Most SEO services sold to UK small businesses are a list of line items, and more than half of the items we see on proposals have no measurable effect on where the site ranks.
They exist because they are easy to produce, easy to screenshot and easy to put in a monthly report. Rankings do not care whether a report was produced.
This is a buyer's guide. It takes the seven items that appear most often on SEO retainer proposals we see from businesses in Northamptonshire and the Midlands, and checks each one against what Google publishes about its own systems and what the Ahrefs and Backlinko link data found. Then it covers the three deliverables that still do the work.
The price context matters. Whito's June 2026 file of 45 UK providers with published prices found a median SEO retainer of £799 a month, with the cheapest tier at £99 to £300. At the bottom end the typical inclusions are citations, basic on-page work and a "monthly ranking report". That is the tier this article is mostly about.
The seven line items, checked
The table below gives the short verdict on each item. The sections after it give the evidence.
| Retainer line item | Does it move rankings? | What the evidence says |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly keyword ranking report | No. It is measurement, and increasingly inaccurate measurement. | Google disabled the num=100 parameter in September 2025 and personalisation makes tracked positions differ from what customers see. |
| Four blog posts a month | Only if each post is better than what already ranks. Volume alone does nothing. | Ahrefs: 96.55% of pages get no Google traffic. Google: no preferred word count; scaled low-value content is a spam policy breach. |
| Directory submissions | No, and at volume it is a risk. | Google's spam policy lists "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as link spam. |
| "Technical optimisation" with no ticket list | Not on a site that is already indexed and renders. | Google's starter guide lists heading counts, URL keywords and word count as things not to focus on. |
| Meta description rewrites | No. | Google has said since 2009 it does not use the description tag in ranking, and snippets come mainly from page content. |
| Link "outreach" with no links delivered | No. Outreach is an activity. Links are the result. | Ahrefs: roughly 1 in 6,671 pages with no backlinks gets over 1,000 search visits a month. |
| DA or DR reporting | No. Third-party scores are not Google signals. | John Mueller, 2020: "Google doesn't use Domain Authority at all when it comes to Search crawling, indexing, or ranking." |
Monthly keyword ranking report
A ranking report tells you where a tool saw you on a given day, from a data centre, logged out. It does not change anything, and since September 2025 it has been less reliable than it was. A rising ranking line is also not the same as a rising enquiry count, which is the gap most owners are really asking about.
Around 10 to 14 September 2025 Google stopped honouring the num=100 URL parameter, which rank-tracking tools had used to pull 100 results in one request. Tools now need ten requests where one used to do, and AccuRanker cut its default tracking depth to the top 20. Several tools showed broken dashboards and missing data for weeks.
The same change exposed how much of the "impressions" line in Search Console had been bots loading page five. Desktop impressions fell across many sites in the same week and average position improved, because the scrapers had gone.
You still need to know whether you are moving. Use the free Search Console performance report, which gives clicks, impressions and average position from Google's own data, for every query, with no tool between you and the numbers. If an agency's report is a prettier version of this, you are paying for the formatting.
Four blog posts a month
Content volume is the line item that looks most like work and most often is not. Google says plainly that the length of the content alone doesn't matter for ranking and that there is "no magical word count target". A page count target is the same mistake one level up.
Ahrefs looked at about 14 billion pages in its index in late 2023 and found that 96.55% get no traffic from Google at all. A further 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month. Four posts a month published into that distribution, on topics chosen because they were easy to write, join the 96.55%.
xychart-beta
title "Share of pages by monthly Google traffic (Ahrefs, 14bn pages, Dec 2023)"
x-axis ["Zero visits", "1 to 10 visits", "More than 10 visits"]
y-axis "Percentage of pages" 0 --> 100
bar [96.55, 1.94, 1.51]
There is also a policy edge. Google's spam rules name scaled content abuse, including "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users". A £300 retainer that promises four posts a month in 2026 is very likely producing them with AI and no real editing.
Directory submissions
Directory submissions were a ranking tactic in 2008. Google's current spam policy lists "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as an example of link spam, in the same list as paid links and automated link programs.
There is a narrow exception. A handful of real local directories (the ones a person in your town would open) support local search by confirming your name, address and phone number. That is a one-off job of an afternoon, with a short list. It is not a recurring deliverable, and "50 directory submissions a month" is a line item for something Google asks you not to do.
"Technical optimisation" with no ticket list
Technical work can matter a great deal, on the right site. A site Google cannot crawl, a template that blocks rendering, a migration with broken redirects: these are real problems, and fixing them moves rankings quickly.
