Stop 4 of 9 · Weekly
The retainer machine
One client list drives three loops: the monthly site checks, the Search Console digest and the content update queue, all landing on the board as tickets.
Sixty jobs a month
Every retainer client buys the same three things: somebody watches the site, somebody reads their Search Console, and somebody makes the small changes they ask for. Twenty clients, three jobs, sixty pieces of work a month, none of them hard and all of them easy to drop in a busy week.
Dany does not build sixty routines. She builds one list and three loops.
One list
clients.csv is the studio's configuration, kept in the studio Project and in the repository. One row per client: slug, platform, repository or Wix site, Search Console property, retainer tier, the day of the month their report goes out, and the name of the person who signs off. Onboarding a client is a row. Changing a check is one edit, not twenty.
Nothing in that file is a credential. The row names the system, the password manager holds the way in.
Three loops
| The loop | What it produces |
|---|---|
| Monthly site checks | One ticket per problem, with client slug and page |
| Monthly Search Console digest | Three numbers and three fixes per client, as a draft |
| Content update queue | One ticket per request, marked in scope or change request |
For every client in clients.csv, check the live site: does it load over https, is the certificate more than 14 days from expiry, does the contact page load, does the phone number match the row, does the form page return a form, and is there any page returning an error from the sitemap. Write one ticket per problem to the board, titled with the client slug and the page, with what is wrong and what a visitor loses. List separately any client where a check could not run and why. Change nothing on any site.
[attach this month's Search Console export for peak-roofing, by page and by query] Peak Roofing, a roofing company on our mid retainer. Give me three numbers I can put in their report: clicks against last month, the page that gained the most impressions, and the page with the most impressions and the worst click rate. Then three fixes I can do inside four hours, each naming the page and what changes. No ranking promises, and say which figures came from rows in the export and which are your estimate.
[paste the client email] This is Aria Dance Studio, on our basic retainer, which covers text and image changes to existing pages and no new pages or features. Turn this into one ticket per change: the page, the exact old text and new text, an estimate in fifteen-minute units, and a mark saying in scope or change request. For anything you cannot place on a page, write the question I need to ask them.
The batch, delegated
The monthly checks across twenty sites are a batch job, not a conversation. Hand it to Cowork as a task with the client list attached, let it work through the sites, and read what it filed rather than watching it. Dany reads the exception list first, because the sites a check could not reach are more interesting than the ones that passed.
The measurable
Two numbers per month: hours the studio spent per retainer client, and how many of the twenty had a month where nobody had to open the site by hand. The first should fall, the second should climb, and any client where both go the wrong way is a retainer priced wrong.