SEO Deliverables: What Should an Agency Actually Do Each Month?

“Ongoing optimisation” is the three words that appear in more SEO proposals than any others, and the three words that tell you the least. Our guide on what you should get from an SEO retainer covers value at the budget level — what a fair price should buy overall. This one goes a level more literal: what work should actually be happening, in practical terms, in a typical month.

Not every agency will do exactly this, and that’s fine — priorities shift based on what a site needs. But if you can’t recognise most of what follows somewhere in your own monthly reports, that’s worth asking about directly.

Part of why this question is worth asking directly is that SEO’s slow feedback loop makes it easy to go a long time without noticing an empty month. If a piece of paid advertising stops running, you notice within a day — the ad simply isn’t there anymore. If an SEO retainer quietly does less than agreed, nothing visibly changes for weeks, sometimes months, because the effects of both action and inaction take time to show up in rankings and traffic. That gap is exactly what makes a concrete monthly picture worth having, rather than trusting that activity is happening simply because the invoice keeps arriving.

Four Categories of Monthly Work

Almost everything an SEO agency does in a given month falls into one of four buckets: technical work, content, off-site activity, and reporting and strategy. The balance between them shifts over the life of an engagement — technical work is usually front-loaded, content and off-site activity build over time — but all four should appear somewhere across a typical quarter.

1. Technical Work

This is usually heaviest in the first one to three months, then continues at a lighter, monitoring-focused pace afterwards. Technical SEO covers anything that affects how easily search engines can crawl, index and understand your site.

• Fixing crawl errors, broken links and indexation issues.
• Improving page speed and Core Web Vitals.
• Structured data and schema markup.
• Ongoing monitoring for new technical issues as the site changes.

2. Content

Content work should be the most concrete, checkable part of any retainer, because it produces a tangible output every month. If your reports mention content work but you can’t point to what was actually published, that’s a specific, easy thing to ask for.

• New pages or blog content targeting specific keywords.
• Updates to existing pages that have lost rankings or traffic.
• On-page optimisation — titles, meta descriptions, internal linking.
• Content strategy adjustments based on what’s performing.

3. Off-Site Activity

Off-site work — mainly link building and digital PR — is the category most likely to be either absent or vaguely described, partly because it’s genuinely resource-intensive and partly because it’s the easiest to claim credit for without much evidence.

• Outreach for backlinks from relevant, reasonable-quality sites.
• Digital PR campaigns, if included in scope.
• Monitoring for toxic or spammy links that need disavowing.

Link building and digital PR are sometimes inferred as part of a standard SEO package. Unless they’re explicitly included and mapped out, don’t assume they’re happening as part of ongoing activity — it’s a resource-heavy channel that needs its own dedicated expertise, in the same way PPC or social media management would.

Andy McLoughlin, Founder of Before You Invest

This is also the category hardest to verify from the outside, which is exactly why it goes unchecked so often – even public bodies, whose invoices are published by law, rarely itemise it clearly. Our investigation into UK council SEO spending found the same vague bundling that shows up in private-sector proposals.

4. Reporting and Strategy

The category that ties the other three together. This is where the agency should be explaining not just what happened, but why, and what’s changing next month as a result.

• A monthly report covering the metrics that map to your objective.
• A short explanation of what was done and why it was prioritised.
• Adjustments to the plan based on what the data is showing.

Reporting is also the category most worth reading critically rather than skimming. It’s easy for a report to describe activity in a way that sounds substantial — “comprehensive technical review completed”, “content strategy refined” — without stating what specifically changed as a result. A useful habit is to ask, for each bullet point in a report, “what would I actually see on the site or in the account if I looked right now?” If the answer is nothing tangible, it’s worth a follow-up question. We go through this test, and the specific phrases worth watching for, in more detail in why your SEO reports don’t add up.

A Sample Month, Put Together

Here’s roughly how these categories might come together in month four of a mid-sized retainer — past the initial technical push, into a steadier ongoing rhythm.

Category	Example activity that month
Technical	Monitoring for new crawl errors; fixing two pages with duplicate content issues.
Content	Two new blog articles published; one existing service page updated and re-optimised.
Off-site	Outreach in progress for three target publications; one link secured.
Reporting	Monthly report and 30-minute call covering ranking movement, traffic and next month’s priorities.

The specific volume will vary with your budget — our guide on retainer value at different price points covers how these numbers typically scale. But the shape of the month — something in all four categories, explained clearly — should hold at almost any reasonable budget. For a typical monthly range for your business, see our SEO cost calculator.

If your own monthly report only ever covers one or two of these four categories, that’s not necessarily a problem — some months are legitimately technical-heavy, others content-heavy. But if the same one or two categories repeat month after month with no variation, it’s a fair question to ask what’s happening in the others.

It’s also worth accepting that some months will genuinely lean harder in one direction than another — a month spent recovering from a Google algorithm update, for instance, might be almost entirely technical and content-focused, with off-site work paused deliberately. That’s a reasonable trade-off, and a good agency should be able to explain it as one, rather than you having to infer it from an otherwise-thin report.

The goal of this checklist isn’t to turn every monthly report into an audit. It’s to give you enough of a mental model that you can tell, in a couple of minutes, whether a given month’s activity roughly matches what you’re paying for — and to have a specific, concrete question ready if it doesn’t. If you are not sure what that fee should be in the first place, our guide to how much SEO should cost sets out typical UK monthly ranges.

Knowing what should happen each month only matters once you’re confident in the agency delivering it. Our guide to how SEO pricing models work covers what you’re actually paying for, and our guide to how to choose an SEO agency covers the wider hiring decision.