TL;DR — SEO Pricing in Melbourne
$800–$2,000/month: Local SEO for single-location businesses in low to moderate competition.
$2,000–$5,000/month: Growth campaigns for competitive industries. Where most Melbourne businesses see real traction.
$5,000–$10,000+/month: Enterprise, large eCommerce, or highly competitive sectors (legal, medical, finance).
Hourly consulting: $150–$300/hr for audits, strategy sessions, or in-house team training.
Our approach: No fixed packages. Every engagement custom-scoped after a free audit. Senior consultant direct — no juniors, no account managers.
What Does SEO Cost in Melbourne?
The honest answer: it depends. SEO pricing in Melbourne ranges from $1,000 to $10,000+ per month depending on your industry, competition, and what needs to happen to your site. That range is wide because the work required for a single-location mechanic in Moorabbin is fundamentally different from an eCommerce store with 5,000 products competing nationally.
Most Melbourne businesses investing seriously in organic search spend between $2,000 and $5,000 per month. Below $1,000 you're unlikely to get meaningful results against real competition. Above $5,000 you're typically looking at enterprise-scale sites, national campaigns, or highly competitive industries like legal, medical, or financial services.
We don't publish fixed SEO packages because they force businesses into boxes that don't match their situation. Instead, we scope every engagement individually based on an audit of your site, your competitive landscape, and what it will actually take to move the needle.
Why We Don't Sell SEO Packages
Here's the problem with packaged SEO pricing. A "Silver Package" at $999/month assumes every business at that budget needs the same thing. But a brand-new website needs completely different work than an established site with 500 indexed pages and a legacy backlink profile. A local plumber needs different keyword targeting than a B2B SaaS company. A site with serious technical debt needs months of cleanup before content strategy even makes sense.
Cookie-cutter SEO packages exist because they're easy to sell, not because they're effective. When an agency sells the same deliverables to every client — "5 blog posts, 10 backlinks, monthly report" — they're optimising for their own efficiency, not your results.
Our approach: we audit your site for free, identify what's actually holding you back, and scope the engagement around what will generate the highest return for your specific situation. Some clients need heavy technical SEO for 3 months before we touch content. Others have solid sites that just need strategic content and authority building. The price reflects the work required, not an arbitrary tier.
What Affects the Cost of SEO in Melbourne
Industry competition. A dentist in South Yarra competes against 200 other dental practices all targeting the same keywords. A fire protection company in Melbourne has maybe 15 serious competitors. The more competitive your industry, the more hours required each month to build and maintain rankings.
Current state of your website. Sites with clean technical foundations, existing content, and some domain authority need less upfront work. Sites with thousands of crawl errors, duplicate content issues, poor mobile experience, and no schema markup need significant investment before the growth phase even begins.
Geographic scope. Targeting one suburb requires less investment than targeting all of metropolitan Melbourne. Targeting Melbourne requires less than targeting nationally. Local SEO campaigns are typically lighter on content and link building than broader campaigns.
Content requirements. Some industries demand constant fresh content — legal, medical, and finance sectors need regular updates to maintain authority and compliance. Others can build a strong content foundation once and maintain it with periodic updates. If you need us to write the content, it costs more than if your team produces drafts that we optimise.
Link building and digital PR. In competitive niches, earning quality backlinks is the most time-intensive part of SEO. If your competitors have strong backlink profiles, you'll need investment in outreach, digital PR, or content marketing to close the authority gap.
SEO Investment Estimator
Answer four questions to get a ballpark investment range. This isn't a quote — it's a starting point for conversation.
What You Get at Each Price Point
$1,000–$2,000/month: Foundations
At this level, expect a focused local SEO campaign: Google Business Profile optimisation, core technical fixes, on-page optimisation for your most important pages, and basic local citation work. This suits small businesses in low to moderate competition — tradies, single-location service businesses, and niche retailers targeting a handful of suburbs. You won't get extensive content creation or aggressive link building at this budget, but you will get a professionally managed campaign that builds real momentum.
$2,000–$5,000/month: Growth
This is where most Melbourne businesses see serious traction. The budget supports comprehensive technical SEO, ongoing content strategy, targeted link acquisition, and monthly reporting tied to real business metrics — not vanity numbers. You get a senior SEO consultant managing your campaign directly, content briefs or full content production, and proactive strategy adjustments based on what the data shows each month. For most competitive Melbourne industries, this is the sweet spot between investment and return.
