What a ₹75,000 SEO Retainer Actually Buys You in a Month

Deliverable lists are unfalsifiable. Hours aren't.

Almost every SEO proposal in India is a bullet list. Four blog posts. Ten backlinks. One technical audit. Monthly reporting. Dedicated account manager. It reads like a menu, and it's designed to.

The problem is that none of those bullets is checkable. "Four blog posts" describes 800 words of paraphrase from a fresher and it describes a 2,200-word researched piece with an SME interview and three internal link edits. Same bullet, 8x the cost, and no way to tell which one you bought until month five.

Hours are different. Hours are a claim somebody can be held to. If an agency tells you a ₹60,000 retainer contains 30 hours, you can divide and get ₹2,000 an hour, then ask who works those hours. If they tell you it contains 90 hours, they're either lying or paying somebody ₹667 an hour, which in the Indian market means a fresher with three months' experience and a template.

So here's ours, in the open. This is how we plan a steady-state ₹75,000/mo month. Not a fantasy month — the boring middle of an engagement, month four or five, after the audit adrenaline has worn off.

One ₹75,000 month, hour by hour

Forty-two planned hours across five workstreams. The split shifts by site and by month — an ecommerce catalogue eats more technical time, a thin-content B2B site eats more writing — but this is the shape we start from and the one we report against.

Months one and two look nothing like this

The table above is steady state. The first two months are deliberately lopsided, and if an agency's month one looks like their month six, they skipped the part that makes the rest work.

Month one runs roughly 14 hours technical, 10 hours audit and keyword mapping, 6 hours baseline and tracking setup, 8 hours content, 4 hours reporting. Barely any link work, because there's no point earning links to pages that are about to be rewritten or redirected.

Month two is the crossover. Technical drops toward its steady 6, content climbs, and the first outreach goes out. By month three you're on the table above and you stay there.

This front-loading is why cancelling in month two is the most expensive decision in SEO. You paid for the setup and left before any of the compounding work started. It's also why we're happy to run month-to-month after the first quarter — the first three months are where the fixed cost lives, and after that you should be free to leave if we're not earning it.

The six hours nobody bills for

Every honest agency does unbilled work. The dishonest version is pretending it doesn't exist; the equally dishonest version is billing you for it and calling it deliverables. Roughly six hours a month on your account never appear on any invoice line at our end.

We're not being generous. This work makes the billed hours worth more, and an agency that skips it is quietly cheaper to run and much worse at the job.

• Algorithm watching — about 2 hours. Reading core update chatter, Search Console anomalies across the whole roster, and Google's documentation changes. Most months this produces nothing. The month it does, it saves a quarter.
• QA — about 2 hours. A second pair of eyes on every published page and every technical change. It's the first thing an overloaded agency cuts, and the reason your canonical tag ends up pointing at a staging URL.
• Research that doesn't ship — about 1 hour. Ideas we investigate and drop. A keyword set that looked promising and turned out to be informational-only, a link angle a journalist already covered.
• Comms overflow — about 1 hour. The WhatsApp questions, the quick look at something your developer changed, the Slack thread about whether to redirect that old campaign page.

What the ₹40,000 retainer drops

We run smaller sites from ₹40,000/mo. It's a genuinely different product, not a discount, and the honest version of the pitch is telling you what's missing rather than what's included.

₹40,000 is roughly 22 planned hours. That's just over half the ₹75,000 month, so something has to go, and what goes is link work — because links are the slowest-compounding and most expensive hour in the plan.

How to convert any quote into hours

You can run this on every proposal on your desk, including ours. It takes ten minutes and it settles most arguments.

1. Ask for the hour split by workstream. Not total hours — the split. An agency that has planned the work answers in thirty seconds. An agency that hasn't will offer to "send that across", which is the answer.
2. Divide the fee by the hours to get a blended rate. Indian agency rates run roughly ₹1,500–₹8,000 an hour depending on seniority and city. A blended rate under ₹1,200 means juniors are doing nearly all of it. Over ₹3,500 blended, ask which named senior is on it, because you're paying for one.
3. Ask who works those hours, by role. "Two hours of the strategist, twelve of a content specialist, eight of a link executive" is an answer. "Our team" is not.
4. Check whether reporting and calls are inside or outside the number. Some agencies quote 40 delivery hours and then bill the monthly call separately. Rare, but it happens, and it's worth one question.
5. Ask what changes in month one. If nothing does, there's no audit, no baseline and no plan — just production starting on day one against whatever keywords looked fine in the pitch.

What sits outside the retainer

This is the section most agencies leave for the invoice. Ours is short, but it isn't empty, and every item here is a real cost you should budget for.

• GST at 18%. All our pricing is ex-GST. ₹75,000 invoices at ₹88,500. Not a surprise if you read the contract, and a nasty one if you didn't.
• Ad spend. Separate, paid to the platform, with zero media markup from us. If you're also running performance marketing, the management fee and the spend are two different lines.
• Paid link placements. We don't buy links, so we don't bill for them. If another agency's quote includes a link budget, that's a purchase of something Google's link spam policy explicitly targets, and the risk sits on your domain rather than theirs.
• Your developer's time. We can specify a fix; somebody with deploy access has to ship it. On a WordPress site that's usually minutes. On a custom Next.js build with a release train, it's a sprint ticket — plan for it.
• Design and illustration. Written content is in scope. Custom diagrams, data visualisations and video are not.
• Your own hours. Roughly four a month: reviewing content for factual accuracy, one SME conversation, and approvals. Skip these and the content is generic, which is the most common reason a well-run engagement still underperforms.

Hours are an input. Here's the output we'll actually stand behind.

Everything above describes what you're buying. None of it describes what you're getting, and confusing the two is how founders end up two years into a retainer with a beautiful reporting deck and a flat pipeline.

Forty-two hours a month is capacity. Capacity is not an outcome. A well-spent 42 hours on a site with a broken conversion path, an unfixable platform or a product nobody's searching for produces excellent SEO and zero business. We'll tell you that on the first call rather than the twelfth.

So the number that actually matters isn't in the table. It's your trailing-90-day count of qualified leads from organic search, frozen on day one before we touch anything. Beat it inside 90 days or we keep working free until we do. We don't promise a ranking position for a keyword — nobody controls Google's index, and an agency promising position one is either buying links or buying time.

If you want the other half of this story, where the ₹75,000 goes once it reaches the agency covers salaries, tools and margin — including why an agency running below 20% net has every incentive to quietly reduce those 42 hours. And if you're comparing structures rather than agencies, retainer versus project pricing is the better argument to have first.