Content is the retainer you keep turning down because the maths never worked. At $99/mo per project for 30 articles, it works. Multi-project workspaces, Admin/Editor/Viewer roles, no contract.
Free 3-day trial · Cancel before it ends and you won’t be charged · Content on your site stays yours
Used by operators who need publishing volume, not another dashboard
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SEO for web design agencies has two halves that get confused with each other. One is your own pipeline: ranking for the searches businesses run when they need a site built, and having a blog on your own domain that is not eight months stale. The other is the thing your clients ask for at the end of every launch call — who writes the content once this is live — where the honest answer has usually been nobody, because the economics of subcontracting writing at agency margin do not work.
The second half is the interesting one, because it is a pure cost problem. A white-label content vendor charges $150–$400 an article. At four articles a month that is $600–$1,600 of cost against a retainer a small business will pay maybe $1,000 for, before your PM spends any time on it. That is why the content line item keeps getting quoted and then quietly dropped. Change the input cost and a service you cannot sell today becomes one you can.
Two surfaces, not one. The map — your Google Business Profile, which decides whether you appear in the local pack — and the blue links, where your website pages answer the questions people type before they buy.
Google rewards pages that have been live and useful for months, and listings that stay active. That is why cadence beats intensity: publishing steadily for a year outperforms a burst of work every quarter.
The build went well. Custom design, clean Webflow, Lighthouse in the nineties, the client cried a little on the handover call. Six months later you look at it for a portfolio screenshot and the blog has two posts, both from launch week, and the case study you wanted to write is a site nobody visits.
The part that actually bothers you is that you knew this would happen and you had no answer. They asked who would write it. You said you could recommend someone, or quote a retainer, and then you did the maths on subcontracting at $300 an article and realised you would be running a content desk for a few hundred dollars of margin and all of the blame.
So it becomes a project business forever. Every January starts at zero, revenue is whoever signed a build that quarter, and the recurring line that would make the agency worth something on a balance sheet keeps not existing. Meanwhile your own site — the one you would judge a client for — has a blog with three posts from 2023.
And the client who churned to a competitor last spring did it because that agency answered "yes" to the content question.
One subscription covers the work an agency splits across a writer, a local specialist, and a social manager.
30 articles a month per project, researched, scored, and published straight into the client site you already built. Webflow, WordPress, Ghost and more, or your own stack through the publishing API.
15 planned posts a month on a client’s Google Business Profile — roughly every two days — a reply drafted for every review, and a 0–100 profile audit, from $49/mo with no website required.
The cobbler’s-children problem, solved cheaply. LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook at $49/mo for your own agency, planned and scheduled in your voice.
These are the shapes of query theStacc builds your content and Google posts around — matched to the services you actually offer and the areas you actually cover.
theStacc does not sell search-volume or keyword-difficulty numbers — we don’t license a keyword database. Keywords are generated from your business and filtered for whether you can realistically win them.
One project per client site, or start with your own. Connect the CMS you already build on, or publish through the API.
theStacc drafts their services, audience, areas, and tone from the site you built. Your team corrects it once before anything is written.
A 30-day article calendar per project, plus 15 planned Google post titles on Local SEO. Edit or regenerate anything before it is drafted.
Draft-for-approval routes everything to your editor with a 0–100 score attached. Or switch a mature project to autopilot. Set it per module, per project.
Weekly Maps, Local Pack, and organic rank history per keyword, plus index checks at days 2, 7, 14, and 28 per article.
Every module runs in one of three modes: full autopilot, draft-for-approval, or manual. You pick per module, and you can change it any time.
Not a strategy document. Actual published work — here is the shape of it.
Articles on your site Blog SEO
Titles are examples of the shape theStacc produces from your business — your real plan is generated from your own services and areas.
Posts on your Google profile Local SEO
A redesign that does not touch your URLs, your page titles, or your internal links is a paint job. The rankings you have today live in those three places, and most traffic drops after a launch trace back to one of them being changed without a redirect. Ask whoever is quoting your rebuild how they plan to handle it before you sign.
SEO compounds, so anyone promising rankings in week two is guessing. Here is the honest sequence.
Connect your Google listing and, if you have one, your site. theStacc analyses the business, drafts your services and voice, and generates the first month’s plan. You approve it.
Posts begin landing on your profile every couple of days and articles publish on schedule. Reviews get replies. Your first weekly rank snapshot is recorded as the baseline.
Index checks run at days 2, 7, 14 and 28 per article, so you can see what Google took and what it ignored. Early ranking movement usually appears on long-tail terms first.
With Search Console connected, your real queries start feeding next month’s plan — the system writes toward terms you already almost rank for instead of guessing.
We do not guarantee rankings or lead volume, and we would be suspicious of anyone who does. What is guaranteed is the output cadence.
