A monthly retainer should name four things: what gets delivered, who does it, what happens to time you do not use, and how you leave. Almost every unhappy retainer we have inherited was unhappy because none of those four were ever written down.
Ours start at $499 a month. What that buys is on the pricing page and it is deliberately specific, because the alternative is the arrangement everybody has had at least once: a number leaves the account every month, something presumably happens, and nobody can say what.
What should actually be in a small monthly plan?
For a local business, five things do most of the work. Keeping the website alive and current. Local search and the profile. One real piece of content. Review requests and replies. And a report that says how many people got in touch.
That is not glamorous and it is what compounds. The businesses we have worked with longest are not the ones who bought the biggest package. They are the ones who did those five things every month for three years.
| Item | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Website upkeep | Updates, backups, and someone who fixes what breaks |
| Local search | Profile kept current, posts, categories and services reviewed |
| Content | One real piece a month, not five thin ones |
| Reviews | Requests going out and every review answered |
| Reporting | One page, contacts first, sent without being chased |
| Unused time | Stated in writing: rolls over, expires, or the plan is a scope |
What about the report?
It should fit on one page and lead with contacts. How many people called, how many filled in the form, how many booked, and roughly where they came from.
Traffic charts belong underneath that, if at all. A report that opens with sessions and impressions is measuring the agency's activity. A report that opens with contacts is measuring your business. We changed ours to work that way after a client politely said the first two pages were for us rather than for him, and he was right.
Wondering whether your current retainer is fair?
Send us what you are paying and what you are told you get. We will tell you plainly whether it looks reasonable, including when it does.
Get a free website and marketing auditWhat happens to hours I do not use?
Ask, and get the answer in writing. Roll over, expire, or partially roll over are all defensible. Unstated is not, because unstated always resolves in the agency's favor eventually.
Our own position is that a plan is a scope rather than a timesheet, which means some months we spend more than the fee and some months less. That is a genuine tradeoff and you should know which model you are buying, because a scope based plan is worse value in a quiet month and better value in a heavy one.
How long should the commitment be?
Long enough for the work to show, short enough that you are not trapped. Three months is usually too short to judge search work honestly. Twelve months with no exit is a term you should push back on.
What matters more than the length is what happens at the end of it. You should leave with the domain, the hosting, the analytics, the ad account and the content. If any of those stay behind, the contract length is not the real issue.
What should the monthly call be for?
Deciding one thing, not reviewing a document. Fifteen minutes is plenty if somebody has already read the report and arrived with a question.
The pattern we settled on is that the report goes out two days before the call, and the call starts with whatever the client wants to talk about rather than with a walk through of what we did. That sounds like a small process detail and it changed the character of the relationship considerably. A call that begins with an agency explaining its own activity puts the client in the position of assessor, which nobody enjoys and which produces polite agreement rather than useful input. A call that begins with the owner saying what they are worried about produces work worth doing.
When is a retainer the wrong purchase?
When the business cannot take more work. When nobody internally has an hour a month to answer questions. When there is no website worth promoting yet, in which case the money belongs in building one first.
We turn down retainers for those reasons a few times a year. It is not generosity, it is that a plan sold into any of those situations ends in six months with everybody unhappy and a bad taste about the whole category.
What we changed after getting it wrong
We used to write plans as hours. Ten hours a month, use them as you like. It sounded flexible and it was terrible: every month began with a conversation about what to spend the hours on, half of them went on whatever felt urgent that week, and nothing compounded.
Now a plan is a fixed set of recurring work plus a defined slot for whatever the month actually needs. The recurring part happens whether or not anyone remembers to ask for it, which is the entire point of paying monthly.
You can see what sits in ours on the pricing page, how the pieces fit together on the Growth Engine page, and what the ongoing marketing work covers on the digital marketing page.