A prospect once asked us, in the first call, whether the retainer included "getting to position one." They meant Google. They did not mean Core Web Vitals, checkout latency, or whether paid landing pages still load in under three seconds on a mid-range phone.
That question is common, and it is a trap. Promise rankings you cannot control and you inherit blame for algorithm updates, competitor content, and a client's CMS experiments. Dodge the question and you sound evasive. The workable path is to separate what a performance retainer actually buys from what SEO campaigns sometimes promise, then price the part you can run every week across a portfolio.
For packaging, pricing tiers, and objection handling in proposal language, we keep the longer guide on our main blog:
- How to Sell Performance Monitoring Services to Your Clients
- Why Agencies Need Automated Performance Monitoring in 2026
This post stays on the conversation: what to say when "#1" shows up, and how to close an agency performance retainer without sounding like you are selling snake oil.
How to pitch performance monitoring (without an SEO retainer label)
"Performance monitoring" sounds like infrastructure. "SEO retainer" sounds like rankings. Many buyers only have budget vocabulary for the second label.
We have had better luck leading with outcomes the client's leadership already measures:
- fewer surprise regressions after releases
- faster incident triage when a template breaks
- reporting they can forward without you re-explaining Lighthouse on every call
Core Web Vitals belong in the story because they are observable and they connect to search quality signals, but they are not a rank guarantee. Say that plainly. Google does not sell position one as a service; neither should you.
What to say when a client asks for Google #1 rankings
You can adapt the wording, but the structure has held up:
- We monitor speed and stability on the URLs you care about, on a schedule, with alerts when agreed thresholds break.
- That reduces the chance that a deploy, a script, or a campaign change quietly wrecks experience (and the metrics search systems can see) before anyone notices.
- Rankings move for many reasons; we do not contract on position, but we do contract on coverage, cadence, and response when your numbers move.
Sentence three is where procurement either relaxes or pushes back. If they push back, you have learned something useful: they may want an SEO agency, not a performance operator. Better to find that in week one than in month six.
Performance retainer scope: what to include for agency clients
A retainer you can deliver should read like operations, not lottery tickets.
In scope, if you mean it
- agreed URL or template sets (home, category, checkout, key landing pages)
- scheduled lab tests plus field data where CrUX has enough traffic
- alert routing to a named channel (Slack, email, webhook)
- a monthly or quarterly review tied to their release calendar
- written decisions: fix now, defer with reason, watch one more cycle
For multi-site portfolios, the same list applies per property, with shared templates called out once. A regression on a global header script is one fix that affects dozens of URLs; your scope document should say you monitor at template level, not only the homepage of each domain.
Out of scope unless you also sell SEO strategy
- guaranteed ranking positions or traffic multiples
- unlimited remediation hours bundled into "monitoring"
- ownership of their content strategy or link building
Blurring monitoring with unlimited fixes is how agencies end up doing free development every time a score dips. Put remediation in a separate bucket or a capped hours block.
How to price recurring performance monitoring for agencies
Buyers sometimes ask how many PageSpeed runs they get. That invites them to minimise usage.
We prefer framing around:
- portfolio size (how many properties and critical templates)
- who triages alerts (you summarise only vs you investigate first)
- reporting depth (async PDF vs live walkthrough with their product owner)
A fixed monthly line item trains clients to treat speed as ongoing hygiene, the same way they treat uptime or backups. Hourly "check when worried" trains them to call only in panic mode, which is the worst time for everyone.
If they push for a per-run price, translate it back: "Twelve manual runs a year on twenty URLs is not a monitoring programme; it is twelve snapshots." You are selling continuity, not a counter.
Client-ready proof for recurring performance audits (no rank guarantee)
Prospects trust sequences more than adjectives. Before the second sales call, assemble:
- two or three URLs with dated trend lines (lab and field where available)
- one example where a deploy marker lines up with a regression you caught early
- one plain-language paragraph a non-technical sponsor could paste into an internal email
You are not proving you are wizards. You are proving the work repeats without heroic manual effort. That is what makes a retainer believable.
Objections when selling performance monitoring to clients
"Our in-house team can run PageSpeed."
Agree. Position yourself on operational load: schedules, portfolio coverage, alert ownership when nobody has spare time on Thursday afternoon. The argument is not that they lack Lighthouse; it is that nobody owns the follow-up when scores move on a site they forgot was in the roster.
"We only care about rankings."
Ask which business risk they would accept if rankings stayed flat but checkout got slower for a month. Often that question surfaces a marketing lead who cares about conversion, not only SERP position.
"Can you bundle this into our existing SEO contract?"
Sometimes yes, with clear line items. Separate monitoring and alerting from content and links so scope creep is visible in the SOW.
When to sell a remediation project before the performance retainer
Some sites need remediation projects, not another dashboard. Say so. An honest "this needs a build phase first" protects your reputation more than a retainer you know will fail.
After the build phase, monitoring is what keeps the fix from slipping back when the next plugin, tag, or hero image lands. That is the handoff story: project for repair, retainer for vigilance.
Performance monitoring proposal checklist for agencies
- Did we name URLs or templates, not "the whole site" without boundaries?
- Did we specify alert thresholds and who receives them?
- Did we avoid rank guarantees while still explaining why speed metrics matter to search quality?
- Did we separate monitoring from unlimited development time?
- Did we attach one piece of evidence they can forward internally?
If fewer than four are true, expect the deal to drift into "can you just take a quick look?" work at no margin.
Next step: run a 30-day performance monitoring pilot on your next call
Pick one active prospect where performance came up as an afterthought. Open with the three-sentence frame above. Offer a 30-day pilot with explicit URL list, threshold document, and one scheduled review, priced so it is clearly not free labour.
Then compare close rate and scope disputes against your last open-ended "we will keep an eye on it" pitch.
If you want packaging tiers, proposal wording, and how we talk about automation without over-promising, the two guides linked at the top go deeper than this conversation frame.
A performance retainer is not a promise to beat the internet. It is a promise that someone is watching the numbers that break when teams ship fast. Clients who want that usually do not need you to say "#1." They need you to say what happens on the Tuesday after a bad deploy, and who picks up the phone.
