesn't: no one can guarantee a position in Google, and anyone who does is either guessing or selling you something else. Rankings are decided by an algorithm nobody outside Google controls, weighed against every competitor also trying to move.

What can be committed to is the work and the honesty about it — the strategy, the on-page and technical improvements, the content, and a monthly report that shows the movement as it actually happened. Search results move over months rather than weeks, particularly on a newer site or a competitive local term, and a retainer is worth starting only if that timescale suits the business.

Common questions

Pricing

SEO retainers start from £450 per month. They work best on a fast, well-built site — if yours needs work first, start with a website build, and keep it healthy afterwards with a care plan. Chasing local rankings in particular? See web design in Stevenage.