White-label content vendors commonly charge agencies $150–$400 an article, and agencies that market other agencies quote $1,000–$3,000 a month. Here is the honest comparison, including what theStacc does not do.
| Do it yourself | Hire an agency | theStacc | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per client site | Your PM’s week | $600–$1,600/mo subcontracted | $99/mo per project |
| Articles a month | 1–2 when there is slack | 4 typical at that price | 30 per project |
| Turnaround | Whenever a build ends | 1–3 weeks per piece | Scheduled across the month, no queue |
| Team access | One person’s logins | Email threads | Admin, Editor, Viewer roles |
| Multiple clients | Spreadsheet of chaos | Separate invoices per client | One project per client site |
| White-label / reseller | — | Usually yes | No. We did not build it. |
| Contract | — | 3–12 months typical | Month to month |
Our published case studies are in solar and B2B software, backed by real Search Console exports rather than mockups, and two accounts is not a pattern — we will not dress it up as one. We have not run an agency account long enough to show you an agency number, and you evaluate marketing claims for a living, so a fabricated one would be insulting as well as useless. The proof we can offer is the site you are on: theStacc plans, writes, and publishes thestacc.com’s own blog from a domain that started at zero. Read it, then run the free 3-day trial against your own agency site before you point it at a client.
What actually moves the needle for web design agencies
Related industry guides: SEO for consulting , SEO for digital marketing agencies , SEO for e-commerce brands , SEO for it services , SEO for printing & sign shops .
No contract, no setup fee, no per-location surprise. Cancel and everything already published on your site stays yours.
15 planned posts a month — about every two days, review replies published to Google, weekly rank tracking, 0–100 profile audit. No website needed.
See Local SEO →30 SEO articles a month, researched, scored, and published to your site. WordPress, Webflow, Ghost and more.
See Blog SEO →Blog, Local SEO, and Social together — the full bundle at 15% off the separate prices.
See full pricing →Free 3-day trial · Cancel before it ends and you won’t be charged · Content on your site stays yours
Everything above is the software — you approve the work, or let it run. If you’d rather not think about marketing again, the same engine comes with people attached.
A dedicated SEO manager owns the strategy, quality-checks what the engine produces, and reports back every month. You get the output — articles live, Google posts published, reviews answered — without opening the app. Most web design agencies who choose this are busy running the business, not learning software.
No, and we would rather lose the deal than fudge it. There are no custom client domains, no removal of theStacc branding as a marketed capability, and no reseller billing where you invoice your client through us. What exists is real and useful but different: separate projects per client site, and Admin, Editor, and Viewer roles so your team works one account without sharing a login. Plenty of agencies run it as a disclosed tool in their stack the same way they disclose a hosting provider. If your model requires the client to never know, we are not the vendor for you.
Tell them what Google’s guidance actually says: the target is unhelpful content produced at scale, not the tool used to produce it. Then show them the mechanisms, because that is what a nervous client wants. Every draft is scored 0–100 across 10 SEO categories before it exists as a URL. Honesty gates are enforced in code, not prompts — it cannot invent a statistic, a customer count, a price, or a promotion. A 60-day keyword cooldown prevents the near-duplicate pattern the scaled-abuse policy actually describes. And in draft-for-approval nothing publishes until a human on your side approves it. For a cautious client, run approval mode indefinitely and put your editor’s name on it.
Blog SEO is $99/mo for 30 articles, per project. Local SEO is $49/mo per profile. Social is $49/mo, and all three together are $167/mo. So a client site with content and Google Business Profile work is $148/mo of cost to you. What you charge on top of that is your business and none of ours — we do not set a floor, take a cut, or restrict resale of the service you deliver. What you cannot do is present the software itself as your own product, because there is no white-label layer to do it with.
Only if you make genuine in-person contact with clients — a studio clients visit, a staffed address, or on-site client work. A fully remote agency with no physical customer contact is not eligible under Google’s guidance, and setting one up anyway risks a suspension we cannot get you out of. If you are not eligible, skip Local SEO for your own agency entirely and use it only for the clients who are eligible, which for a web shop is usually most of them.
Voice is per project and learned from your edits, not from one upfront prompt. Every correction your editor makes is distilled weekly into standing style rules for that specific account, so a plumbing client and a law firm client diverge over the first few weeks rather than converging on one house style. Expect real editing in the first fortnight — that is the training signal — and much less after.
Published work and real numbers. Articles live on their site with index checks at days 2, 7, 14, and 28, so you can show what Google took rather than what you submitted. Weekly rank history per keyword across Maps, Local Pack, and organic. On Local SEO, posts published and reviews replied to. What we do not give you is a branded PDF generator or search volume and difficulty numbers, because we license no keyword database and will not print figures we cannot source.
It stays on their site and it is theirs — published articles are not licensed, hosted elsewhere, or revocable, so there is nothing to claw back and no awkward conversation at handover. On cancellation you keep access until the end of the period you paid for. Given it is month to month, the sane way to start is one project on your own agency site for a month, judged on output, before you put a client’s domain behind it.
An agency with no recurring line is worth roughly what it billed last quarter, and it feels that way to run — the pipeline anxiety never ends because there is no floor underneath it. Content retainers are the most natural floor for a web shop, because you already have the client, the CMS access, and the trust, and the only thing that ever blocked it was input cost. Every quarter you keep saying no to that question, a competitor who says yes takes the account after the warranty period ends.
Start the free 3-day trial and watch the first posts and articles get made for your business. Cancel before it ends and you won’t be charged.
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