Do you need SEO every month?

Short answer: Yes.

Long Answer: You need consistent SEO work required to adapt and sustain results. And even if you’ve maintained top search rankings for your head terms, there’s still room for growth for any type of business. 

SEO retainer is a service agreement where an agency or consultant provides ongoing SEO support and implementation for a monthly fee.

I’ve seen marketing agencies and companies realize more today than before how continuous work is necessary to sustain SEO results, given the ever-changing search landscape, surprising core and other Google algorithm updates, and new players in every industry trying to dominate Google’s SERPs. 

Of course, getting buy-in from in-house stakeholders (Head of SEO, marketing manager, and VPs of Marketing) requires arm chests and tools of persuasion, managing expectations, and in-depth expertise of your offer. 

But compared to years ago, selling and hiring agencies for monthly SEO retainers who can do the job is much simpler. 

In this guide, I won’t cover full-packaged SEO retainers, which includes technical SEO, on-page SEO audit, content asset creation, analysis, and reporting. Still, I’ll go deep into one essential SEO retainer facet: link building retainers. 

The Value of Link Building Retainers

You’ve seen this everywhere—link building agencies selling one-time-off packages, a few to a couple of links in a single project, with guarantees of quick results. In a nutshell, it’s like link building – selling pancakes.

While it’s true that there are certain times when link building is needed or when having few links to certain pages boosts their individual rankings, treating link building like quick magic for your website is not a good thing.

For the most part, competitive brands still engage in long-term link building, as they see it not just as another SEO activity but as part of a robust branding campaign.

Viewing link building from a sustainable perspective keeps your focus on creating a flywheel effect on your search traffic as you see incremental (and even exponential) impact on one of your pages and on the total link equity and brand strength of your website. 

À La Carte vs. Full Link Building Retainers: What’s Typically Included?

If you’re looking to hire a link building agency or consultant, you’ll probably choose between these two types of link building retainers: à la carte and full link-building retainer.

seo retainer

À La Carte Link Building Services

This type of monthly retainer allows clients to purchase specific link building services or packages at the pace of their needs. It’s usually a one-time or occasional purchase, ideal for businesses with very limited budgets. 

If you’re getting à la carte link building service, you should have a particular link quantity and quality in mind—the number of links and predefined metrics for links (e.g., Ahrefs DR30+, Majestic Trust Flow 25..), as well as the type of links, whether it’s a guest post, niche edits, local citations, or a few foundational links.

In this case, the client specifies the pages and target keywords the links should support. The link building agency must provide all this information, and at the end of the timeframe agreed to deliver, it would show up on reports, including the exact link placement for verification.

A very straightforward way to purchase a service. You’ll have full control over the preferences of both the quantity and quality of links you want to build. 

However, the downside of an à la carte link building service is the lack of ongoing strategy and optimization. As you’ll only get plain deliverables of links, you can’t expect the link building agency you’re partnering with to provide you with the next optimization efforts. In other words, you only get the execution part, not the strategy service. 

This requires you to fully strategize the more granular details of your link building campaign, aligning it with your entire SEO campaign before hiring an à la carte link building agency. 

I won’t recommend this type of service if you don’t have a solid running SEO team and an SEO strategy at the start. You may be building tons of links, but if they don’t align and integrate well with your top-eye-view SEO strategy, they will only make a minimal impact. 

Another drawback of getting à la carte link building services is the minimal support you can expect from an agency or consultant. It’s a piece-by-piece type of work where service providers hand over a list of live links, and that’s pretty much what you can expect from them.

Full Link Building Retainers

Full-scale link building retainers involve comprehensive strategy development and execution to manage the entire link acquisition process.

If you’ve been doing link building, you know that it involves link strategy development, link research (link prospecting), link qualification and approval, content creation, and outreach campaign development —all of which are critical to the success of the backlink campaign. 

Partnering with full link building retainers isn’t cheap. After all, the immense value you’ll get is hands-off tasks from strategy to execution, which require hours of time and mind work to execute correctly. 

This type of link building retainer is more appealing than à la carte retainers, as it includes a free consultation in addition to the link building package itself. 

