In short: freelance SEO consultants sell expertise but spend too much of the month on tool-hopping, copy-and-paste and report formatting. This page lays out how a freelancer can use RankThat as their SEO tool across a handful of retainer clients: winning the work, the first week with a new client, a monthly routine with a realistic hour budget, reports under your own name, what it costs per client, and the limits worth knowing before you commit.
Winning the client
Start with something you can show. Before a first call, run the prospect’s homepage and one service page through the free Website SEO Checker. It grades a page on 20 checks with a plain-English fix for each one, and it needs no account. Add the AI crawler checker if the prospect asks about ChatGPT: finding a robots.txt rule that blocks AI search bots is a concrete, easily understood finding.
On the call, talk about two or three specific problems, what they cost the business and what you’d do first. Avoid promising rankings or dates. Owners hear those promises from every cold email they get; a clear diagnosis is what sets you apart.
Once they sign, run a full site audit. The free checker looks at one page; the Site Audit crawls the whole site with 100+ checks and finds what only shows up across pages: duplicate titles, broken internal links, orphan pages, redirect chains. That’s your scope for the first month.
The first week with a new client
- Add the site as a project and connect the client’s Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4. Ask the client to add you as a user in both; it takes them two minutes and saves you their passwords.
- Install the free Bridge plugin if the site runs on WordPress. With the client’s permission, of course: it lets RankThat apply the fixes you approve, and it counts enquiries (form submissions and taps on phone, email and WhatsApp links) so your reports can show leads, not just traffic.
- Agree the keywords. Twenty to fifty to start, chosen with the client, tracked in the Rank Tracker in the right location on mobile and desktop. Getting the client to agree the list up front means nobody argues about it in month three.
- Add their competitors so you get alerts when they publish, change or remove pages.
- Fix the emergencies from the audit: a stray noindex, a site-wide robots.txt block, a missing SSL redirect. Everything else goes into the month-one plan.
- Invite the client to the portal if they want to look in. The client portal is read-only and shows only their own site.
Your month, and the hours it takes
Here’s a suggested time budget for one small-business retainer, with the part RankThat handles. Your numbers will vary with the client; the point is to know where the hours go before you price the work.
| Task | Suggested time | What RankThat does | What you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical fixes | 1 to 2 hours | Finds issues, drafts fixes, applies them on WordPress with undo, re-checks the live page | Review and approve; handle anything that needs a developer |
| Rankings and opportunities | 30 minutes | Tracks positions, flags pages close to page one and keyword cannibalization | Decide what to work on next |
| Content | 2 to 4 hours | Topic ideas, a brief, a draft in the client’s brand voice, publishing to WordPress | Edit the draft, add the client’s real details and expertise |
| Competitor and AI checks | 30 minutes | Competitor alerts; whether AI assistants mention the client (Professional) | Spot threats and openings |
| Monthly report | 20 to 30 minutes | Drafts it in plain English at the start of the month | Edit the commentary, approve, send |
The report line is where most freelancers win back time. A report that used to take half a day of exports and screenshots becomes a read-through and a few edits.
Week by week
- Week 1: review and send last month’s report. Note what you’ll focus on.
- Week 2: work through the audit fixes in batches by type: all titles in one review, all redirects in another.
- Week 3: content. One well-edited page or post per client per month beats four thin ones.
- Week 4: check rankings, alerts and opportunities, and plan next month.
If a client emails with a question mid-month (“why did our traffic dip last week?”), the Claude connector helps you answer fast. Connect Claude to RankThat and ask about any site in plain English: it reads the audits, rankings, Search Console data and reports, and can draft fixes for you to review.
Send the report on the same day every month. Clients judge reliability by the things they can see, and a report that arrives on the 3rd every month does more for retention than an extra chart.
Reports under your name
Reports are white-label, carrying your business name and logo, so the client sees your work, not ours. They’re written around what owners care about: enquiries and calls, clicks from Google, rankings that moved, and the work you completed. Comparisons are fair by design (per day, month on month and year on year), so a short month or a seasonal dip doesn’t look like failure.
Nothing is ever sent automatically. Every monthly report waits for you to review, edit and approve it. That’s deliberate: your name is on it.
The first report deserves extra care, because rankings rarely move much in month one. Lead with the baseline instead: the issues the audit found, the fixes you applied and confirmed live, the keywords you’re tracking and where each one starts. Set that expectation on the kickoff call, and the first report reads as progress rather than a shrug.
Pricing fit
| Your situation | Plan | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Your own site, or one client to start | Starter | $50 a month: 1 site, 100 keywords, 10 mini audits a month, 5 AI articles |
| Two to five retainer clients | Professional | $99 a month: 5 sites, 1,000 keywords per site, 50 audits a month including full site audits, 25 AI articles, AI visibility and local SEO tracking 4 times a month, Search Console, 3 team members per site |
| More than five clients | Enterprise | $199 a month: unlimited sites, keywords, audits, articles and team members |
With five clients on Professional, your tool cost is about $20 per client per month. Paying yearly costs 10 months’ price ($990 for Professional). Every plan has a 14-day free trial: you enter a card at sign-up and aren’t charged until the trial ends, so you can set up your first client properly before paying anything. Full details are on the pricing page.
When you pass five clients, you’re running a small agency. Our page for agencies covers team roles and running many sites at once.
Working with subcontractors
Many freelancers bring in a writer or a developer for some clients. Professional allows 3 team members per site. Give a writer Editor access to the sites they write for, and nothing else. Your clients stay on the read-only Client role.
Honest limits
- Automatic fixes are WordPress only. For Wix, Squarespace or Shopify clients you still get the audit, rankings and reports, but you make the changes yourself. There are no apps for those platforms.
- Professional stops at five sites. The sixth client means Enterprise.
- No ads or PPC tools. If you also manage Google Ads, keep your ads reporting separate.
- No public API for building your own dashboards.
- Some sites block crawlers. RankThatBot identifies itself honestly and never gets around bot protection. If a client’s firewall blocks it, they can allowlist it; on WordPress, the Bridge plugin can pull fixes from behind a firewall.
- AI drafts need your edit. Articles are drafted in the client’s brand voice, but the details only the client knows (prices, guarantees, real examples) are what make a page worth ranking. Budget the time.
Freelancer checklist
- Free checker run on each prospect’s key pages before the first call
- Full site audit run the week a client signs
- Search Console and GA4 access granted by the client
- Bridge plugin installed on WordPress clients, with their permission
- Keyword list agreed with the client in writing
- Competitors added for alerts
- Your logo and business name set on reports
- A fixed day each month for reviewing and sending reports
- One piece of edited content per client per month
- Subcontractors given Editor access to their sites only
For a manual walk-through you can share with clients who want to understand the process, see our guide on how to do an SEO audit. For the fixing side in detail, see how the WordPress plugin works.