The question for a retainer is what is left to do in month seven on a site that was audited in month one. Google's own starter guide lists things it believes you shouldn't focus on: the number and order of headings, keywords in the URL path ("hardly any effect"), word count, subdomains versus subdirectories, and treating E-E-A-T as a ranking factor ("No, it's not"). Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million results found no correlation between page loading speed and first-page rankings either.
The fix as a buyer is simple. Ask for the ticket list: each technical change, the URL it applies to, the date it went live. If the list is empty or the same every month, the line item is theatre. A one-off technical audit with a dated fix list is a product. Open-ended "ongoing technical optimisation" usually is not.
Meta description rewrites
Google does not use the meta description in ranking and has said so for seventeen years. Matt Cutts wrote in September 2009 that "we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking". The current documentation says snippets are primarily created from the page content itself, with the description tag used "sometimes".
A clear description can lift click-through on a result you already have, which is useful. Writing it once per page is enough. Rewriting descriptions each month is a deliverable that exists because it fills a row in a spreadsheet.
Link "outreach" with no links
Outreach is emails sent. Links are what the emails were for. A report that lists "120 outreach emails sent" and no links is reporting the cost, with no revenue.
The reason links are still worth paying for is in the Ahrefs data above. Of the roughly 20 million pages in its index with no referring domains, only 2,997 get more than 1,000 search visits a month, about one in 6,671. The same study found "a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic". Ahrefs is careful to say that is correlation, and so are we. It is still the strongest pattern in the data.
So pay for links, by all means. Pay for them as a list of live URLs on named sites, each one somewhere a person might read it. If a previous agency already built some, audit the backlinks you already have before paying for more.
DA or DR reporting
Domain Authority is a Moz product. Domain Rating is an Ahrefs product. Neither is a Google signal, and Google has been saying so for a decade. Search Engine Journal collected the quotes: John Mueller in 2020, "Google doesn't use Domain Authority at all when it comes to Search crawling, indexing, or ranking", and again in 2022, "you do not need DA for Google Search. Google doesn't use it at all."
Google doesn't use Domain Authority at all when it comes to Search crawling, indexing, or ranking. John Mueller, Google, 2020, via Search Engine Journal
These scores correlate with rankings because they are built from link counts, which correlate with rankings. Backlinko found Domain Rating strongly correlated with first-page position. That makes DR a reasonable shorthand when you are choosing which sites to ask for a link. It does not make "DR went from 14 to 17" a result you should pay for.
The three deliverables that still move rankings
Three things reliably change where a page ranks. They are content that answers the query better than the pages currently above it, a site structure that gets link equity to that page, and links from sites real people read. Everything in the table above is either a measurement of these, a weak proxy for one of them, or filler.
Content that beats the current top three for a query you can name. Google's own self-assessment list for content asks whether the page "provides substantial value when compared to other pages in search results" and whether it was "primarily made to attract visits from search engines". The deliverable is a page, a target query, the three pages it has to beat, and the specific reason it does (more complete, more current, written by someone who has done the thing). One of those a month beats four generic posts, and treating it as content marketing rather than a word count is the shift that makes it work.
Internal linking and site architecture. Google says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site, and that descriptive anchor text helps both people and Google make sense of the site. On most small business sites the money pages are linked from the menu and nowhere else, while the blog links to nothing. The deliverable is a map of which pages link to which, with the changes made, and it is often the cheapest ranking gain available.
Links from sites real people read. Google's spam policy rules out buying them, exchanging them, automating them and getting them from low-quality directories. What is left is earning them: a supplier page, a trade body, a local paper, a guide someone cites because it is the best one. The deliverable is the live URL, the site, and the date. Ahrefs found that links from pages with high URL Rating and from sites with many referring domains correlated best, so quality of the linking page matters more than the raw count.
These three are harder to produce than the seven. That is the point. A ranking report takes a tool ten minutes. A page that beats the current number one takes someone who knows the subject a week.
How to read an SEO proposal with this in mind
Put each line item in one of three boxes: one of the three deliverables above, a measurement of one of them, or neither. The same sorting works on any marketing agency proposal, not just an SEO one. Measurements are fine as long as you are not paying for them as if they were work. Neither should be struck out before you sign.
Then ask one question per deliverable: what will I be able to see, with a URL and a date, at the end of the month? A page you can read, a list of internal links that were added, a list of sites that now link to you. If the answer is a PDF with graphs, the retainer is mostly theatre, whatever the price.
This buyer's guide sits alongside our fuller guide to what a UK SEO agency should cost and deliver. We write our SEO retainers with the deliverables as URLs and dates for this reason, and most of the ones we scope are for professional services firms weighing up their first proper programme. The monthly report is the Search Console data with a note on what changed and why. If you want a second opinion on a proposal you have been sent, send it over and we will mark it up against the table above.