Scope, fees and exit terms, agreed up front
SEO company Cavan and what a retained engagement includes
Most businesses shopping for an SEO company are really asking a commercial question: what do I get, what does it cost and what happens if I want to stop. This page answers those three before it talks about tactics. Ceol Digital has traded from Cavan Town since 2006, and we have watched too many vague arrangements go wrong to write one of our own.
- Named deliverables every month
- No annual lock in
- You keep every asset
- Plain terms in writing
The industry earned its reputation honestly. Year long contracts, no named work in the proposal, reporting nobody can read. A buyer’s real job is not finding the cleverest agency, it is finding one whose terms you can hold them to. We set ours out in plain language and put them in writing before any invoice arrives, so that the argument about what was promised never lands on you.
What the monthly fee pays for
A retainer is not a subscription to a mystery. It is a set of hours and deliverables agreed in advance and reported against each month. When you pay monthly, you should be able to point at the month just gone and say exactly what came out of it: the pages written, the faults fixed, the links earned and the report that explained them all. If that list is hard to draw up, the arrangement is not working. Clarity is the entire point of paying a retainer rather than hiring a freelancer.
Our engagements are built from four standing pieces, sized to your site and your sector:
Technical upkeep
Crawling, speed and indexation kept in order, with faults fixed as they appear rather than saved up for one annual tidy that arrives with a large bill attached.
Content production
A set number of new pages or updates each month, planned against agreed terms and reviewed before anything is published in your name.
Earned links
Outreach and placements at an agreed rate, reported with the source of every link, never bought in bulk from a marketplace and never resold to another client.
Advice and reporting
A monthly report and a call with the person doing the work, not an account manager reading a template back to you from a script.
If your site is small and stable, a full retainer is more than you need. A single audit with a written plan, carried out by your own team afterwards, is an honest and cheaper route, and we will suggest it when it fits your position rather than talk you out of it.
Three questions for any agency, including us
When you compare proposals, ask each one the same three things. Who will do the work, and will you ever meet them? What exactly gets delivered next month, in numbers? What happens to everything built so far if you stop? Those answers separate a working partner from a billing arrangement with a logo painted on the side of it. Ask the same three questions of us and you will get a straight answer to every one.
Our answers are the ones you would hope for. You meet the people who work on your account. The next month’s deliverables are written down before the month starts. The site, the content, the links and the analytics stay in your name, always. We do not hold your property to keep you, because a client who stays on those terms is worth more to us than one who stays because leaving looks awkward.
You meet the people doing the work
How the engagement gets set up
Nobody is asked to sign anything before they understand what they are buying, and nobody is rushed toward a signature.
Scope call
A conversation about the site, the sector and what a win would look like, held before any proposal is written at all.
Audit and plan
The site reviewed and a written plan produced, so the proposal is built on your situation rather than a reused template.
Agree the terms
Deliverables, fees, notice period and ownership set out in one document you can hold us to without a lawyer present.
Start the work
The first month targets the quickest honest wins, so you see the work moving before any honeymoon period has ended.
Review every month
A short call, the report and the next month’s priorities, with the option to change scope as you learn more about what works.
Questions before you hire an SEO company
Do SEO companies lock you into long contracts?
Some do, and it is the first thing to check. We work month to month after a short initial period long enough to be useful, usually three months. The notice period is written into the agreement, so you always know the path out well before you need it.
What should a monthly report contain?
At a minimum: the work done, the rankings for the agreed terms, the enquiries from organic search and the pages that produced them. If a report is all charts and no named work, ask what was actually done that month, because it is a fair question and you are entitled to a clear answer.
Who owns the content and the links you build?
You do. The pages, the links, the analytics and the site all sit in your accounts and your name. A company that owns your assets is holding your business to ransom, and that is a good enough reason to walk away before you sign.
Can we handle some of the work ourselves?
Often, yes. Plenty of clients write their own content and leave the technical and link work to us, which keeps the cost down. We will help you decide what your own team is better placed to do than we are.
How is the fee decided?
By the size of the site, how competitive your sector is and how much content or link work is realistic each month. You are quoted a figure with a defined deliverable list attached, never an open ended day rate that grows as the work expands. If the scope ever changes, the new fee is agreed before the extra work starts, not after it is done.
Who this commercial model suits
A good fit
This suits a buyer who wants to know what they are paying for, keep the asset at the end and be able to leave without a fight. It suits businesses that will engage with the monthly report, question the plan and tell us plainly when something is not worth the money being charged for it. It also suits a firm that has been disappointed by an agency before and wants the next engagement to look plainly different from the last.
Better served elsewhere
If you only need the search basics done once, website SEO is a smaller job than a retainer. Businesses chasing local footfall want a local SEO agency, and firms needing the whole channel mix in one place want a digital marketing agency. Where the brief runs wider than search altogether, the internet marketing specialists remit is the honest starting point, and our own the SEO agency service sits at the centre of all of it.
Get the terms in writing before you sign
Ask us for a proposal with named deliverables and a clear exit. Compare it against the others you are holding. Reach us on +353863487761, or send a request through the contact page.