$5,000–$10,000+/month: Authority
Reserved for enterprise sites, large eCommerce stores, multi-location businesses, and industries where the competition is fierce and the revenue per customer justifies aggressive investment. At this level, you get everything in the growth tier plus large-scale content production, digital PR campaigns, advanced technical SEO across complex site architectures, AI search optimisation, and strategic consultation at a senior level. The work compounds significantly — businesses investing at this level for 12+ months typically see the strongest and most durable results.
What SEO Costs by Industry in Melbourne
Every industry is different. Here's what real Melbourne campaigns typically look like based on our experience across 30+ industries:
Dental Practice — South Yarra
$3,000–$5,000/month
Why this range: Dental is one of Melbourne's most competitive local SEO markets. Every suburb has 5–15 practices fighting for the same keywords. The campaign needs strong local SEO (Google Business Profile, reviews strategy, suburb-targeted pages), ongoing content addressing patient queries, technical optimisation, and consistent link building to maintain position. High patient lifetime value ($3,000–$8,000+) means the ROI justifies the investment.
Plumbing Company — Eastern Suburbs
$1,500–$2,500/month
Why this range: Trade businesses benefit hugely from local SEO because customers search when they need someone now. The campaign focuses on Google Business Profile dominance, suburb-specific landing pages, review generation, and basic technical health. Competition is moderate — most plumbing competitors have weak websites. A plumber ranking in the map pack for 5 suburbs can generate 30–50 calls per month from organic search alone.
eCommerce Store — 500+ Products, National
$5,000–$8,000/month
Why this range: eCommerce SEO is complex — product schema, faceted navigation, category architecture, internal linking at scale, and competing against marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. The campaign includes technical SEO across hundreds of pages, product and category content optimisation, digital PR for authority, and conversion rate improvements. Average order values and volume make the maths work — even a 20% organic traffic increase on a $50K/month store pays for the campaign many times over.
Law Firm — Melbourne CBD, Family Law
$4,000–$7,000/month
Why this range: Legal SEO in Melbourne is extremely competitive — established firms with 15+ years of domain authority dominate the results. Winning requires authoritative content (practice area guides, case outcome summaries), strong E-E-A-T signals (lawyer bios, credentials, publications), digital PR, and aggressive technical optimisation. Client lifetime values of $10,000–$50,000+ make even expensive SEO campaigns highly profitable when they convert.
Accounting Firm — Inner Melbourne
$2,000–$3,500/month
Why this range: Professional services sit in moderate competition. Most accounting firms have outdated websites and minimal content, creating opportunities for well-optimised sites to climb quickly. The campaign focuses on service page optimisation, targeted content (tax guides, business advice articles), local SEO for the office area, and building topical authority. Client retention in accounting is high, so each new client acquired through SEO delivers years of recurring revenue.
These are indicative ranges based on typical Melbourne campaigns. Your actual scope will be confirmed during the free audit — the factors above (competition, site condition, geographic scope, content needs) all influence the final number.
SEO Pricing Models: Retainers, Projects, and Consulting
Monthly retainers ($1,000–$10,000+/month) are the standard for ongoing SEO campaigns. This is how most of our engagements work — a consistent monthly investment that covers technical SEO, content, link building, and strategic oversight. SEO compounds over time, so retainer models deliver the strongest long-term results.
Project-based pricing ($2,000–$10,000) suits one-off deliverables: comprehensive site audits, platform migrations, content audits, or technical remediation projects. If you need a specific problem solved without committing to ongoing SEO, a scoped project can make sense. We frequently run migration support for businesses moving between platforms — WordPress to Shopify, Magento to headless — where getting the SEO right during the transition is critical.
Hourly consulting ($150–$300/hour) works for businesses with in-house teams that need senior-level guidance without a full campaign. Strategy sessions, training, second opinions on existing agency work, or technical audits where you just need expert eyes on a specific problem. Our consulting rate reflects 20+ years of hands-on experience.
How Our Pricing Compares
Melbourne SEO agencies typically charge between $800 and $7,000 per month. The wide range reflects massive differences in what you actually get. At the low end, you're usually assigned to a junior account manager handling 30+ clients simultaneously. At the high end, you get direct access to senior strategists with decades of experience.
Our pricing sits in the mid to upper range because you work directly with a consultant who has over 20 years of experience — no account managers, no juniors learning on your budget. We also take only one client per industry in Melbourne, which means your success directly protects our reputation. That exclusivity is part of the value.
For context, our detailed guide to SEO costs in Melbourne breaks down exactly what the market looks like across different provider types and experience levels.
SEO Pricing vs Google Ads Costs
Melbourne businesses routinely pay $5 to $50+ per click on Google Ads depending on the industry. A personal injury lawyer can pay $80+ per click. A plumber pays $15 to $25. That spend stops the moment you turn off the campaign.
