You've asked two or three agencies what SEO costs. You got a discovery call, a capability deck, and a proposal that needed another meeting to explain. What you didn't get was a number.
Here are the numbers. What the Australian market charges, what moves the price up or down, and what we charge, on the page, before anyone books you into a workshop.
Why agencies won't tell you
The usual defence is "every business is different." That's half true. Scope varies. But an agency that has run a hundred retainers knows its ranges to the dollar, and a missing pricing page is a choice. An agency that hides its prices is telling you the price depends on you: your budget, your urgency, how the discovery call went. We think you should be able to rule us in or out before we've ever spoken.
What the Australian market charges
Broad ranges, because that's what the market is. As at 2026, quotes tend to land in four tiers.
Packaged SEO: a few hundred dollars a month. Usually offshore, usually templated. You get a monthly PDF, a batch of directory links, and content written for a keyword count rather than a reader. More on why this tier costs more than it looks like further down.
Freelancers and independent consultants: roughly $1,000 to $3,000 a month. The good ones are very good, and this tier can be the right call for a business with one clear problem. The constraint is capacity. One person can't run technical work, content, and outreach at the same depth, so something is always waiting.
Specialist agencies: roughly $2,000 to $10,000 a month. This is where most serious retainers in Australia sit, and where ours sits. A small senior team covering the full surface: technical, content, measurement, and increasingly the AI answer engines.
Big agencies: $10,000 a month and well beyond. Sometimes the work justifies it. Often the difference between their price and a specialist's is not the work. It's the machine around the work, and you're the one paying for it.
What moves the price
How contested your category is. A specialist trade in a regional town and a commercial law firm in the Sydney CBD are different jobs. The law firm is bidding against businesses spending serious money on the same queries, and matching that takes more content, more outreach, more months.
The state of your site. Technical debt gets paid before growth work starts. A site with indexing problems, slow pages, or a messy migration in its past spends its first months on repair.
Who writes the content. Search work runs on pages, and someone has to write them. If that's the agency, the retainer reflects it. If it's your team, the retainer shrinks and your workload grows. Neither is wrong. It just has to be decided out loud.
Whether AEO is included. A growing share of buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity and act on the answer without ever seeing a results page. Some agencies sell visibility in those answers as a separate line. Our view: in 2026, search work that ignores answer engines is half a service, and it shouldn't cost extra to get the whole one.
What we charge
Our Search and AI Visibility retainer runs $2,000 to $10,000+ a month. Both surfaces, one retainer: Google and the answer engines, technical work, content, and a question panel that measures what the engines say about you, captured verbatim every month. You'll get a report you can read without a translator: which questions name you, which name competitors, what changed, and what we're doing next.
One more thing worth weighing when you're comparing agencies. Our AI visibility measurement runs on tooling we built ourselves, because nothing off the shelf tracked answer engines the way we wanted. We build AI products as a service, and the engines deciding whether to cite you run on the same technology we work with every day. You're not hiring people who read about this. You're hiring the people who build with it.
Where you land in the range comes down to the two big variables above: how contested your category is, and how much content the plan needs. Complex scopes can go beyond it, and we'll say so upfront. Either way, we'll tell you which end you're at, and why, before you sign anything.
What the big-agency retainer pays for
An account director to manage the relationship. A project manager to manage the account director. A twelve-week discovery phase before anyone touches your site. A sixty-person office with your retainer in the rent. None of that is work, and none of it shows up in your rankings. You're not paying more for a better result. You're paying more for the machine that produces the same one.
When cheap SEO costs more than it saves
The few-hundred-a-month tier has a bill attached that arrives later. Templated links from low-grade directories can take months of cleanup to walk back. Content written for a keyword count reads like everyone else's, and in 2026 that failure is doubled: answer engines cite pages that say something specific, with evidence attached, and skip the ones that don't. Cheap SEO used to make you mediocre on one surface. Now it makes you invisible on two.
Tell us what's going on. We'll tell you what we'd do and what it costs. If it makes sense, we start.
FAQ
How much does SEO cost in Australia?
Most businesses paying for ongoing SEO in Australia spend between $1,000 and $10,000 a month. Packaged offshore services sit below that, big-agency retainers above it. Specialist agency retainers commonly run $2,000 to $10,000 a month; ours runs $2,000 to $10,000+ and includes AEO.
Is AEO priced separately from SEO?
Some agencies sell it as an add-on. We don't. Google and the answer engines draw on the same underlying work, so we run both surfaces inside one retainer and one report.
What should a small business budget for SEO?
If a retainer at $2,000 a month doesn't fit yet, a scoped one-off project or a good independent consultant will usually serve you better than a cheap package. If that's your situation, we'll say so on the first call rather than sign you to something that doesn't fit.
Why don't most agencies publish their prices?
Because unpublished prices can flex to the client. Publishing ranges costs an agency some deals and some margin, which is exactly why doing it is worth something to you as a signal.
