How much does SEO cost in Australia?

What SEO agencies charge

Most SEO is sold as a monthly retainer. These are the prices Australian SEO providers publish on their own websites, checked on 27 October 2026. Many other agencies only quote after a call, so published prices are a sample, not the whole market.

Prices change, and what each package includes varies a lot, so compare what is done each month, not only the price. iOnline also lists a basic SEO audit from $1,500 and Google Business Profile management at $395 a month per location.

What the monthly fee usually pays for

• Technical fixes to the website: speed, page titles, structured data, broken links, how Google crawls the site.
• Content: new pages and blog posts aimed at the searches your customers make.
• Local SEO: your Google Business Profile, directory listings and suburb or location pages.
• Links: getting other websites to link to yours.
• Reporting: rankings, traffic and, ideally, enquiries.

For a business competing nationally, or in a crowded city market, that ongoing work can be worth paying for. For a local tradie or shop, much of it is one-off: once the site is fast, every service and suburb has a page and the Google profile is complete, the monthly work that is left is smaller.

What Google says about hiring an SEO

Google publishes its own advice for business owners. Three points stand out. First: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Second: "If you run a small local business, you can probably do much of the work yourself." Third: "Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results."

It suggests asking any SEO, among other questions:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Search Essentials?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What's your experience in my industry, and in my city?
• Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and the reasoning behind them?

Google also warns to be wary of SEO firms that email you out of the blue, and suggests giving an SEO only read access to your Search Console at first.

Before you sign an SEO contract

• Check the term and the exit. Some packages have minimum terms or recommend a year. Find out what happens if you stop early, including whether work done in advance has to be paid for.
• Watch for automatic rollover. The Victorian Small Business Commission names automatic rollover as an unfair term it has seen, and asks small business owners to read the fine print before signing.
• Know your protection. Under the Australian Consumer Law, a small business (100 or fewer employees, or under $10 million turnover) is protected from unfair terms in standard form contracts made or renewed from 9 November 2023, and a court can cancel an unfair term.
• Ask how success is measured. Rankings alone don't pay the bills. Ask whether they report the enquiries the work brings in.

The alternative: SEO built into the website

A lot of what small businesses pay an SEO retainer for is fixing a website that wasn't built for search in the first place. Ours are. Every plan includes the technical basics, Google Search Console, and a page for each service and each suburb you serve. Win Local adds local SEO content, Google Business Profile setup and a monthly enquiry report, and Grow Online adds a blog post written for you every month.

Get Online is $20 a month, Win Local $50 and Grow Online $80, all with no GST charged, including the website, hosting and updates. There's no setup fee and no lock-in. We don't do link building or run ads, and like Google says, we can't promise first place. If you later want an agency for a hard-fought market, they start from a site that is already built properly.