How agencies price SEO when the work costs $99 a month

I run a digital marketing agency with 21 clients. TinyRank came out of that agency, so I have had the pricing conversation with myself many times before anyone else asked. Here is where I landed, and what I have seen other agencies do with it since.

The starting fact is simple. TinyRank costs the agency $99 per client website per month. For that, the client's WordPress site gets audited, fixed every day, re-audited every 30 days, gets business directory listings built on weekdays and backlinks every 30 days, and the agency gets a white-label PDF report on the 1st of each month with its own name and logo on it. The client never sees TinyRank.

So the agency's cost is $99 and the question is what the client pays.

First, what the client was paying before

Most small business SEO retainers I see in Ireland and the UK sit between 300 and 1,500 a month, in euro or pounds. US agencies tend to charge more. For that, the client usually gets a monthly report, some on-page fixes when someone finds time, a few blog posts, and a vague sense that someone is looking after things.

The honest problem with that retainer is not the price. It is that the technical work, the boring fixes that matter, mostly does not get done, because it is nobody's favourite job and it never feels urgent. I wrote about what that backlog looks like on six real sites.

So the agency is not replacing a service with a cheaper one. It is finally delivering the part of the service it was already charging for.

Four ways agencies price it

1. Keep the retainer, do more

The simplest. The client keeps paying 500 a month. The agency keeps doing strategy, content and the client relationship. TinyRank quietly does the daily technical work, listings and backlinks underneath. Cost goes up by $99, but the report at the end of the month has a long list of actual changes in it for the first time.

This is what I do with my own clients. The margin on the retainer is already there. What changes is that the report is worth reading, and renewals get easier.

2. A dedicated SEO maintenance line

Some agencies add an explicit line to the invoice: website SEO maintenance, 250 to 400 a month. It covers daily fixes, listings and the monthly report. Strategy and content are priced separately.

This works well for web design agencies who built the site, have no SEO team, and want a recurring line that does not need staff. $99 in, 250 to 400 out, and the deliverable is a PDF the client can read. Ten clients on this line is a meaningful monthly income from something nobody at the agency has to do.

3. Bundle it into hosting and care plans

Web agencies that already sell care plans at 50 to 150 a month often add a higher tier. Care plan plus SEO at 200 to 300. The client sees one bill, the agency sees one more reason the client never leaves.

The thing to watch here is that the SEO tier has to be visibly different from the plain care plan. The monthly report does that job, because it lists every change by name.

4. Charge by result

A few agencies want to price on rankings or traffic. I would not, and I will not help you do it with TinyRank, because I do not make claims about rankings or traffic and neither should you. SEO work is real, measurable and worth paying for on its own. Pricing it on an outcome neither of you controls just turns every quiet month into a dispute.

What I would not do

I would not pass the $99 through at cost or near it. Not because the margin matters to me, I get paid the same either way, but because a client who pays $120 for SEO assumes they got $120 of SEO. The report shows seven changes a day, listings, backlinks and a clear log. That is worth more than $120 to a business, and pricing it low tells them otherwise.

I would also not hide that a tool is involved if a client asks directly. The report is in your name because the relationship is yours, the strategy is yours and the responsibility is yours. But if a client asks how the daily fixes get done, "we use an agent that logs every change and we check it" is a better answer than a story.

A worked example

Say a web design agency has 12 clients on WordPress and no SEO staff. They add an SEO maintenance line at 300 a month and 8 clients take it.

Monthly cost: 8 sites at $99 is $792. Monthly income: 8 at 300 is 2,400 in their currency. The agency does about 20 minutes per client per month, mostly reading the report before forwarding it, so around three hours of time.

The interesting number is not the margin. It is that 8 clients now get daily SEO work who were getting none, and the agency has a reason to talk to each of them every month.

Where to start

Add one client. Do not change their price yet. Read the log every morning for two weeks and read the report on the 1st. Then decide which of the four models fits your agency, with the evidence in front of you rather than my opinion.

TinyRank has no setup fee, no contract and no minimum number of sites, so one client is a complete test.