What a retainer actually buys
Divide any quote by the market hourly rate and you get the only number that matters: how many hours a month someone will work on your site. A 1,000 retainer in a market where senior time costs 100 buys ten hours — about one working day. That day has to cover reporting, a client call, whatever technical issue surfaced, a content brief and any link outreach. It cannot. This is why cheap retainers quietly become reporting subscriptions.
The hours in this model come from what programmes consume in practice: monitoring and reporting take two to four hours a month before anything is produced, a single well-briefed content piece takes two to five hours of SEO time on top of the writing, a template-level technical fix takes four to twelve, and outreach is measured in hours per landed link rather than per email. Multiply by the number of countries and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable fast, which is the point.
Ranges matter more than points. The estimator returns a floor, a recommendation and an upper bound because the same brief priced by five competent providers will spread across a factor of two, driven by seniority, by how much is done in-house versus subcontracted, and by how much risk each is willing to carry. Judge the middle of the range against the market pricing guide rather than treating any single quote as the truth.
Reading the split: where the money should go
On a site with nothing done, more than a third of the budget belongs in technical work, because content published on a site Google struggles to crawl is content nobody will read. As foundations solidify, the balance tips towards content and then towards authority: a mature programme in a competitive market spends close to a third on earning links and brand mentions, which is the slowest and most expensive part of the job.
Strategy and reporting stay around a sixth throughout, and that is not overhead to negotiate away. It buys the decision-making: which intents to attack next, which pages to retire, what the last three months actually changed. Programmes that cut this line to fund more articles end up producing a great deal of content nobody sequenced.
Use the split to interrogate a proposal. If a provider prices 70 % content on a site whose main problem is a JavaScript-rendered catalogue, or prices heavy link building for a local business that needs a Google Business Profile fixed and forty citations cleaned, the split reveals the mismatch faster than the total does. Our questions to ask an agency covers how to press on it politely.
- Divide any quote by the market hourly rate before comparing it to another
- Under ~15 hours a month, expect one workstream to be silently dropped
- Technical share should be highest on immature and on very large sites
- Authority share should rise as the site matures, never start at zero
- Never let strategy and reporting fall below roughly 15 %
- Price additional countries at about a third of the first, not at full cost