Monthly SEO retainers in Australia commonly run from around $750 at the small business end to $2,000 to $5,000 for a competitive market, with national and ecommerce programs going well beyond that. One off technical audits are usually quoted between $1,500 and $5,000.
Those ranges are wide because SEO is a labour service with no fixed deliverable. What you are really buying is a number of skilled hours per month, and the honest way to compare two proposals is to work out how many hours each one represents and what they will be spent on.
What each band buys
Under $750 a month is rarely enough to do the work. At Australian rates that is a few hours, and a few hours goes on reporting rather than optimisation. If a proposal at this level promises technical work, content and link building, one of those three is not happening.
Between $750 and $2,000 a month is a realistic small business program: technical issues fixed as they appear, a small number of pages properly optimised each month, one or two pieces of content, Google Business Profile maintained, and reporting that means something. This is enough to win local and long tail terms.
Between $2,000 and $5,000 a month adds volume and ambition: a content program rather than occasional articles, deliberate internal linking, digital PR or outreach, conversion work on the pages that already rank, and enough hours to pursue terms with real competition.
Above $5,000 a month you are usually funding either a national campaign, a large ecommerce catalogue, or a market where the incumbents are spending similarly. In competitive Sydney and Melbourne verticals that is simply the entry price.
How to tell work from reporting
Ask for the previous month of one existing client, anonymised. A good answer lists specific things that were changed: these six pages were rewritten, this redirect chain was removed, this schema was added, these four listings were corrected. A weak answer describes activity: monitoring, analysis, optimisation, strategy.
- Ask what proportion of the retainer is reporting and account management. Above a third is high.
- Ask who does the work and where. Not as a gotcha, but because you should know.
- Ask what happens if rankings do not move in six months, and listen for whether the answer involves changing the approach or changing the metric.
- Ask for the deliverables in writing, per month, not per quarter.
Rankings are not the deliverable. Rankings are a symptom. The deliverable is the work, and the work should be listable.
Why the cheapest tier usually fails
It is not that cheap SEO is fraudulent. It is that the fixed costs of running an account, the reporting, the calls, the account management, consume most of a small retainer before any optimisation happens. Below a certain figure the maths does not leave room for the work, whatever anyone intends.
The two ways out of that are to do less but properly, or to lower the cost of the hours. A small business is often better served by a well scoped three month project that fixes the foundations than by an underfunded retainer that runs for two years.
What to expect for the money
Long tail and branded terms move within weeks. Local terms in a normal market take one to three months. Competitive commercial terms take six to twelve, and in the hardest verticals longer. Any proposal that promises page one in thirty days is describing terms nobody searches for.
Before you sign anything, make sure conversion tracking is properly configured. Without it, six months from now the conversation will be about rankings and rankings alone, and neither of you will be able to prove whether the money worked.
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