$400 a month, every month. After two years that's $9,600. After five it's $24,000.
For most tradies paying for "SEO services," that money has done nothing. Not less than it should have. Nothing.
I've audited dozens of monthly SEO retainers for tradies across the Hunter. Same pattern almost every time. Site loads slowly. Pages aren't indexed. No suburb-specific content. No proper schema markup. Google Business Profile half set up. And the agency invoices keep coming.
This isn't a hit piece on every SEO agency. There are good ones. But the tradie market is full of bad ones, and the bad ones make most of their money from tradies who don't know what they're actually paying for.
Here are the 9 things a $400/month retainer usually claims to cover, and what the agency is actually doing in each case.
1. "On-page SEO optimisation"
What it should be: rewriting title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, internal linking, and image alt text across your site so Google understands what each page is about.
What it usually is: an automated audit run once, three or four changes made in month one, then nothing else for the rest of the contract. Or worse, a plugin like Yoast or RankMath installed and never configured properly.
Quick check: ask them to send you screenshots of the title tag and meta description changes they've made in the last 90 days. If they can't, they haven't done any.
2. "Monthly keyword research"
What it should be: ongoing analysis of which search terms your customers actually use, mapped to which pages on your site should target each term.
What it usually is: a one-page PDF generated by SEMrush or Ahrefs, sent once, then never updated. Often the keywords aren't even in your service area. I've seen "plumber Sydney" reports sent to a Newcastle plumber.
3. "Backlink building"
What it should be: getting your business listed on legitimate directories, industry sites, and local news pages that actually pass authority to your site.
What it usually is: submission to a couple of dozen low-quality web directories that Google has been ignoring since 2014. Sometimes Private Blog Networks (PBNs), which are spam sites that get your domain penalised when Google catches on.
Quick check: ask for the list of backlinks built in the last 6 months. Put each domain into the Ahrefs Backlink Checker (free version). If most have Domain Rating under 10, the links are worthless. If any look spammy or unrelated to your trade, you've got a bigger problem.
4. "Google Business Profile management"
What it should be: weekly posts, photo uploads, Q&A management, review responses, service-area updates, and monitoring for new categories or features Google rolls out.
What it usually is: the agency claims your profile, makes sure your phone number's right, then logs in once a quarter to upload a stock photo. Sometimes not even that.
Quick check: log into your Google Business Profile and look at the activity log. If there's no posting cadence and no recent edits other than yours, it's not being managed.
5. "Monthly reporting"
What it should be: a clear summary of impressions, clicks, leads, calls, and rankings, with context on what changed and why.
What it usually is: a 12-page Google Looker Studio template that nobody reads. Designed to look thorough rather than be useful. If you can't tell from the report whether your business made or lost money that month, it's a vanity exercise.
6. "Content creation"
What it should be: real blog posts answering questions your customers actually ask, written in your voice, optimised for local search, linked into your service pages.
What it usually is: one or two AI-generated articles per quarter, padded out to 1,500 words, on topics like "5 reasons to hire a plumber" that nobody searches for. Sometimes the same article gets sold to multiple competing tradies in different cities with just the location swapped out.
7. "Technical SEO"
What it should be: making sure your site loads quickly, your URLs are clean, your sitemap is current, your robots.txt isn't blocking pages it shouldn't, and your schema markup is in place.
What it usually is: never touched again after the original build. If your site's running on WordPress with twelve plugins, technical SEO degrades by itself over time as plugins update and conflict. The retainer doesn't fix this. It just keeps invoicing while the site quietly gets slower.
8. "Local SEO"
What it should be: dedicated landing pages for each suburb you service, NAP (name, address, phone) consistency across the web, schema markup for your service area, and local citation building.
What it usually is: a single "Service Areas" page listing suburbs in a paragraph. Google ignores this. It needs dedicated pages, not a list.
This is where I see the most damage on tradie sites. A plumber paying $400/month for "local SEO" for three years, still doesn't show up for "plumber [their suburb]" because there's no page for it.
9. "Strategy and consulting"
What it should be: an actual phone call once a month or quarter where someone who understands your business looks at what's happening and tells you what to do next.
What it usually is: an automated email summary, generated from the same template every month. If you can't remember the last time you actually spoke to someone at your SEO agency, you're not getting strategy. You're getting an invoice.
So what should you actually be paying for?
Most tradies don't need a monthly SEO retainer. They need the foundational work done properly once, then quarterly check-ins.
Proper foundational SEO for a tradie site looks like this:
Clean site architecture with one page per service and one page per suburb. Schema markup on every page (LocalBusiness, Service, Review). Fast page load times, ideally under 2 seconds. Proper title tags and meta descriptions matched to the keywords each page targets. Google Business Profile fully populated with categories, services, photos, and a posting habit. Real content that answers customer questions.
Once that's in place, the work to maintain it is small. New blog post every fortnight or month. New suburb pages as the service area grows. Quarterly check on Search Console, Google Business insights, and rankings. New schema or technical fixes if Google updates change requirements.
That's not a $400/month job. That's a one-off build plus a small ongoing arrangement.
The Steel Cap approach
Every site I build has the SEO foundations baked in from line one. Title tags, meta descriptions, schema, suburb pages, fast static HTML, the lot. Not as an add-on. As part of the build.
You don't pay me $400/month after that. You pay me once for the build, then either run it yourself with the guide I'll send you, or pay $120/month for hosting and minor updates. The Growth plan at $220/month adds extra blog posts and an annual SEO refresh, which is genuinely all most tradies need.
If you've been paying a monthly SEO retainer for more than 12 months and you're not sure what you're getting, I'll audit it for free. No sales pitch. I'll tell you what's being done, what isn't, and what your site actually needs.
Just send the URL and your last invoice through to the contact form. I'll have a look and tell you straight.