How much does SEO cost in Australia?
What Australian businesses actually pay each month, what each budget buys in real hours of work, and how to tell whether a retainer will pay for itself before you commit to it.
The short answer
Most Australian small and medium businesses pay $1,000 to $3,500 a month for SEO. Below about $800 a month you are almost certainly buying a report rather than work, because the hours simply don’t exist at that price. Above $5,000 a month you should be a large multi-location business or in a genuinely brutal vertical.
What each budget realistically buys
| Monthly | What it buys | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Under $800 | 2–5 hours of actual work. Enough for basic Google Business Profile upkeep and not much else. Often an automated report and a couple of directory submissions. | Almost nobody. Do it yourself instead with our checklist. |
| $1,000 – $1,500 | A genuine local campaign: technical fixes, profile management, review generation, a couple of new pages a month, citations. | Single-location local service businesses |
| $2,000 – $3,500 | The above plus real content volume, link acquisition, conversion work, and multiple service or location targets. | Most established SMEs |
| $4,000 – $8,000 | Serious content production, digital PR, technical depth, multi-location management, dedicated strategist time. | Legal, medical, finance, franchises, ecommerce |
| $10,000+ | Enterprise. Teams of specialists, custom tooling, national or international scope. | Large brands |
The three pricing models
Monthly retainer is the standard and the right structure for most businesses, because SEO is ongoing work rather than a project with an end. Project pricing suits one-off jobs like a technical audit or a migration — expect $600–$3,000. Pay on results sounds attractive and almost always isn’t: the incentive is to target keywords that are easy to rank rather than keywords that make you money, and you can end up ranking first for something nobody searches.
Do the hourly maths
Australian SEO work costs roughly $120–$200 an hour to deliver properly. So a $1,200 retainer buys about six to ten hours of real work a month. That is enough for a focused local campaign. It is not enough to also write eight articles, build twenty links and rebuild your site architecture — and if an agency is promising all of that for $900, either they are not doing it or they are doing it badly with automation.
Ask any agency directly: how many hours a month does this retainer represent, and who is doing them? A straight answer tells you a lot.
When you should expect to see something
- Weeks 1–4: Technical fixes and, for local businesses, Google Business Profile work. Often the first movement in map results if the profile was neglected.
- Months 2–3: New pages start being indexed and ranking for longer, specific searches.
- Months 4–6: Meaningful movement on your main target keywords. Enquiry volume starts changing noticeably.
- Months 6–12: Compounding. This is where SEO becomes obviously cheaper than ads.
If someone promises page one in 30 days, they are either targeting keywords with no volume or planning something that will get you penalised. Both waste your money.
Working out whether it is worth it
Take your average customer value, your close rate on enquiries, and the retainer. If your average job is $2,500 and you close one in three enquiries, a $2,200 retainer needs to produce three extra enquiries a month to be roughly three times profitable. Whether SEO can produce three extra enquiries a month in your market is a question with an actual answer — search volume for your keywords is measurable. Ask to see it before you sign anything.
Red flags
- Guaranteed rankings. Google’s own guidelines say nobody can promise this.
- Lock-in contracts of 12 months or more. Ask why they need one.
- Reporting built around impressions and “keywords in the top 100”.
- No named person doing the work.
- Link packages sold by the hundred. These are the links Google is best at ignoring, and sometimes at penalising.
- Refusal to tell you which keywords they are targeting and why.
What we charge
$1,200 a month for a foundation campaign, $2,200 for the growth tier most clients land on, and from $3,500 for competitive verticals. No GST added. Month to month, cancel with 30 days’ notice, everything published stays yours. Full pricing here.
More questions
Is SEO better value than Google Ads?
They do different jobs. Ads deliver traffic today and stop the day you stop paying. SEO takes months and then keeps producing. In most Australian markets the cost per enquiry from SEO drops below ads somewhere between months six and twelve, and keeps falling after that.
Can I do SEO myself?
The local fundamentals, yes — and you should, whether or not you hire anyone. Our local SEO checklist covers what to do. Technical work, content at volume and link acquisition are where time becomes the limiting factor.
How long should I commit for?
Think in six-month blocks, because that's roughly when the picture becomes clear — but you should never be contractually forced to stay that long. Commit your intention, not your signature.
What happens to my rankings if I stop?
They don't collapse overnight. Rankings usually hold for a few months and then slowly erode as competitors keep publishing and you don't. The pages you paid for stay live and keep working.
Want to know why you’re not ranking?
Send us your website. We’ll come back within two business days with a plain-English audit: what’s holding you back, what your competitors are doing, and what we’d fix first. No charge, no obligation.