The short answer
Most Australian agencies charge $1,000 to $5,000 a month, small business and local work at the lower end, competitive national campaigns at the top. Hourly consulting is roughly $100 to $300, one-off projects $2,000 to $10,000. Almost all of those are quoted excluding GST, so add 10% before you compare. Cheaper plans exist and are not automatically bad, but the price should have a reason behind it that someone can name. If nobody can tell you why it costs less, that is the warning sign, not the number itself.
SEO pricing is opaque in a way almost nothing else in business is. Two agencies quote the same business $1,200 and $4,500 a month for what sounds like the same thing, and neither will explain the gap in a way you can check.
So this page tries to make it checkable: what the market charges, what the money buys at each level, and how to tell a genuinely cheap plan from a badly done one, which is the distinction that actually matters and the one nobody writes about.
We sell an SEO plan, so read this knowing that. Our number is at the bottom of this market and I have explained why below rather than leaving you to wonder.
What the Australian market charges
| Who it is for | Per month | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Small business, local | $1,000 to $2,500 | Local optimisation, low-competition markets |
| Growing business | $2,500 to $5,000 | Broader on-page work, content, link building |
| Large or e-commerce | $5,000 to $10,000+ | Big sites, national reach, finance and legal |
Other shapes exist: hourly consulting at $100 to $300, one-off projects such as a technical audit or a site migration at $2,000 to $10,000, and hiring in-house at $80,000 to $120,000 a year plus software.
Two things worth knowing about those numbers before you use them. Almost every Australian agency quotes ex-GST, so a $2,500 retainer is $2,750 out of the bank. And a widely cited Ahrefs study, quoted throughout the discussion on this topic, puts the global average at $2,917 a month, with 23% of providers charging $500 to $1,000. The bottom of the market is considerably more populated than the agency pages suggest.
What the money actually buys
Almost every pricing guide explains the tiers by spend, which tells you nothing you did not already know. What changes as the number goes up is roughly this:
- Hours. The main driver. At $1,000 a month you are buying a handful of hours from someone. At $5,000 you are buying a small team.
- Content volume. Written pages are the most expensive deliverable in SEO. A plan that includes four articles a month costs more than one that includes one, and it should.
- Link building. The single most variable line, and the one where cheap plans most often go wrong, because buying links is fast and looks like progress.
- Competition. A plumber in one suburb and a law firm chasing national terms need different amounts of everything. Same work, different quantity.
- How much they have to learn first. Rarely mentioned, and it matters more than people think. An agency taking over an unfamiliar site spends the first month or two on discovery and a technical audit before shipping anything. You pay for that, and you should, because skipping it is worse.
That last one is the loose thread, and pulling it explains most of what looks unexplainable about SEO pricing.
Why ours is $520, and what you cannot buy from us
Our SEO plan is $520 a month on three-month plans. That is roughly half the bottom of the range above, which is exactly the sort of number this industry warns you about. So here is the reason, in three parts and a limitation.
1. We only do it on sites we built ourselves
This is the whole reason the number works, and it is a restriction rather than a discount.
When an agency takes on a site they did not build, they inherit an unknown. They do not know what the codebase does, what the previous developer left behind, why a template behaves oddly on mobile, or which of the forty plugins is slowing the thing down. Working that out is real, necessary, skilled work, and it is a large slice of what a first month or two of any retainer pays for.
We skip it entirely, because we wrote the site. There is no discovery phase, no technical audit, no unfamiliar platform fighting us and nothing to reverse-engineer. We already know exactly what needs doing for that business, because we built it around what that business needed in the first place. That cost does not get discounted, it does not exist.
2. The work is deliberately bite-sized
It is not a smaller version of a full-service retainer. It is a different shape of thing: a defined scope agreed each quarter, shipped in monthly pieces. New pages, technical work, content, the Google Business Profile, whatever that quarter's goals need.
Small and steady rather than large and open-ended. You know what is coming, we know what we are building, and neither side is guessing at the end of the month what the money went on. It also means the work compounds in one direction instead of being scattered across whatever seemed urgent that week.
3. Clients are a long game, not a monthly invoice
The honest version: we are not trying to maximise what any single client pays per month. A client whose site keeps getting better for years is worth more to this business than a bigger retainer that gets cancelled in month seven, and it is also the only way a small studio gets case studies, referrals and reviews worth having.
That is self-interested, and it is stated plainly for that reason. It happens to align with what the client wants, which is the only kind of alignment worth relying on.
