Turn the sites you've built
into monthly retainers
Your old clients already trust you and already have a website. Here's how web designers charge them $500 to $1,000 a month for SEO, and what they deliver for it.
600+ customers at ChatSEO. Web designers are the ones paying us the most.
The call is with Nicholas, on one of your own client sites · the trial is 7 days, free
Web designers are already doing this
As a web designer, ChatSEO has become my secret weapon. It lets me add a new revenue stream by offering complete SEO services to my web design clients. It generates SEO audits and optimised copy in one click — a huge time saver that raises the value of my offers.
Verified review on Trustpilot · translated from French
The 4 steps
You can start the first one this afternoon.
List 20 past clients whose site is still live
Straight from your invoices. Put anyone who ever asked "do you also do SEO?" at the top — they're pre-sold. Don't over-qualify the rest; half the yeses come from names you'd have bet against.
Run this on their site
One line, their domain. This is SEO research mode — you don't need to connect anything, so it works on any site, including ones you haven't touched in two years.
I need you to find 3 interesting SEO opportunities for "yourclient.com". These should be low effort high ROI opportunities.
It doesn't guess. It pulls the domain overview, the keyword rankings, the referring domains, the page's own meta tags, the live SERP and real search volumes — then answers.
What comes back is the email: three concrete opportunities with real search volumes behind them. Here's a full one.
Book a 15-minute call if you'd rather we ran the first one with you, on a real client site.
Low effort, high ROI is the important half of the prompt. You want three things a business owner reads and immediately understands — not a technical audit, and nothing that reads as a criticism of the site you built them.
Send this email
No deck, no attachment, no calendar link. Five a day is thirty minutes — two weeks is fifty clients.
Subject: something I noticed on [site] Hi [name], I was looking at [site] the other day — still looks great. One thing stood out: [the biggest of the three, in one line]. Here are the three things I'd fix first: 1. [finding one] 2. [finding two] 3. [finding three] I've started offering SEO alongside the builds, so I can take care of this properly if you want. Either way the list above is yours. Want me to walk you through it on a quick call? [you]
Quote a monthly price on the reply
Not a project fee. One page, two prices, below. Most people take the higher one — which is the reason to offer two and not one.
Never sold a retainer before? Ask ChatSEO to build the proposal with you, or book a 15-minute call and we'll price it with you.
I'm a web designer. I built the website for [client], a [what the business does]. They're interested in SEO. Write me a one-page retainer proposal: three tiers, priced monthly, deliverables not hours. Ask me what you need first. Don't promise a ranking or a date.
The one line not to cut: "either way the list above is yours." Giving the findings away unconditionally is what makes the email a favour instead of a pitch. And keep the offer to one sentence in the middle — never the subject, never a P.S. with a price in it.
What you deliver every month
Roughly 4–5 hours per client, once you've done it twice.
Do this on day one: connect their Google Search Console to ChatSEO. It's read-only Google sign-in, it takes two minutes, and you already have the access because you built the site. Without it there is no monthly report — and the report is what gets the retainer renewed. Get it during onboarding or don't start the month.
| Service | What the client sees | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Audit | A ranked list of what's costing them traffic | 20 min |
| Technical fixes | A changelog of what you shipped | 1–2 h |
| Page rewrites | 2–4 pages live, before and after | 30 min each |
| New pages | 1–2 new pages published | 1 h + build |
| Monthly report | What you did, what moved, what's next | 15 min |
The report is the one that matters. Every client who's been burned by an SEO agency was burned the same way — they paid for months and could never tell whether anything happened. Send it even in a flat month: say it was flat, say what you did, say what's next. Clients don't churn on bad numbers, they churn on silence.
What to charge
| Tier | Every month | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Essential | Audit, 2 page rewrites, technical fixes, monthly report | $497 |
| Growth | Everything above, plus 2 new pages and a monthly call | $997 |
- Never price by the hour. That's freelancing with extra admin, and every efficiency you gain becomes a pay cut.
- Say "six-month minimum" out loud on the call. SEO doesn't show its hand in eight weeks, and a client who leaves in month three concludes it doesn't work.
- Never promise a position or a date. Promise the work, the reporting, and an honest read of what moved.
Where ChatSEO comes in
The prompt above works on one client in one chat. A retainer is eight clients times twelve months — and a chat window has no memory of what you shipped for whom, no place for each client's Search Console, and nothing to build a monthly comparison against. By client four you become the database, the reports stop going out, and the retainers stop renewing.
That's the half ChatSEO holds: one site per client with their Search Console attached, the history of every change, and the monthly read you send them. It does the audits, the rewrites and the new pages — you keep the client and the margin. You can try all of it on a 7-day free trial.
Try it on one old client
Pick a site you built last year, run the prompt, send the email. Start a 7-day free trial and do it yourself, or book a call and we'll do the first one with you.
7 days free · No credit card required · or we'll walk you through it live