What a marketing agency charges 2,000 pounds a month for — and which parts you can do yourself

A typical small-business retainer is somewhere between 750 and 3,000 pounds a month. Here is roughly what is inside a 2,000 pound one, based on what these packages usually contain.

None of this is an argument that agencies are dishonest. Most are not. It is an argument that you should know which line you are buying.

The account manager: 300 to 500 pounds

The person who emails you, joins the monthly call and chases the specialists. Real work, and the first thing to disappear when the agency gets busy.

The reporting: 150 to 300 pounds

A monthly document assembled from tools that produce it automatically. Genuinely useful when somebody interprets it. Frequently it is a dashboard with a covering paragraph.

You can do this yourself. The underlying data is free from Search Console and your analytics.

The content: 400 to 800 pounds

Usually two to four pieces a month. Quality varies more than any other line — some agencies have excellent writers, some produce filler that will not rank because it says nothing a hundred other pages do not.

Ask to see three pieces they wrote for a client in a trade like yours. Not the portfolio. Three real ones.

The technical SEO: 200 to 400 pounds

Fixing what crawlers cannot read, speed, structured data, internal links. This is real skilled work — and the diagnosis half of it takes seconds and is available free from any number of tools, including ours.

The fixing is the part worth paying for. The finding is not.

The software: 200 to 400 pounds

Rank trackers, audit tools, keyword research, reporting platforms. Bundled invisibly into your retainer at a markup.

This is the line to ask about directly. Licensing the same tools yourself is usually a fraction of the cost, and you keep them if you leave.

The strategy: 100 to 300 pounds

The part that is genuinely hard to replace, and usually the smallest number on the invoice. Knowing which of your services to push, which customers are worth chasing, what to stop doing.

What is left when you subtract the software and the reporting

Roughly a thousand pounds of skilled work: writing, technical fixes, and someone thinking about your business. That can absolutely be worth two thousand pounds a month to a business turning over enough for it to matter.

It is rarely worth it to a business with no customers yet, because the thing that business needs is not more volume through a funnel — it is finding out whether anybody wants what it sells. That work costs nothing but time.

The four questions to ask before signing

Which of these hours are strategy and which are software I could licence directly?

What happens to the content, the accounts and the data if we stop?

What specifically will be different in ninety days, and how would we know?

What result would make you tell me this is not working?

The last one is the useful one. An agency that has never told a client to stop is an agency that will not tell you either.

Before you decide

Run a free audit of your own site first, so you can tell whether the technical problems an agency finds are the ones you already knew about. If somebody quotes you for six months of fixes and the audit lists the same eight things in fifteen seconds, that is worth knowing before the contract rather than after.

And if the diagnosis is that people arrive and do not get in touch, start here — that is usually a week of work rather than a retainer.