And the limitation, which is real
If we did not build your website, we cannot sell you this plan at all. Not at $520, not at any price. Everything above depends on knowing the site from the inside, and we do not have that on somebody else's build.
If you have a site you like and want SEO on it, you want one of the agencies in the table above, and the $1,000 to $2,500 band is the right place to be looking. That is not a brush-off, it is the correct answer.
One smaller thing while we are on price: we are not registered for GST, so $520 is $520. Compare that against an ex-GST quote carefully, because $2,500 ex-GST is $2,750 leaving your account.
Telling a cheap plan that is honest from one that is not
The industry's warning about cheap SEO is fair, and it is also lazy, because it treats the price as the problem. The price is not the problem. The absence of a reason is.
| A low price is fine when | A low price is a problem when |
|---|---|
| They can name what is excluded | The scope is "SEO", undefined |
| The scope is narrow on purpose | It promises everything an agency does, cheaper |
| They only work with a certain kind of client | They take anyone with a card |
| Deliverables are named each month | You get a rankings report and nothing built |
| Links are earned or claimed, and they say how | Links appear and nobody explains from where |
| No promises about position or timing | Guaranteed page one, guaranteed by a date |
The line that matters most is the link one. Cheap link building is where inexpensive plans do actual damage, because bought links from a network are quick, look like progress on a report, and can take months to undo. If a plan includes links, ask where they come from. We have written about what honest link building looks like and it is slower and less impressive than the alternative.
Five questions before you sign anything
- What gets shipped this month? Not worked on. Shipped. Pages, fixes, posts, listings. Time spent is not a deliverable and a report is not a deliverable either.
- What are the goals for this quarter, agreed before the money starts? If nobody can say what success looks like in three months, nobody can tell in three months whether it worked.
- Where do the links come from? Ask directly. The answer, and the comfort level with the question, tells you most of what you need.
- Is it ex-GST, and is there a lock-in? Both change the real number, and both come up late in the conversation far too often.
- What is not included? The best answer to this is a specific list. "Everything's included" means the scope has not been thought about, and it will be thought about later, by them, in their favour.
One more thing worth doing before you spend anything at all: check what is already free. A Google Business Profile costs nothing and often does more for a local business in the first few months than a retainer will. The order these things should happen in is its own piece, and SEO is further down the list than most people are told.
Common questions
How much does SEO cost in Australia?
Most Australian agencies charge between $1,000 and $5,000 a month on a retainer, with small business and local work at the lower end and competitive national campaigns at the top. Hourly consulting runs roughly $100 to $300, and one-off projects such as audits or migrations run $2,000 to $10,000. Nearly all of those figures are quoted excluding GST, so add 10% to compare like with like.
Is cheap SEO a red flag?
Sometimes, and the industry's warnings about it are fair. The question is not the number, it is whether the provider can name a structural reason the price is lower. Fewer hours, a narrower scope, no discovery phase because they already know the site, or work restricted to a type of client they specialise in are all real reasons. If nobody can explain why the price is lower, the usual answer is that corners are being cut somewhere you will not see for six months, most often in link building.
Why does Webstallion charge $520 a month when other agencies charge more?
Three structural reasons and one limitation. We only do SEO on websites we built ourselves, so there is no discovery phase, no technical audit and no unfamiliar codebase to learn, which is a large part of what a first month usually pays for. The work is deliberately bite-sized: a defined scope agreed each quarter and shipped monthly, rather than an open-ended retainer. And we are not registered for GST, so the price you see is the price. The limitation is real: if we did not build your site, we cannot sell you this plan at all.
How long before SEO shows results?
Three to six months before the numbers mean anything, and longer in competitive categories. Anyone promising rankings sooner is either lucky or misleading you. A Google Business Profile can produce calls within days because map results move faster, which is why it is worth doing first. Judge a provider on whether they show you the direction of travel each month, not on whether they hit a position by a date.
What should an SEO plan actually include?
At a minimum: agreed goals before the money starts, technical fixes to the site itself, new or improved pages targeting things people search for, management of the Google Business Profile if the business is local, and reporting in plain English tied to enquiries rather than rankings alone. Ask what is shipped each month rather than what is worked on. Time spent is not a deliverable, and a report showing rank movements with nothing built is the most common way a retainer produces nothing.
The bottom line
Do not judge an SEO price by the number. Judge it by whether anyone can tell you what makes it that number and what is deliberately left out. A cheap plan with a stated reason and a named scope is a fine thing to buy. An expensive one that cannot describe what ships this month is not, and costs considerably more to find out.