SEO costs more upfront and takes longer to deliver results — typically 3 to 6 months for visible improvement. But the traffic it generates is ongoing and doesn't carry a per-click cost. After 12 months of consistent SEO investment, the cost per lead from organic search is almost always lower than paid ads, and the leads keep coming even if you pause the campaign for a month.
Most of our clients run both. Google Ads for immediate visibility while SEO builds the long-term asset. Over time, the SEO traffic overtakes paid, and the ad budget can be reduced or redirected.
SEO Pricing in 2026: The AI Search Factor
SEO pricing has evolved because the work has expanded. In 2026, ranking on Google is only part of the equation. Your business also needs to appear in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. That requires structured content, strong entity signals, schema markup, and the kind of authoritative backlink profile that AI models rely on when selecting sources to cite.
We build AI search optimisation into every campaign — not as an upsell, but as a core part of how modern SEO works. The fundamentals haven't changed (technical health, quality content, authority), but the outputs have. If your SEO provider isn't tracking AI visibility alongside traditional rankings, you're paying for half a service.
Red Flags in SEO Pricing
If you're comparing SEO packages in Melbourne, watch for these warning signs:
Guaranteed rankings. No agency can guarantee a #1 position. Google's algorithm considers hundreds of factors, many outside anyone's control. Any agency promising guaranteed results is either lying or planning to use tactics that risk penalising your site.
Vague deliverables. "SEO optimisation" isn't a deliverable. You should know exactly what work is being done each month: which pages are being optimised, what content is being created, what links are being built, and what technical issues are being resolved.
Vanity reporting. Reports full of "impressions" and "keyword visibility scores" without clear connection to leads, calls, or revenue are designed to distract from a lack of real results.
One-size-fits-all packages. If the agency offers the exact same Bronze/Silver/Gold tiers to a dentist, a SaaS company, and a furniture retailer, the strategy isn't tailored to anyone.
How to Get Started
We begin every engagement with a free site audit. No sales pitch — we review your site's technical health, competitive landscape, and keyword opportunities, then tell you honestly what it would take to achieve your goals. If the economics make sense for both sides, we scope a custom engagement. If they don't, we'll tell you that too.
You'll know exactly what you're paying for before you commit to anything. The audit is free and the quote is transparent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most Melbourne SEO campaigns range from $1,000 to $10,000 per month. Small businesses in low-competition industries typically invest $1,000 to $2,000. Competitive industries like legal, medical, and eCommerce usually require $3,000 to $5,000+. Enterprise and large eCommerce sites often invest $5,000 to $10,000+. We don't sell fixed packages — we scope each engagement individually based on your specific situation.
Because publishing a price without understanding your site, competition, and goals would be dishonest. A $2,000/month campaign might be perfect for one business and completely inadequate for another in the same industry. We provide a transparent quote after a free audit so you know exactly what you're getting and why it costs what it does.
The three main models are monthly retainers ($1,000–$10,000+/month for ongoing campaigns), project-based pricing ($2,000–$10,000 for one-off audits, migrations, or strategy builds), and hourly consulting ($150–$300/hour for specialist advice). We primarily work on monthly retainers because SEO is an ongoing discipline, but we also offer one-off audits and migration support as standalone projects.
Most Melbourne businesses see measurable ranking improvements within 3 to 4 months and meaningful traffic growth within 6 months. Highly competitive industries can take 6 to 12 months for significant results. Local SEO improvements — particularly Google Business Profile optimisation — often show results within weeks. We set realistic timelines during the quoting process so there are no surprises.
Yes. SEO is a long-term discipline — results compound over time, and meaningful outcomes require sustained effort. We work with minimum engagement terms that give campaigns enough runway to deliver real results. The specific term depends on your scope and goals, which we discuss transparently during the quoting process. Most clients stay well beyond their initial term because the returns keep growing.
It varies by client, but a typical engagement includes: comprehensive technical audit and ongoing fixes, keyword research and strategy, on-page optimisation, content strategy and production, link building and authority development, monthly reporting on rankings, traffic, leads, and revenue, and direct access to your senior SEO consultant. We never assign juniors or account managers — the person who builds your strategy is the person you talk to.
Ask these three questions: Can you see exactly what work was done this month? Are your rankings and organic traffic improving over a 6-month trend? Can you attribute real leads or revenue to organic search? If the answer to any of these is no after 6 months of paying for SEO, something is wrong — either with the provider, the strategy, or the reporting. We provide full transparency on all three.