For example, SharpRocket is a full-scale link building retainer covering everything from strategy development to relationship management. In detail, we start with competitor backlink analysis and link gap analysis to see how many quality links we have to build to dominate the top 3 spots for your target keywords (assuming we already have target pages to build links to).

Then, we determine the appropriate link types for the client’s business. If it’s a local client, we focus on local links and citations. If it’s a B2B SaaS, we focus on tech and other vertically related links, publishing, and news sites. 

Other agencies build generic, one-size-fits-all links to all their clients – which diminishes the link value. Remember that certain link types have been working effectively for the ranking sites. You just need to figure out what those are and how to incorporate them into your link building campaign. 

You can check out our link building services to learn more about how full-scale link building services work. 

The best thing about hiring full-scale link building retainers is the trust you can build upon the agency’s expertise and processes. From their years (even decades) of SEO experience, they’ve dealt with different industries and types of clients, and they could identify similar patterns that could work for your website – customizing the entire strategy and execution so you can gain top-of-the-bar results.  

Hiring a full-scale link building agency is beneficial from both financial and relationship perspectives for big agencies and enterprise link building campaigns. Given that it takes 6 or 12 months to onboard a new service provider, having someone continue doing the link building work could adjust to the agile movements of the SEO campaign. 

How to Choose the Right SEO (Link Building) Retainer

1. Evaluate Their Backlink Profile 

It’s easy for an agency to say they’re building high-quality backlinks, but unless you see what kind of quality they’re talking about, you shouldn’t rely on their lip service. 

One way to examine this even before inquiring about their services is to look at their agency’s site backlink profile. 

If you have link analysis tools like Ahrefs, simply plug in their agency website and have a quick assessment of their current link profile. See what types of backlinks they’re building. Are the links mostly organic or paid? Do they build editorial or contextual backlinks? From which industry do they focus on link acquisition? Is it relevant to the market?

Obviously, this isn’t 100% perfect criteria for determining whether they’re the right fit. But if they know how to grow their own SEO agency by building more quality links to their agency website, it definitely attests to how well they can take care of you as their prospective client – for the least part. 

2. Ask For Samples of Links and Social Proofs

I’ve observed this a common request from prospective clients in our UK link-building agency—they usually request samples of links and clients we’ve worked with (ones we can disclose to the public).

The reason is plain simple. If they can provide you with the exact link placements they acquired for a specific client, you could tangibly assess their link types and quality. And it should be based on either topical relevance, link metrics (e.g., Ahrefs DR30+), trust, and thematic flow. 

It would be a plus, of course, if they could show you case studies from clients within your industry, as the types of links they would typically tackle would be similar to yours. 

When it comes to social proof, be careful. Some case studies of ther agencies are copy-cat or plain screenshots of organic traffic reports using SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush. They don’t mind getting other agencies’ social proof. 

3. Understand How They Measure Results

Like any other SEO campaign (and any business initiative), you should measure results. Evaluating progress (or regress) helps marketers improve their work through adjustments.

When you meet with your prospective SEO link building retainer, confirm they could align their work with your SEO and business objectives. Ask, what types of metrics do they look at? Will they provide performance reports? 

These questions help you understand their exact deliverables and approach to link building. If it’s all about links to rankings without consideration of how your brand will be perceived in the market, think through it.

4. Ask Who Will Handle Your Account

It’s a nightmare for companies to see SEO agencies today only working directly with account managers. That’s not to say it’s not a good communication model and way of collaboration for both parties.

However, if you can speak and work directly with both an account manager and SEO strategies or are fortunate enough to even talk to the CEO who does the strategy work, who will relay the progress of your campaign, you will have more confidence and trust in the results you can expect from them. 

5. Relay Confidentiality (If Applicable)

If you work for big corporations with strict branding and legal requirements, remember to tell your partnered link building agency about these. They should be aware of any confidentiality concerns before the link building campaign even starts.

This way, you avoid running issues in sharing data that shouldn’t be disclosed as the campaign runs. 

Make The Right Choice For SEO (Link Building) Retainers

These tips will increase your chances of partnering with the correct link building agency or consultant for monthly link building retainers. As every investment needs to see ROI, deciding on your non-negotiables is critical when picking the right outsourcing firm for your business.