Pricing an SEO retainer when someone else does the work

The arithmetic of resale: what a retainer leaves you after fulfillment, and the two line items that quietly erase it.

Reselling fulfilled SEO looks simple on a spreadsheet. You buy at a wholesale rate, you sell at a retail rate, and the difference is margin. In practice two line items sit between those numbers, and agencies that do not price for them end up working for a fraction of what they thought.

The first leak: account management

Fulfillment is not the whole cost of servicing a client. Someone at your agency still takes the call, writes the recap, answers the invoice question and sits in the quarterly review. That time is real and it does not appear on a partner's rate card. Price it in as a fixed hourly allowance per client per month, then check monthly whether the allowance is holding.

The second leak: unbilled out-of-scope work

A client asks for a landing page change. It takes forty minutes, it is genuinely outside the retainer, and nobody wants to raise an invoice over forty minutes. Repeated across a roster, this is the single largest silent margin loss in outsourced SEO. The fix is not stricter billing — it is a stated monthly allowance for small requests, so both sides know when the meter starts.

What a defensible markup looks like

Whatever multiple you choose, work backwards from the two costs above rather than forwards from the wholesale rate. A markup that covers fulfillment but not account management is not a margin, it is a deferral.

Price the outcome, not the deliverable list

The agencies with the healthiest margins on resold SEO rarely itemise the package to the client. They sell a result and a reporting cadence. That framing also protects you when the deliverable mix needs to change — swapping two content pieces for a technical sprint is a conversation about strategy, not a renegotiation of a line item.