What Types of Deliverables Do Agencies Deliver Based on Retainers or Spend Levels?

95% of Fractl’s clients are national vs local, but for 11:12 years, we always did deliverables-based billing with a set # of pillar pages and research-based Digital PR (link building) campaigns each month based on spend. We always sought out 6-12mo engagement minimums for greater results:retention. This past year we started offering more of a retainer model for ~ 10% of our roster, but it’s felt a lot more tedious from an operations perspective without significant strategy benefits. I’ve worked with a few technical SEO consultants over the years, as well, and they seem to charge a flat fee for audits and implementation.

I did a <https://moz.com/blog/roi-content-marketing-vs-native-advertising|study with MOZ> back in the day that has some more data around agencies offering retainers vs deliverables-based, which might be helpful, but it was a smaller analysis of 30 agency leaders at the time.

And Ahrefs has a 2023 analysis that seems to be more focused on smaller agencies and consultancies: <https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-pricing/>

@Kelsey Libert Awesome! I'll take a look at those articles!

We have set budgets and based on the strategy and budget we decide what we are going to do each month to move the needle (e.g. Month 1 may be all about content and Month 2 may be all about links, etc.)

@Andrew Shotland Month 1 for us is typically the topics & mapping research where we outline what all of the content will be for the campaign.

I just was using that as an example. Month 1 for us is typically strategy + roadmap