What does an SEO actually do?

The four buckets of an SEO retainer

Every hour an SEO spends on your account belongs to one of four buckets. Memorise them. Then ask your agency, at the end of each month, which bucket they spent each hour in.

1. Technical. The work that keeps Google able to find, render and index your site. Core Web Vitals, crawl errors, canonical tags, redirect chains, schema markup, site architecture, hreflang for international sites.
2. Content. The work that earns relevance. Keyword research, content briefs, on-page optimisation of existing pages, new article drafts, internal linking, title and meta updates, image and alt text work.
3. Authority. The work that earns trust. Backlink outreach, digital PR, expert quote pitching, podcast bookings, partnership building, citation cleanup, Google Business Profile work for local clients.
4. Measurement. The work that proves what is happening. Google Search Console reviews, GA4 setup and clean-up, rank tracking, CRM matching, monthly client reports, strategy reviews.

A healthy retainer spreads time across all four within a quarter. The exact split shifts as the account matures. New sites tilt heavy on technical and content for the first six months. Established sites tilt heavy on authority and refinement after that. A retainer that only ever does content or only ever does links is missing half the picture.

If you have not read the parent pillar, what is SEO covers the three-layer model that these four buckets serve.

The first 90 days, week by week

This is the schedule we run on a fresh client at The SEO Company. Other agencies do it slightly differently but the shape is the same.

Weeks 1-2: Discovery and audit

• Kick-off call with the business owner. We are listening for the actual money question, not the SEO question. (We are not really being hired to rank, we are being hired to bring leads.)
• Technical audit: full crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, render check, Core Web Vitals, Search Console health, sitemap and robots.txt review.
• Content audit: every existing URL scored for traffic, ranking, intent match, freshness, internal links. Bucketed into keep, improve, merge or kill.
• Competitor audit: top three direct competitors, top three keyword competitors (often different from the direct ones), backlink gap, content gap.
• Keyword research: primary, secondary and supporting query maps. Search intent classified for each.
• GA4 and GSC checked, tracking errors fixed, conversion events added if missing.

Weeks 3-4: Quick wins and strategy

• Quick wins shipped: broken links fixed, missing meta filled, obvious noindex tags removed, robots.txt cleaned, canonical issues resolved. Anything that takes under an hour and moves the needle goes first.
• Strategy document presented. Twelve-month roadmap with a 30, 60 and 90 day deliverable list. Owner signs off.
• First content briefs commissioned. Usually a refresh of the two or three pages closest to ranking on the highest-value commercial keyword.

Weeks 5-8: Execution begins

• First refreshed pages published. Indexing requested.
• Internal links audited and rebuilt around the top commercial pages.
• Google Business Profile optimised if the client is local. Photos, services, posts, review responses.
• First link earning campaign briefed. Usually a piece of original Australian data or research worth pitching to AU press.
• Schema markup added or fixed across product, FAQ, organisation and breadcrumb entities.

Weeks 9-12: First measurement and pivot

• First ranking and traffic movements showing in GSC. Usually small but pointing in the right direction.
• First substantive new content piece published. (The refreshes are quicker; new pieces take longer because briefs, writing, editing and link planning all stack.)
• First links earned, if the digital PR campaign landed.
• 90-day review with the client. What worked, what did not, what the next 90 days look like.

If your agency cannot describe their version of this schedule in your first month, that is a red flag.

A typical month on a $2,500 retainer

At a Perth blended rate of around $180 per hour, $2,500 a month buys roughly 14 hours. (Some agencies blend higher, some lower. Mid-tier sits there.) Here is a representative split for an established account in month 6, not a new client:

Bucket	Typical hours/month	Sample work
Technical	2-3 hours	Search Console error sweep, one CWV win, schema additions, site speed audit
Content	5-6 hours	One new brief, one refresh, on-page tweaks across 3-5 URLs, internal links
Authority	3-4 hours	One outreach campaign, citation cleanup, Google Business Profile post, review chase
Measurement	2-3 hours	Monthly report, strategy review, CRM lead match, rank tracking review

Notice: writing one new long-form article takes 4-6 hours by itself. So if your agency promises four new articles a month plus everything above on a 14-hour retainer, the maths does not work. Either the articles are AI-generated rubbish, or another bucket is being starved.

For the rest of the budget conversation, our pricing page shows the actual retainer tiers and what each one buys.

In-house SEO vs agency vs freelancer

Three structures, three trade-offs. None of them are wrong for everyone.

In-house

A single SEO inside your business gives you focus and context. They know your product, your customers, your CRM. The downside: one person cannot cover all four buckets at senior level. They will be strong at two and need outside help for the others. Good fit if you have a marketing team of five plus and the SEO can specialise.

Agency

A team of specialists working across multiple accounts. You get a strategist, a content lead, a technical lead and a digital PR lead at fractional cost. Downside: you are not the only client. The context never matches what an in-houser would build over two years. Best fit when you need all four buckets covered but cannot justify two or three internal hires.

Freelancer

A single person on a smaller retainer. Great if you need senior thinking applied to a narrow problem. Risky if you need the full stack, because the same constraint as in-house applies: one head, four buckets. Works best as a specialist hired in alongside an agency or an in-house team. If you want our take on this, the SEO services page sets out where an agency fits in the picture.

Common mistakes when hiring an SEO

Tools and reports you should expect to see

You do not need to read the tools yourself, but you should see the outputs every month. The bare minimum:

1. Google Search Console screenshots or live data. Performance report, Pages report, Core Web Vitals report. Anything else is downstream of this.
2. GA4 organic-traffic and conversion dashboards. Filtered to organic-only. Showing trend lines, not just last-month numbers.
3. A ranking export. Not just the top 50 keywords. The full tracked list, with movements both up and down.
4. A link earned summary. Where any new backlinks came from this month. Domain, anchor, page linked to.
5. A what-we-did list. The four buckets, the hours spent, the URLs touched.
6. A what-we-recommend-next list. The bottlenecks, the experiments, the questions for the owner.

If you want to benchmark your current site against the work an SEO would actually do, our free SEO audit tool runs the technical checks an agency would run on day one. For an honest second opinion on whether your existing agency is doing the work, the website audit service is a useful sanity check.

Perth and WA context

Perth has a few quirks worth knowing about when hiring SEO:

• The market is small enough that everyone knows everyone. Reputation actually matters. Before you sign, ring two of an agency's past clients (any reputable agency will give you names). The conversation you have on the phone tells you more than any pitch deck.
• Trades and home services dominate the local market. The agencies that work well for tradies build playbooks around Google Business Profile, reviews and a small number of conversion-focused service pages. If your prospective agency talks more about blogging than about GBP, they may not understand trades SEO well.
• Mining services are a separate game. Niche, B2B, long sales cycles, often national or international buyers. Mining SEO needs an agency that understands the technical buyer and can produce credible expert content.
• Regional WA punches above its weight. Towns like Bunbury, Mandurah, Geraldton and Karratha have under-served SERPs. A modest investment goes a long way. See our Bunbury and Mandurah service pages for what the playbook looks like.
• Most retainers in Perth are smaller than Sydney or Melbourne. The median we see at the small-business end is around $2,000 a month. Build the strategy around that hour budget, not around what a Sydney agency would recommend on triple the spend.

For the timelines side of this conversation, read how long does SEO take to work. For the unhelpful myths still floating around about agency SEO, SEO myths that won't die covers them.