What’s Included in Monthly SEO?

written by Lindsay Halsey

posted on Jun 16, 2025

If you design and build websites for your customers, then you’re already familiar with the need for ongoing maintenance to keep a site running smoothly. Launching a new website isn't the end of the story; websites need regular support to stay up-to-date. This kind of support is best delivered via a monthly maintenance plan.

Remember, SEO isn't a “set it and forget it” marketing initiative. The search engines continue to evolve, and so do your clients’ businesses. SEO, therefore, requires ongoing effort. For this reason, we recommend that clients engage in a monthly SEO services plan after completing the SEO Assessment and SEO Set-Up processes.

What’s Included in Monthly SEO

At Pathfinder SEO we believe there to be three primary components to an effective monthly SEO service:

1. Communication: This is the most important piece of a successful SEO effort. To be successful in SEO today, collaboration and feedback are required. A monthly phone call is a great way to ensure you’re on the same page as your clients.
2. Reporting: Each month, it's essential to deliver a summary of results and observations. This takes the form of an emailed report which combines your insights on Google Analytics data along with an overview of the action items that have been recently completed or are scheduled for the upcoming month.
3. Action Items: These are the exact steps we take each month to drive results. Each month’s progress builds on previous months and ensures your client’s SEO is ever-evolving and up to date. Content marketing collaboration is often a core component of the action items.

These components are then rolled into three tiers, each costing a different price, in order to give clients choices of which monthly SEO service best fits their needs.

Creating Tiers of Monthly SEO Service

As we package SEO services for monthly delivery, it’s a great time to give customers a choice. This is because each customer has different goals and budget constraints. Having established tiers in place means that your agency can package ongoing services to meet varying needs while maintaining consistency.

Consider offering three sturdy tiers of monthly SEO packages:

1. Good: This is for prospective clients who want to maintain their performance ranking results. They want to stay up to date with SEO and they take comfort in knowing that an SEO expert is reviewing the results and sharing insights each month.
2. Better: This is for prospective clients who are looking to steadily grow traffic in the months and years to come. This client values collaboration on content marketing as one of the core means of driving growth.
3. Best: This is for prospective clients who want next year’s results today. This client values collaboration on content marketing, often at a faster pace than the Better plan. Sometimes, this prospect has a significant hurdle to overcome like a big drop in traffic after the launch of a new website.

There are many ways to differentiate your tiers of service. Here are a few options:

• The frequency of calls and meetings increases as project engagement increases.
• Your role in content production ranges from delivering a strategy to executing the content plan.
• Your role is off-site SEO, which also ranges from delivering a strategy to executing the link building plan.

The biggest differentiator amongst them all is the time it takes to execute them.

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Creating Your Monthly SEO Packages

Now it’s time to design your monthly SEO packages. Consider the following questions as your agency formulates the Monthly SEO package offering.

• What will you include in each?
• How will they differ from each other?
• What will you name each package?

We recommend breaking SEO into its component parts — technical SEO, content, on-site optimization, and off-site SEO. Consistently using this framework aids in the client's understanding of the why behind individual action items. As a result, they better understand the value provided by the monthly service.

As outlined by the 4 pillars of SEO, there are action items that align with monthly SEO services:

Technical SEO

• Scanning and fixing broken links
• Fixing ‘page not found’ errors with 301 redirects
• Speed optimization
• Fixing mobile usability issues

Content

• Writing a blog post
• Updating an existing page to include additional content types such as testimonials
• Adding FAQs to top-level services or category pages
• Adding introductory text to product category pages

On-Site Optimization

• Taking a deeper dive into the customization of page titles and meta descriptions than was completed during the SEO Set-Up
• Updating alternative text across the media library
• Updating top pages or posts to have more keyword-friendly headers

Off-Site SEO

• Active management of the Google Maps listing
• Citation building
• Consulting and collaboration on link building

As you craft your monthly SEO services packages, you can scale the effort across the packages to create any necessary differentiations.

Here’s a tangible example of how these tasks are incorporated into each tier:

What's Next?

Grab a pen and paper. Document what you will include in each of your monthly SEO packages. How many tiers of service will you offer? What will you call them? How will they differ?

Once you’ve defined what’s included in each of your offerings — the SEO Assessment, Set-Up, and Monthly — you are ready to dive into pricing. Learn how to price SEO services.