SEO is an unusual thing to buy when you think about it, isn't it?
With most things you have some sense of what fair looks like before you start ringing around. A new logo, a month of bookkeeping, a tradie's day rate. You can sanity check the number against something. SEO doesn't really give you anything to anchor to, or much idea of what to expect for the money.
Which is why the quotes come back miles apart. One agency says a few hundred a month, another says several thousand, and both call it the same service. With nothing to compare against, most business owners end up going on gut feel.
So here's a reference point.
Most Australian small businesses pay between $1,000 and $3,000 a month for SEO, excluding GST, on a commitment of somewhere between three and twelve months. We charge $1,000 to $2,000 a month for standalone SEO, and the rest of this article explains exactly how we arrive at that figure.
Two things sit behind everything below. The first is that we will tell you what things cost. The second, and the more important one, is that a campaign has to be systemised to be worth paying for. The difference between SEO that works and SEO that quietly does nothing is almost never the size of the budget. It is whether there is a considered order to the work, or whether someone is just doing tasks.
SEO is not a product on a shelf. It is a number of hours of skilled work applied to your website every month, so the price comes down to how many hours your situation actually needs.
Four things move that number:
Across the Australian market, small business SEO pricing generally falls into three bands.
If you would rather buy by the hour, Australian freelancers generally run $80 to $150, small agencies $120 to $200, and mid-tier agencies $180 to $280. Most reputable Australian agencies sit somewhere in the $140 to $250 band.
Ongoing SEO is rarely billed hourly though, because consistent monthly effort compounds in a way that ad hoc tasks never do. An Ahrefs survey of SEO providers found around 78% bill on a monthly retainer. That same research put average agency retainers near $3,209 a month against $1,348 for freelancers, which tells you the type of provider you choose moves your bill about as much as the size of your business does.
This is the part almost nobody explains, and it is the reason two agencies can quote the same number and deliver completely different work.
We run campaigns from the top down, in three stages. Where your hours go in any given month depends on which stage you are in, not on a fixed package list.
A business at stage one and a business at stage three need very different months. That is why we would rather scope the work honestly than sell you a tier off a page, and it is also why a business already sitting on solid foundations often gets more from the same budget.
Search costs less here, and not because anyone is discounting.
Competition outside the biggest categories is genuinely lower. The major trades are still a fight, but across a lot of the market there are simply fewer businesses actively competing for the same searches. Plenty of well established Tasmanian businesses are not posting, not updating their site, and not doing the work. That gap is an opportunity.
Fewer competitors means fewer hours to reach page one. Fewer hours means a smaller bill. It really is that simple, and it is the honest reason our pricing looks the way it does rather than any claim to be cheaper than the next agency.
There is a second edge too. Local knowledge counts here in a way it does not on the mainland. Knowing the suburbs, knowing how people actually search for things around Hobart and the rest of the state, is worth more than it would be in a city of five million.
Here is what that looks like in practice. Nomac Built came to us as a two person building operation. Within twelve months their website was ranking around position three for "Hobart builder", competing against businesses that have been in the market for decades. That is not a result you could achieve as readily in Melbourne.
One thing to be aware of. Search for "SEO Hobart" and you will get quotes from $250 a month at one end and $6,000 to $25,000 a month at the other. Neither of those agencies is in Tasmania. Both generate a page for every city in the world and swap the place name in. If you are a Tasmanian business owner trying to work out what normal looks like, quotes like that make it close to impossible.
Do the maths on a $400 a month package. At a $100 hourly rate, that is four hours. Across an entire month.
Four hours does not go far. Keyword research alone takes half an hour if you are quick. Writing a piece of content and getting it live is another hour. A competitor check is another half hour. You are already at two hours of genuine work, spread thin across four weeks, and none of it has touched your technical setup, your Google Business Profile, or your reporting.
It is not that cheap SEO does nothing. It is that it rarely does enough to matter, unless you are very small in a very quiet niche.
Worth saying clearly: AI has legitimately brought prices down, and that is a good thing. Good agencies use it to speed up research and drafting, and those efficiencies should be passed on to clients. But using AI to write a blog post from scratch produces something generic and near identical to what your competitors are publishing. That does not just fail to help. It can actively harm your site.
Red flags worth watching for:
Two businesses we work with came to us after cheaper builds and cheaper SEO. The problems were remarkably similar.
Page titles and headings containing nothing but the business name. Service pages with two lines of content and no room to add more. On one, the platform itself did not allow editing the fields that matter for search. On the other, a website build that included a search function which had never been set up properly, and American spelling throughout, on a site selling to Tasmanians.
The fix in both cases was to work top down. Homepage first, optimised properly around a single keyword. Technical elements in place. Then schema markup to paint a clear picture for Google. Then out through the service pages.
Dom's tip. Undoing bad habits almost always takes more effort than starting from scratch. Spend three months at $400, then three months at $1,000 putting it right, and you have spent more than doing it properly once and lost half a year. When you are comparing quotes, price in what it will cost to fix.
There is also a fair chunk of any retainer that goes on work producing nothing you can screenshot. Submitting sitemaps. Requesting reindexing. Setting up and maintaining Google Search Console and analytics so results can actually be measured. Schema markup. FAQ structures. Platform and subscription costs sit behind all of it, including the AI tooling most agencies now run. None of it is glamorous. All of it is why the ranking page eventually ranks.
This is the question that really sits underneath the pricing one. A monthly figure only means something once you know how many months you are committing to before anything happens.
The honest answer depends on which keywords you are chasing.
For your primary keyword, the one with real money behind it, expect around three months before you see meaningful movement. You are competing against businesses that already have both an established presence and years of accumulated authority, and that takes time to overhaul. Secondary and third tier keywords, the ones with less competition, can move a lot sooner. Sometimes inside a month.
That is why we work on a three month minimum, and why six months is where we would rather start. One month of effort will not shift much unless your market is genuinely quiet. Three to four months is enough to implement properly and see the first real results. Six months is enough to build something that keeps compounding after you stop paying attention to it.
How much does SEO cost for a small business in Australia?
Most small businesses pay $1,000 to $3,000 a month excluding GST. Entry level work sits at $500 to $1,000, and competitive industries typically need $3,000 or more.
Is cheap SEO worth it?
Usually not. At $400 a month you are buying around four hours of work, which is rarely enough to move rankings. Cheap packages also tend to rely on thin content or shortcuts that cost more to undo than they ever saved.
Do I need to sign a long contract?
You should not have to lock in for a year. We work on a three month minimum because that is the realistic time frame to implement and see results, and we would rather earn the next three months than contract for them.
How much does SEO cost in Hobart compared to the mainland?
Generally less. Lower competition means fewer hours are needed to compete, so Tasmanian businesses often achieve strong results on budgets that would barely register in Sydney or Melbourne.
Is SEO better value than Google Ads?
They do different jobs. Ads stop the moment you stop paying. SEO compounds, so work done in month three is still working in month nine. Most businesses eventually want both.
If you are weighing up quotes right now, the most useful question is not "what does it cost". It is "how many hours am I buying, and in what order will they be spent". Any agency worth hiring can answer that in plain language.
We are based in Hobart, we work with Tasmanian businesses, and we are happy to tell you when SEO is not the right spend for you yet.
Learn more about our SEO services in Hobart or get in touch for a straight conversation about your site.
