DeskSEO for freelancers and agencies: many domains, plans and prepaid balance

Freelancers and small agencies have a particular problem: they are responsible for sites they do not control day to day. A client's developer pushes a release, a plugin updates itself, the hosting company migrates servers, and the first sign of trouble is the client asking why enquiries dropped. DeskSEO is designed to give one person a reliable view across many client sites: scheduled technical checks, alerts, Search Console data and AI visibility, in one account paid from one balance.

Choosing a plan

Plan	Domains	Checks	On-demand checks per day	Search Console
Free	1	Weekly	3	Last 28 days, top 50 queries
Starter	3	Daily	20	Up to 16 months, 1,000 queries and pages
Pro	10	Daily	50	Same as Starter
Agency	30	Daily	150	Same as Starter

Current prices are on the pricing page; a year costs the same as ten months. A freelancer with five to eight retainer clients usually fits Pro. A small agency with a few dozen client sites fits Agency, and the on-demand allowance leaves room for checking prospects' sites during sales conversations, which you can also do with the free SEO checker without using any allowance.

Setting up client sites

1. Add each client domain under Your sites. Domains are tracked without www and paths, and each is checked immediately.
2. Record a baseline. The first check is a dated record of the site's technical state when you took it on, useful for the conversation in three months' time. The onboarding guide lists the other baselines to record.
3. Verify the sites where you will connect Search Console, using the meta tag or a TXT record on each domain.
4. Connect Search Console by having each property's owner (usually the client) add DeskSEO's service account as a Restricted user; see connecting Search Console.

Alerts across many sites

Alerts go to your account email after each scheduled check when a site's score drops by five points or more, a new critical issue or warning appears, or the home page cannot be reached. The overview of your sites shows each site's latest score, its issue counts, when it was last and next checked, the number of alerts in the last 30 days, and whether Search Console is connected. Every number links to the detail behind it.

For agencies, two practices make alerts work:

• Use a shared inbox (for example, a monitoring address that several people read) as the account email, or forward alerts into the channel your team already watches.
• Agree a response rule per client: who looks at an alert, within what time, and when the client's developer is contacted. A clear rule turns an alert into a ten-minute fix rather than a week of lost traffic. The monitoring guide explains what each alert means.

Using DeskSEO in client reporting

Each month, a few things from DeskSEO fit naturally into a client report:

• Technical health in one line: the current score and band, any issues found and fixed, and the trend over the month.
• Search performance: clicks and impressions from the connected Search Console data, and day-by-day positions for the client's priority queries.
• AI visibility, where the client cares about it: the mention rate for a fixed question set, measured the same way each time.

The client reporting guide describes a structure that clients actually read; DeskSEO supplies the numbers, and your judgement supplies the story.

AI visibility runs for clients

Runs are paid per question from your balance, so you can run them for the clients who value them and pass the cost on. Build a stable question set per client with the method in choosing questions, keep it in the client's file, and run it monthly or quarterly. The measured model answers from its training rather than a live web search, so present results as a long-term trend, not a reaction to last month's work.

How the balance works

• One prepaid balance in US dollars, topped up with PayPal from $10 to $1,000 at a time.
• Listed prices exclude VAT. VAT is added when you top up; for example, a $50 top-up is charged as $50 plus VAT.
• Invoices are issued at top-up, for the exact amount paid. Buying a plan or an AI run from the balance is not invoiced again, which keeps your accounting to one invoice per top-up.
• Refunds go back to the balance, for example when an AI run fails completely. Top-ups cannot be withdrawn as cash or bank transfer.
• The balance does not expire, so unused credit carries over.
• Plans extend, switches keep your days: buying the same plan while it is active extends it from its current end date. Switching to a different plan starts the new one today, and the unused days of the old plan are valued at the price you paid and converted into extra days of the new plan, shown on the payment page before you pay. Nothing is refunded in cash.

The wallet page lists every top-up and a ledger of every payment and refund, with running balance, which makes it straightforward to reconcile client charges at month end. Many agencies top up once a quarter with an amount that covers the plan and expected AI runs, then pass the relevant share of costs to each client in their regular invoice.

Prospecting with the free checkers

The public checkers need no account and no allowance, which makes them useful in sales. Before a first call with a prospect, run the SEO checker on their home page and one key page, and the AI bot checker on their domain. The result gives you a neutral, specific starting point: "Your www and non-www versions both load, so search engines see two copies of the site; here is the one-line fix." Prospects respond better to one concrete, verifiable problem than to a generic audit offer, and the public scoring method on How scoring works means nobody has to take your word for the score.

A week in practice

A hypothetical two-person agency looks after 22 client sites on the Agency plan. On Tuesday morning the shared inbox has two alerts. One client's score fell by eight points overnight: the check shows a new noindex on the home page after the client's developer deployed a theme update. The agency emails the developer with the exact finding and a link to the check; the fix is live by lunchtime and confirmed with Check now. The other alert is a home page that could not be reached at check time; the next check, a day later, shows it reachable again, and the hosting status page confirms a brief outage. On Thursday, the agency pulls day-by-day positions for each client's priority queries into their monthly reports. On Friday, they run AI visibility question sets for the three clients who pay for it. Total time spent in DeskSEO for the week: under two hours, most of it on the noindex incident, which would otherwise have been discovered weeks later.

What DeskSEO is not

To set expectations with your team: DeskSEO monitors technical health at the domain and home-page level with a sample of internal links, reads your own Search Console data, and measures AI mentions. It is not a full-site crawler, a backlink database or a third-party rank tracker. Agencies typically pair it with a crawler for audits and their preferred link tool; the audit checklist shows where each fits.

A setup checklist for agencies

1. Choose the plan that covers your client domains, with some headroom for new clients.
2. Use a shared monitoring inbox as the account email, or forward alerts.
3. Add every client domain and save the first check as a baseline.
4. Verify domains and ask clients to add the service account in Search Console.
5. Agree a response rule for alerts with each client.
6. Build an AI question set for clients who want AI visibility tracked.
7. Add DeskSEO numbers to the monthly report template, and review the plan size each quarter as clients come and go.