How to choose an SEO agency in Australia

You're three calls deep into agency shopping and every pitch sounds the same. Proven results. Tailored strategies. Transparent reporting. You've built a business by judging people well, but this industry makes judging hard on purpose: no standard pricing, no standard deliverables, and a report format designed to look busy. This guide is written by an agency, so read it with that in mind. Everything below is checkable, and most of it works against us as often as for us.

Costs first, because most agencies make you sit through a call to get them:

• Freelancers and consultants: typically charge by the hour or per defined project, like an audit or a migration review
• Small to mid agencies: retainers typically sit in the low-to-mid thousands a month
• Larger agencies and competitive industries: typically mid thousands to $15,000+ a month. Legal, finance, and national e-commerce sit here

For reference, GOJI's retainers run from $2,000 to $10,000+ a month, ex GST, and they're published, because pricing behind a sales call is a tactic, not a service.

Two pricing rules worth holding. First, bargain retainers typically buy activity, not outcomes: at the bottom of the market the economics only work through templated work or offshore delivery, so something gets done, and it's rarely the something that moves rankings. Second, price doesn't predict quality above that floor. A modest retainer from a six-person team often buys more senior hours than a large one from a sixty-person team, because the bigger number funds the machine around the work.

Price doesn't predict quality. It predicts the size of the machine.

Every one of these is checkable before you sign:

• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google. An agency that guarantees position one is either lying or planning to rank you for terms nobody searches
• They won't say who does the work. If your day-to-day contact is an account manager and the execution happens somewhere you'll never see, you're paying a markup on outsourced work
• The report is unreadable. Forty pages of impressions and crawl stats is camouflage. A useful report says: here's what we did, here's what changed, here's what's next. One page can do it
• No opinion on AI search. Ask what they're doing about ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Our Australian AI Visibility Index scored 1,459 AI answers and found businesses appearing in roughly 5% of cost-related ones. An agency with no answer here is optimising for where your customers used to be
• Long lock-in contracts. Twelve-month minimums protect agencies that expect you to want to leave. Early movement should be visible by month three; a long lock removes their reason to show it
• They pitch before they look. A proposal written without examining your site, your market, and your data is a template with your logo on it

Seven questions, and the pattern of the answers matters more than any single one:

• Who will do the work on my account, and can I meet them? The answer you want: the people on the call
• What would you do in the first 90 days, specifically? Vague answers now become vague retainers later
• What won't you do? Every good agency has refusals. No refusals means no method
• How do you handle AI visibility, and can you show me data? Not a slide about the future of search. Data
• What runs on systems and what runs on people? The necessary, repetitive work (rank capture, monitoring, report assembly) should be automated so it happens every month without relying on someone remembering. The humans should be spending your retainer on judgement and on you
• What does month four look like if months one to three show nothing? You're listening for accountability, not reassurance
• Why did your last client leave? Everyone has churn. The ones who pretend otherwise are the concern

The pattern across every good agency we've studied: specifics, opinions, and constraints. They name numbers. They tell you something you could disagree with. They tell you what they won't take your money for.

The pattern across the bad ones: capability statements. Words like tailored, holistic, and data-driven doing the work that evidence should. If you could paste a sentence from their pitch onto a competitor's site and it would still be true, it wasn't telling you anything.

Specifics, opinions, constraints. Everything else is a brochure.

Not the pitch deck. Three fits:

• Fit of size. Your retainer should be meaningful to them. If you're their smallest client by far, you'll get their newest staff
• Fit of proof. Ask for one example in an industry with dynamics like yours, and ask what specifically they did. A traffic percentage means nothing without the how
• Fit of communication. If the sales process feels slow, opaque, or pushy, the retainer will too. The pitch is the best behaviour you will ever see

Where GOJI sits, stated once so you can judge us by our own checklist: a small senior team in Melbourne running Search + AI Visibility retainers from $2,000 to $10,000+ a month, covering Google and the AI answer engines together. We've built our own systems to automate the repetitive work, so the routine runs without relying on a human to remember it, and the team's hours go to your strategy rather than to admin. The people you meet are the people who do the work. Monthly reports you can read in five minutes. No follow-up sales sequence after the first call. And if you're still deciding between a consultant and an agency at all, start with that question.

If we're not the right fit, the questions above will surface it fast, and we'd rather that than a retainer that limps. If the fit is right, let's talk.

How much does an SEO agency cost in Australia?

Freelancers and consultants typically charge by the hour or per defined project. Small to mid agency retainers typically sit in the low-to-mid thousands a month, with larger agencies and competitive industries running to $15,000+ a month. GOJI's retainers run from $2,000 to $10,000+ a month, ex GST, published on the site.

How do I know if an SEO agency is any good?

Look for specifics, opinions, and constraints: real numbers, positions you could disagree with, and a clear list of what they won't do. Then confirm the people you meet are the people who do the work, and ask for one example in an industry with dynamics like yours, including what specifically they did.

Should I sign a 12-month SEO contract?

Be cautious. Long minimums protect agencies that expect you to want to leave. Early movement should be visible by month three, and an agency confident in its work doesn't need a year of your money guaranteed before showing it.

What should an SEO agency be doing about AI search?

Tracking and improving how your business appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, with data to show for it. GOJI's Australian AI Visibility Index scored 1,459 AI answers and found businesses appearing in roughly 5% of cost-related ones. An agency with no answer on AI visibility is optimising for where your customers used to be.