Service

The monthly retainer, priced and explained

What this is

A monthly SEO retainer buys a fixed block of senior time — roughly 45 delivered hours at our ₹75,000 tier, split across technical work, on-page and content, links, and reporting. Ours is ₹75,000 a month ex-GST, ₹40,000 for sites under about 50 pages, month-to-month after the first quarter.

Updated 26 July 2026 · Written by the Last Agency team · See what SEO actually costs

The short version

  • ₹75,000/mo, ex-GST. Roughly 45 delivered hours: about 40% on-page and content, 20–30% links, 20–30% technical in month one settling near 10%, the rest reporting and strategy.
  • Smaller sites — under about 50 pages — are ₹40,000/mo at roughly 15 URLs a month instead of 40.
  • No lock-in after the first quarter. 30 days' notice, and you leave with every asset, login and document.
  • Three new clients a month, hard cap. A guarantee you can't carry at volume isn't a guarantee, it's marketing.
  • Miss your 90-day baseline and we keep working free until we beat it. Never a promised ranking position.

Where ₹75,000 a month actually goes

You never see a timesheet from us and we don't bill by the hour. But a retainer is a block of senior capacity, and you're entitled to know roughly how much of it there is and where it lands. At ₹75,000 ex-GST it plans out at around 45 delivered hours a month, distributed like this.

"Delivered" is doing work in that sentence. It means hours spent on your site — crawling, writing, pitching, fixing, thinking about your problem specifically. It does not count our internal standups, our tooling, or the time somebody spends making a chart pretty. Those exist, we just don't bill them to you as delivery and then wonder why you feel short-changed.

The shape shifts across the first quarter. Month one is heavy on technical and audit because everything downstream is capped by it; by month four the technical share has usually dropped to maintenance and that time has moved into content and links. If you'd rather we held the technical share high because your site is a genuine mess, we'll rebalance and tell you what it costs elsewhere in the month — the total doesn't grow just because the priorities changed.

A typical ₹75,000 month at roughly 45 delivered hours.
DisciplineShare of the monthWhat that buys
Technical SEO20–30% in month one, ~10% afterCrawl and indexation fixes, Core Web Vitals, schema, redirects, the backlog from the audit
On-page and content~40%Around 40 URLs a month rewritten and optimised, plus briefs, keyword mapping and internal linking
Links and digital PR20–30%Prospecting, outreach, and one asset a month built to be worth linking to
Reporting, analysis and the monthly call~10%The live dashboard, the written note, and deciding what gets dropped next month

The tiers, and which one you're actually in

Four things move the number: how many indexed URLs you have, how competitive the query set is, whether your CMS lets us ship without a developer, and how many markets or languages are in scope. Everything else is noise.

All prices ex-GST. Ad spend, where relevant, is billed separately with zero media markup.

Monthly plans, ex-GST. Bundles are cheaper than the same services bought separately.
PlanMonthlyWho it fits
SEO — smaller sites₹40,000Under roughly 50 pages, one market, ~15 URLs of on-page work a month
SEO — standard₹75,000Most B2B, SaaS and D2C sites. ~40 URLs a month and active link work
Organic Growth Engine — SEO + Organic Social & Content₹99,000You need net-new content and social at volume, not just optimisation of what exists
Full-Funnel Starter — Social + Performance₹75,000You need demand now. Note: this bundle contains no SEO
Own Everything Stack — all three₹1,75,000One team across organic, social and paid, with one baseline across the lot

What's in the retainer, and what's a separate line

The rule we use: continuous work belongs in the retainer, and one-off builds that need a different team don't. Bundling a ₹1,75,000 PR campaign into a ₹75,000 month would just quietly delete two months of content.

SEO retainer scope at the ₹75,000 tier.
IncludedSeparate, and priced separately
Full technical audit in the first ten working daysA full GA4 rebuild — that's the fixed ₹75,000 analytics build
Technical fixes we can ship ourselves, plus a spec for those we can'tFront-end development inside your app or theme
On-page work across ~40 URLs a month, with internal linkingNet-new article production at volume — that's the content retainer from ₹30,000
Keyword research, mapping and quarterly re-prioritisationTranslation and native-language content for new markets
Ongoing link and digital PR outreachA standalone digital PR campaign at ₹1,75,000 each
Schema, Core Web Vitals guidance and indexation managementHosting, CDN and infrastructure costs
Live dashboard, monthly written note, monthly callPaid media management — that's performance marketing from ₹40,000
Your team asking us things between calls, within reasonBuying links, reviews or traffic. Not at any price

No lock-in, and what leaving actually looks like

The first quarter is committed, because 90 days is the shortest window in which SEO can be fairly judged and it's the window the guarantee runs on. After that it's month-to-month with 30 days' notice, in writing, no reason required.

