The inclusion list, as it should read in your contract
Almost every legitimate SEO scope in India contains the same six line items. The difference between a ₹40,000 retainer and a ₹1,50,000 one isn't which items appear — it's the number next to each one.
Here's the standard list, with the volumes you'd reasonably expect on a ₹75,000/month engagement. If your proposal has the items but no volumes, that's the first thing to fix. For the money side of the same question, see what sits inside a monthly SEO retainer.
| Line item | What it means in practice | Typical monthly volume |
|---|---|---|
| Technical audit and fix queue | A full crawl at kickoff, then a prioritised backlog of indexing, speed, redirect and schema fixes, reworked each month. | One audit up front, then 4–8 fixes |
| Keyword research and mapping | A query list grouped by intent, with each query assigned to exactly one URL so your own pages stop competing. | One map up front, revised quarterly |
| Content briefs and copy | Outline, target query, internal links, word count, sources — then the draft itself, if writing is in scope. | 8–12 briefs, 4–8 pages published or rewritten |
| On-page work | Titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal links and schema on the pages that already have a chance. | 10–30 pages touched |
| Link acquisition | Digital PR, expert commentary, partnerships, resource placements. Named sites, with URLs. | 2–5 earned links |
| Reporting | One report against one agreed number, plus what changed, why, and what happens next month. | One report, one call |
What's excluded, and who ends up paying for it
This is the half of the document nobody reads until month three. An SEO scope is defined as much by what sits outside it, and the items below are outside it at almost every agency in the country — including ours.
None of this is dishonest. Hosting isn't an SEO service. But if you budget ₹75,000 a month and assume it covers everything the site needs, you'll be surprised twice: once by the invoice and once by the fixes that never shipped.
| Excluded item | Who pays | Roughly what it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Web hosting, CDN, SSL | You | ₹500 to ₹15,000+ a month depending on stack and traffic |
| Developer hours to ship the fixes | You — your own team, or billed as extra agency hours | Internal capacity, or roughly ₹800–₹3,000/hr for agency dev time |
| Design, illustration, custom graphics | You | Quoted per asset; almost always billed separately |
| Ad spend on Google, Meta or LinkedIn | You, ideally billed directly by the platform | Whatever you set. Watch for a markup on top |
| Tool licences (Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog) | The agency, on their own accounts | Their overhead. You should never be billed for a seat you can't log into |
| Translation and regional-language copy | You | Quoted per language, per word — Hindi and Tamil pages are new pages, not variants |
Tool licences: who owns the login
There are two kinds of account in an SEO engagement, and confusing them is the most expensive administrative error a founder can make.
Your accounts hold your history. The agency's accounts hold their working tools. Keep them separate and switching agencies costs a week. Mix them and it costs your data.
- Yours, always. Google Search Console, GA4, Google Business Profile, Tag Manager, your CMS, your ad accounts. Create them yourself and invite the agency as a user with the access they need.
- Theirs, always. Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, rank trackers. Their licence, their cost, folded into the retainer. If an agency asks you to buy the seat, ask whether it survives the contract. Usually it doesn't.
- Exports beat logins. Ask for a monthly CSV of rank data and the latest crawl. Those files are yours and they're readable in any tool you move to next.
- Write it down. One line in the contract listing every property that sits on your accounts. It takes thirty seconds and settles the argument before it happens.
Developer hours: the line that decides whether any of it ships
Roughly a third of a good technical audit needs someone to write code. Template changes, redirect rules, rendering fixes, schema in the layout rather than pasted per page. The SEO scope specifies those fixes. It does not, by default, ship them.
There are exactly three arrangements, and one of them is the silent default.
- Put a number in the contract: hours of dev time per month, or a named internal owner with a stated share of sprint capacity.
- Agree what happens to the timeline when those hours don't appear. "We'll flag it" is not a plan; "the guarantee pauses" is.
- Your developers ship it. Cheapest and slowest. Works only if SEO tickets get standing sprint capacity rather than "when we get a gap".
- The agency ships it. Fastest, and it needs staging access, a code review path and one person on your side authorised to approve a merge. Billed as extra hours in most contracts, including ours.
- Nobody ships it. The audit becomes a PDF, the retainer gets judged a failure at month six, and the actual cause is sitting untouched on a Jira board. This is the default outcome, and it's why technical SEO services should always be sold with a named owner for the fix queue.
How the scope changes with site size
The same six line items get very different weightings depending on how many URLs you have. A 30-page site being sold log-file analysis is being upsold. A 40,000-SKU catalogue being sold four blog posts a month is being underserved.
| Site size | Where the hours go | What gets added |
|---|---|---|
| Under 50 pages | On-page and content. There's very little technical debt to find. | Google Business Profile, if you serve a location |
| 50–500 pages | Content velocity plus internal linking. Keyword cannibalisation starts here. | A keyword-to-URL map that's actually enforced |
| 500–5,000 pages | Templates, faceted navigation, crawl budget, indexing rules. | Index bloat control and template-level schema |
| 5,000+ pages | Crawl efficiency, log files, migrations, QA before every release. | Dedicated technical hours and a pre-deploy SEO checklist |
Five lines to add before you sign anything
None of these are unreasonable. All of them are easier to agree before money changes hands than after.
- The number. "Success is measured as qualified organic leads, baselined at N on this date." One metric, one starting value, one date. Without it, nobody can prove anything moved.
- The volumes. Not "content creation". Four published pages of 1,200+ words a month, briefs delivered five working days ahead, two to five earned links.
- The dev dependency. Who writes the code, how many hours, and what happens when those hours don't materialise.
- Account ownership. Every analytics, search and advertising property sits on your accounts, named in the contract.
- The exit. Thirty days' notice, full handover of assets and exports, no clawback on content already published.