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Done-for-You vs. Done-with-You as SEO contractors
Posted by on May 14, 2026 at 10:45 pmWhich one are y'all doing as SEO consultants or agencies? Solely Done-for-You? A mix of both?
I always did Done-for-You as most clients I had were looking to delegate SEO entirely. But I've been receiving more and more inquiries for Done-with-You SEO work these past few weeks and it made me think. Maybe is it a more scalable way of doing things as an SEO consultant?
As I see it, you get to work on more projects at once, you're still in charge of the strategic and analytical parts while the clients handles the implementation which to me sounds like a win-win.
But I'm worried it'll be more time consuming that I would hope for with all the back-and-forth necessary, which would basically be as, if not more, time consuming than doing all the work yourself.
For those doing Done-with-You SEO, how do you structure it in practice?
Do you charge hourly, retainer, or coaching-style packages? And does it actually end up being more scalable/profitable than Done-for-You in your experience?
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1 Reply
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I personally love Done-with-You SEO!
As an example, I have a client who is an optometrist and also sells high-end glasses. I randomly got them as a client because – while I needed new prescription – the optometrist made conversation with me and asked what I do. Then talked about how he was dissatisfied with his current SEO agency, who is a Done-For-You agency. It turned into an amazing connection opportunity where we spent an hour looking at his store website together, talking about what SEO does, and cringing at what this agency is doing.
I said for the half the price, I’ll do SEO for you! The difference is I’m transparent about my processes. I’m giving him actual data and telling him exactly what I’m doing and why. And the best part is, he’s excited about it! And I get to help a local doctor! Sure, it may be an extra 30 minutes of my day to take time to manually type everything out for him to understand, but I see it as relationship-building. He’ll recommend me to other people and give me an excellent reference. And he gets to be the number-1 local optometrist on Google search when people needed to update their prescription, or new glasses.
Win-win for everyone!
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A mix of both – having clients who have an in house marketing team is often much more productive in terms of responsiveness, turnaround time, compliance procedures and so-on.
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I’ve seen SEOs use “done with you” as a downfall of the regular SEO campaign is considered too expensive
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How exactly are these differentiated? Like as a client, what would be the experience like?
Isn’t “done for you” similarly all for approval anyway, hence clients can increase/decrease involvement depending on how they want?
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Both. Done for you is most of our SEO business, clients don’t want to be bothered, they just want results.
Done with you is a small mix of agencies we white label for and larger businesses that have marketing departments who take a more a time role. For those clients we generally provide guidance via strategy they can implement. Specific content calendars, on site punch lists, etc. These are actually a lot easier since we don’t have to do the implementation but still make a pretty decent fee.
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To me, done with you seems like it’s harder to scale honestly. You can give them instructions but you have to create all that content to guide them to do it correctly, which could cause also some questions you have to answer.
We only offer done for you. Do you think they truly want done with you or is it maybe them looking to save?
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I do a mix of both depending on the client! Some have ongoing marketing and deep knowledge only they can use, while using us to be SEO experts that fill the gaps. Other clients want to buy peace of mind and time and only care about more leads!
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done-with-you sounds great on paper but the back-and-forth can absolutely kill your margins if you dont set hard boundaries upfront. the clients who want “collaboration” often end up being the ones pinging you on slack at 11pm asking why their rankings dropped 2 positions.
the way to make it actually scalable is to productize the hell out of it, fixed monthly deliverable like a strategy doc, a loom walkthrough, and one async Q&A round, thats it. you stop treating it like consulting and start treating it like a course with accountability. keeps scope creep from eating you alive.
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I’ve been in SEO for 14 years and I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone ask about done-with-you services. Then again, I’ve worked almost exclusively with million dollar+ SaaS companies.
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