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.
The problem
Hours logged to one SEO bucket cannot answer what month three actually bought.
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.
Rankings answer a quarter late. Without hours by workstream, the only evidence of February is a March traffic line that has not turned yet.
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.
How it works here
How SEO agencies set time tracking up
- Departments per workstream
- Technical, content, digital PR and local, each with its own share of the retainer. Hours pace against that share rather than against one monthly total.
- Logging that survives a busy week
- People log from a sentence, a timer, or the task they are already in, so the hours exist before anyone has to reconstruct the month from memory.
- Approved before it bills
- An account manager approves the timesheet, and approved hours are what reach the invoice and the margin figure. No reconciliation at month end.
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.
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