Local SEO in Melbourne: be the business that comes up.
When someone in Melbourne searches for what you do, three businesses get the map and everyone else gets scrolled past. Local SEO is the work that decides which side of that line you're on: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your location pages, and now the AI assistants people ask for recommendations. We handle all of it, and you'll see what's working in a monthly report you can read in five minutes.
What local SEO covers
Your Google Business Profile, set up and maintained properly: categories, services, photos, and the review responses most businesses leave hanging. Location and service pages built to rank for the suburbs you serve. Citations cleaned up so every directory agrees on your name, address, and phone number. And reviews: a steady, genuine flow of them, because they're the strongest local ranking signal there is and the first thing a buyer reads.
The map pack is the new front page
For local searches, the map pack sits above every organic result, and it takes three businesses. Most of your competitors are ignoring it: an unclaimed profile, photos from 2019, reviews with no replies. That's the opportunity. Local SEO is one of the few channels where a few months of work can put you ahead of businesses that have traded longer than you, because almost nobody in the pack got there on purpose.
AI assistants recommend local businesses now
Ask ChatGPT for a physio in Brunswick or an accountant in Richmond and it names names. The names it picks come from the same signals local SEO builds: a consistent entity, strong reviews, and pages that say plainly what you do and where you do it. We check what the assistants say about you, fix what feeds them, and track whether you're in the answer. Most local SEO providers haven't noticed this surface exists yet.
Why Melbourne businesses work with us
You work with a small senior team, and the people you meet are the people who do the work. We're in Melbourne, and we know that ranking in Fitzroy and ranking in Frankston are different jobs. Local SEO sits inside our Search + AI Visibility retainer, and local scopes usually sit at the lower end of the range: you'll get a real number after one call, not a discovery phase.
What we won't do
We won't spam directories or buy reviews: both can get your profile suspended, and neither survives a Google update. We won't build a page for every suburb in Victoria and call it strategy. We won't send you a report you need a specialist to interpret. And we won't chase you after the first call.
What the engines already say about local service businesses
We measured this rather than guessing. The AI Visibility Index put buyer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews across ten Australian sectors, and the service industries came out worst by a distance. Healthcare was named in 62 per cent of scoreable answers and law in 42, against 94 for ecommerce. Ask about price and it collapses: across healthcare, real estate, builders, manufacturers and law, eight of 149 cost questions returned an answer naming a business at all. Real estate scored zero out of thirty, manufacturers zero out of thirty, law one out of thirty. These are categories where the buyer is local, the intent is high, and the engines currently return almost nothing useful. The gap is the opportunity.
What local SEO costs
Local work runs inside the Search and AI Visibility retainer at $2,000 to $10,000 or more a month, rather than as a separate line, because the map pack and the answer engines now draw on overlapping signals. A single location with one service area sits at the lower end of that. Several locations, or a category with entrenched competitors, moves up it. The full market range and what moves it are in what SEO and AEO cost in Australia.
Where local SEO stops and AEO starts
Local SEO is about the map pack, the profile, and the proximity signals Google uses to decide who is nearby and trustworthy. Answer engine optimisation is about being the business an assistant names when nobody opens a map at all. They share most of the groundwork and separate at the top. If your enquiries still arrive mostly through Google Maps, start local. If your buyers research before they ever search, the answer-engine work matters more. Either way it is one team, one retainer, and one report: see the Search + AI Visibility practice for how the whole surface is run.