Most SEO proposals are lists of deliverables. That is a description of what arrives in your inbox, which is not the same as a description of what will be done to your business.
Here is what is normally inside one, and the three parts worth arguing about.
The standard line items
Nearly every Australian retainer contains some mix of these:
- Technical work. The behind-the-scenes changes that let Google read the site properly — crawling, speed, mobile, broken structure, duplicated pages.
- Structured data. Code that lets search engines display your services, locations and reviews directly in results (schema).
- New pages. Usually one to three a month at small-business level. This is where most of the budget goes.
- On-page changes. Titles, headings and copy on pages that already exist.
- Links and citations. Getting other sites to mention and link to yours.
- Reporting. Where you stand, what moved, what is next.
The total is rarely the interesting part. The proportions are the negotiation, and they should differ depending on your site. A technically sound site with eight pages needs a different month from a fifty-page site with a crawl problem, and a proposal that looks identical for both was not written for either.
For context on what these retainers cost: a small-business retainer in Australia is typically $1,400 to $2,500 a month, with boutique Sydney retainers often $2,000 to $4,000 — set out in full in how much SEO costs in Australia.
The three clauses that decide the outcome
1. Who writes the content
The largest single variable, and the one most often left ambiguous.
"We will deliver a content plan" and "we will write and publish the pages" are separated by most of the cost of the engagement. A content plan is a document telling you what to write. If nobody on your side has the time or the appetite to write twelve service pages, a plan is not a deliverable, it is homework.
Ask directly: in month three, who has written the words on the new pages?
2. Who changes the website
This is the one that quietly wastes the most money in this market.
A very common arrangement: the SEO agency audits, recommends, and sends the recommendations to you. You forward them to whoever built the site. That developer is not on a retainer, quotes for the work, and the quote sits somewhere for six weeks.
Nobody has done anything wrong. The recommendations were correct. Nothing has happened, and you have paid two months of retainer for a document.
If the agency cannot edit your site, the proposal needs to say explicitly how work reaches the people who can, and who pays for it. If it cannot answer that, the retainer's real deliverable is advice.
3. What counts as a link
"Link building" covers everything from earning a mention in a publication your customers actually read to buying placements in bulk on sites that exist to sell them. Both appear in proposals under the same two words, at very different levels of risk to you.
Ask for examples of links built for other clients in the last quarter. It is a completely normal request.
What should not be in it
- A ranking guarantee. Nobody controls the results page. A promise about a future outcome made without grounds is a misleading representation under Australian Consumer Law, and an agency confident enough to make one is telling you how they will behave about everything else.
- A traffic or lead-number promise, for the same reason.
- A lock-in period longer than you can evaluate. Twelve months before you can leave, on work whose first honest signals take months to appear, is a transfer of risk to you.
How to read the report you get
Reporting can be automated. Work cannot. A retainer whose most polished artefact is the monthly PDF is often one where the PDF is the deliverable.
The useful request is not the report. Ask for last month's work log — what was done, and to which pages. An agency doing real work has one and is usually pleased to be asked. An agency that cannot produce one has answered your question.
Why ours is not an SEO retainer
We do not sell one, and the reason is clause 2 above.
Search work sits inside a development subscription that starts at $750 a month, alongside hosting, AI search visibility, conversion work and a set number of development hours each month agreed before we start. The same team that decides what should change can make the change, so recommendations do not become tickets for somebody who is not in the room.
That arrangement is not automatically better. It is more entangled — you are buying the site and the search work from one supplier, which is a real concentration of risk, and you should weigh that. But it removes the specific failure that stalls more small-business SEO than any technical problem does.
For comparison, a business buying a website care plan, an SEO retainer, AI search visibility and automation separately is commonly paying about $8,200 a month across four invoices.