Time tracking software for SEO agencies

Technical SEO is the work that costs the most and shows the least. Verbial logs hours against the workstream that did them, so a month of crawl fixes and a migration audit reads as delivered work rather than a flat traffic chart. The pacing warns the account manager while there is still a month left to act.

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Why it matters

Hours logged to one SEO bucket cannot answer what month three actually bought.

Technical hours disappear into a general bucket.

A migration audit, a quarter of crawl fixes and a schema rebuild all log as SEO, so the month with the most engineering in it looks identical to the quietest one.

The lag makes a busy month look thin.

Rankings answer a quarter late. Without hours by workstream, the only evidence of February is a March traffic line that has not turned yet.

Workstreams run hot at different times.

Content is steady and digital PR is spiky. One blended number hides the month where outreach took three times the share of the retainer it was sold at.

What changes

What changes for SEO agencies

Hours land where the work happened
Technical, content, digital PR and local, each with its own hours.
Logging survives a busy week
A sentence, a timer, or the task they are already in. Nothing gets reconstructed from memory.
Bill from hours nobody argues with
An account manager approves the week. Approved hours reach the invoice and the margin.

Open an account in the third week and see which workstream is ahead of its allocation, while there is still time to move hours or bill the overage.

Common questions

How do we show value for technical work that will not rank for months?

Report the hours beside the trend. The client sees the migration audit, the crawl fixes and the schema work as delivered against their retainer, on the same page as the traffic line that has not moved yet.

Can we see hours by workstream instead of one SEO total?

Yes. Departments split the retainer into technical, content, digital PR and local, and each paces against its own allocation, so you can see which part of the account ran hot and when.

Does the team have to track time to the task?

Only where you want that detail. Hours can land on the client and the department and still pace correctly. Task level is there for the workstreams you need to cost precisely, like a migration.

What happens when an SEO retainer runs over?

Pacing flags the account before the allocation is spent, so the overage is a conversation in week three rather than a write-off discovered in week five.

Keep reading

The rest of what SEO agencies run on.

Client reportingThe report is the only artifact most SEO clients read, and it costs a day a month to build by hand.Read more →ProfitabilityDeliverable pricing hides how much labor each SEO retainer actually consumes.Read more →Time tracking for every agencyGet every hour logged without chasing, then invoice from time you trust.See time tracking →SEO agenciesRankings move slowly and clients get nervous. Show the work and the trend line in the same report.See the whole system →

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