Ongoing SEO, month by month.

A twelve-month SEO retainer is worth it when your website is technically sound, there is demonstrable search demand for what you offer, and the margin on a small number of extra jobs covers the annual cost. In Switzerland they are offered by full-service agencies, specialist SEO agencies and freelancers; at DLM Digital in Zollikon near Zurich, ongoing work starts at CHF 300 per month for local SEO and at CHF 800 per month for full-service SEO. The reason for the long horizon is the effect curve, not a contract clause. Locally, the first measurable shifts appear in month two to four, a stable position settles between month four and eight, and for contested national terms both move out to eight to twelve months. Stop after three months and you have paid for the groundwork without waiting for the effect. We still do not sell minimum terms — if a retainer is not delivering, it should be cancellable.

Anchor it to a break-even calculation rather than to rankings: annual cost divided by the margin on one won enquiry gives you the number of additional jobs at which the investment carries itself. With our prices that is CHF 3'600 a year for local SEO, CHF 9'600 for full-service SEO and CHF 30'000 for SEO combined with GEO — so at a margin of CHF 5'000 per new customer, that is one, two and six additional jobs a year respectively. The internal paper should also contain a baseline from Google Search Console (clicks, impressions and position of your most important pages at the start), the target metric, the planned measures, and an exit criterion defined in advance. In our experience the exit criterion convinces committees more than any forecast does, because it caps the investment instead of promising a return.

At DLM Digital, ongoing SEO starts at CHF 300 per month for local SEO — Google Business Profile, local keywords, citations, NAP consistency and reporting. Full-service SEO with technical optimisation, content production and link building starts at CHF 800 per month. If you also want to build AI visibility systematically — AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity — that is CHF 2'500 per month. A one-off SEO audit without ongoing work starts at CHF 1'500. Which model fits you depends less on the size of your company than on the competition in your search environment and the value of a single enquiry. For a local service business with manageable competition, the smaller retainer often works for years; in contested fields a CHF 300 budget simply moves too little, and we will say so.

An SEO retainer is a recurring monthly fee that buys you a fixed allocation of SEO work, as opposed to a one-off project with a beginning and an end. The term comes from the agency world and means, at its core, that you are paying for continuous time and responsibility rather than for a single deliverable. In practice a retainer typically covers analysis, implementation, content, technical maintenance and reporting within a defined scope. The difference from hourly billing is predictability on both sides: you know what it costs, and we can plan over months instead of thinking in individual assignments. When comparing retainers, do not look at the price alone — look at how much of it flows into actual implementation and how much into reporting and project management.

Realistically, SEO needs six to twelve months before the work shows up as stable rankings and measurable enquiries — towards the lower end for local queries, towards the upper end for contested national terms. That is why retainers under six months rarely make sense from our point of view: you pay for the groundwork but leave before it takes effect. This is not a contractual requirement from us, it is a description of how Google works. Changes have to be crawled, evaluated and, over time, classified as trustworthy. If your horizon is genuinely shorter — you need revenue in three months — Google Ads is the more honest suggestion. After the build-up phase the work usually settles into a quieter mode: less foundational repair, more maintenance, content and reaction to competitors and Google updates.

Your rankings do not vanish overnight, but they erode. What you have built stays in place at first: the pages remain indexed, the technical foundations hold, the backlinks stay. What disappears is the continuous work against three forces. Your competitors keep optimising and eventually overtake you. Google keeps changing how it evaluates pages and will sooner or later touch one of yours. And without new content there are no new queries for which you can be found. In practice you therefore see a slow slide over months rather than a crash, with the pace set by competitive pressure. That is an argument against panic, not for dependency: if you have to pause, you will not lose everything, but you will pay part of the build-up cost again when you restart.

An SEO audit is a one-off stocktake: we analyse technology, content, backlinks and competitors and deliver a prioritised action plan. It starts at CHF 1'500 and tells you what to do — nothing is implemented as part of it. That is exactly right when you have an internal person or a web agency who can work through the measures, or when you first want to know how large the topic is for you at all. An ongoing retainer from CHF 300 per month implements instead, and adjusts the priorities continuously to whatever the data is doing. The audit is a snapshot; the retainer is a process. Many clients start with an audit and then decide whether to implement it themselves or have us do it — the action plan is deliberately written to work without us.

That does not depend on headcount but on the value of an enquiry and on whether your service is searched for at all. At CHF 300 per month, a year of local SEO costs you CHF 3'600. If a single new customer carries a margin of CHF 5'000, it pays for itself with one additional enquiry a year; at CHF 200 per job you need far more volume, and then SEO may be the wrong investment. For most local service businesses, trades, practices and fiduciaries the ratio is favourable, because local competition online is often weak and an optimised Google Business Profile moves a great deal. You are not a case for SEO if you are already at capacity and work entirely through referrals — and we will tell you that in the first conversation, even though it argues against our own offer.

Little, but not zero. Keyword research, structure, copy, technical implementation and reporting are entirely ours. What we cannot replace is your subject expertise: the questions your customers actually ask, the typical mistakes in your industry, the reasons someone hires you rather than a competitor. That is precisely what produces content that ranks and that Google and AI systems classify as competent. In practice this runs as one or two focused conversations of 30 to 60 minutes a month, plus a short approval of the texts. What helps but is not mandatory: access to your website, Google Search Console and Google Analytics, so we work with real numbers rather than estimates.

By enquiries, not by rankings. Rankings are an intermediate quantity — they fluctuate, they are personalised and location-dependent, and position three for a keyword without buying intent is worthless. Four things are meaningful: the number of organic enquiries and calls, the development of clicks and impressions in Google Search Console, visibility in the Local Pack for your most important terms, and whether you appear in AI answers at all. In the first two to four months you usually see movement in impressions and positions before enquiries follow. That is normal, and it is the reason SEO cannot be judged after eight weeks. Our reporting states openly which numbers are moving and which are not, including the measures that did not work.