Long contracts exist to protect agency revenue during the months when nothing is happening. If we need twelve months of lock-in to keep you, the problem isn't the contract.

There's a second reason no lock-in is in your interest, and it's about our behaviour rather than yours. An agency that has to re-earn the month in month seven keeps a senior person on the account. An agency holding a signed year has no such pressure, and the account quietly drifts to whoever is cheapest to staff it with. You have almost no way to detect that from the outside until the reporting goes vague.

Exit is a checklist, not a negotiation. Within five working days of your last day you get every one of these, whether you left happily or not.

  • Every login and property you started with, plus any we created: GA4, Search Console, Business Profile, tag manager, dashboards.
  • All content we wrote, in source form, with full rights. It's yours; you paid for it.
  • The keyword map, the audit, the fix backlog and the link prospect list, as working files rather than PDFs.
  • The measurement plan and the baseline document, so your next agency can be held to the same standard.
  • A handover call with whoever takes over, at no charge. Refusing that one is petty and it's usually your traffic that pays for it.

Why only three new clients a month

Because of the guarantee, and the arithmetic is not complicated. If we miss a client's 90-day baseline, we work free until we beat it. Free months are real months — a senior team, a full 45 hours, no invoice. An agency signing fifteen clients a month cannot absorb three of those going long, so it does the only thing left: it stops making the promise, or it makes the promise and argues about the measurement later.

Three is the number where we can carry a couple of misses in a quarter without cutting corners on everyone else. It's a capacity limit, not a scarcity tactic, and it has an obvious commercial cost to us.

The practical effect for you: start dates are queued. If the month is full, you'll be given a real start date rather than being onboarded into a queue and billed from day one. We'd rather lose the deal than take the fee and start in six weeks. If the wait doesn't suit, SEO consulting at ₹40,000 a month is available immediately and does not carry the guarantee, for exactly this reason.

The guarantee in full, and the arithmetic when we miss

On day one we freeze your qualified leads from organic search over the trailing 90 days. Both sides sign the number and the definition of "qualified", with examples. If we haven't beaten that number in the following 90 days, we keep working — same scope, same team, no invoice — until we do.

Here's what that's worth in rupees, because vague guarantees are how people get talked into things. At the ₹75,000 tier, three extra free months is ₹2,25,000 of work you don't pay for. That's our downside, and it's the reason the baseline conversation in week one is careful rather than casual.

What we do not do is promise a specific ranking position for a specific keyword. Nobody controls Google's index, results are personalised and localised, and a guarantee written against something the guarantor doesn't control isn't worth reading. A promise against your own frozen number is.

Two honest limits. First, the guarantee is void if we can't do the work — approvals sitting for six weeks, developer access never granted, a rewrite blocked at legal for a quarter. We'll flag that in the monthly note the first month it happens, not silently bank it as an excuse for month three. Second, we don't offer a cash refund. The remedy is free work, because handing back money and walking away leaves you exactly where you started, which is the outcome you were trying to avoid. If you'd rather have neither, the notice period is 30 days and nothing holds you. Full context on what the market charges is on SEO cost in India, and the case for a retainer over a one-off project is in retainer vs project.

Related questions.

What does a monthly SEO retainer include?

Ours: a full audit in the first ten working days, ongoing technical fixes, on-page work across roughly 40 URLs a month, keyword research and mapping, continuous link and digital PR outreach, and a live dashboard with a written monthly note. Net-new content at volume and paid media are separate retainers.

How much should an SEO retainer cost in India?

The market runs from about ₹25,000 to ₹3,00,000 a month. Below ₹25,000 you're funding part-time attention. ₹75,000–₹1,50,000 is where a multi-discipline team becomes viable for a competitive national keyword set. Ours is ₹75,000 standard, ₹40,000 for smaller sites, ex-GST.

Is there a minimum contract length?

One quarter, then month-to-month with 30 days' notice. Ninety days is the shortest period in which SEO can be judged fairly, and it's the window the guarantee runs on. After that, staying is your choice each month, which is a healthier arrangement for both sides than a twelve-month lock-in.

What happens if you miss the 90-day baseline?

We keep working at the same scope with no invoice until we beat it. At the ₹75,000 tier, three free months is ₹2,25,000 of work we absorb. There's no cash refund — the remedy is the work, because money back leaves you exactly where you started.

Why do you only take three new clients a month?

Capacity, driven by the guarantee. Free months are real months of a senior team's time, and an agency signing fifteen clients a month can't absorb several running long. The cap is what makes the promise survivable. It does mean start dates are sometimes queued.

What do I keep if I leave?

Everything. All logins and properties, all content in source form with full rights, the keyword map, the audit, the fix backlog, the link prospect list, the measurement plan and the baseline document — as working files, within five working days. Plus a handover call with your next agency, free.

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