SEO agency in Melbourne, built for the AI era.
We're a Melbourne SEO agency that treats Google and the AI answer engines as one job, because your customers now use both. Traditional SEO gets you ranking; AI visibility gets you cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews for a recommendation. Most agencies still only do the first half. We do both, report on both, and tie the work to outcomes you can actually read.
What you get from an SEO engagement
The technical foundation search engines need: crawlability, structure, speed, and clean structured data. The content that earns rankings and citations: pages built answer-first so both Google and the AI engines can lift them. The authority work that makes it stick: genuine corroboration rather than link spam. And a monthly report that tells you what moved, what didn't, and what we're doing next, in plain English rather than a wall of metrics.
Why AI visibility is now part of SEO
A growing share of buyers get their answer from an AI assistant and never see a results page. Ranking first for a search nobody runs anymore is a hollow win. So we optimise for both surfaces at once: the same structured, answer-first content that ranks on Google is what gets you quoted by the answer engines. It's not two projects. It's one discipline with two outputs, and treating them separately is why most SEO retainers now underdeliver. Sold as a separate product it is usually called AI SEO, and we run it as part of the same retainer rather than beside it.
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. No junior handoff, no account manager relaying messages, no sixty-person overhead priced into your retainer. We're a Melbourne agency, we know the local market, and we work with businesses across Australia. If your customers come from your suburbs rather than the whole country, our local SEO work covers the map pack and "near me" side of the same discipline. We recommend the work we'd do if it were our own money, which sometimes means telling you to spend less.
What we won't do
We won't buy cheap links that put your domain at risk. We won't run 2019 SEO and call it a strategy. We won't send you a report you need a specialist to interpret. And we won't lock you into a contract you can't leave: the work should earn the next month every month.
What SEO costs in Melbourne
Our search retainers run $2,000 to $10,000 or more a month. The range is about scope rather than seniority: how many questions you are competing on, and how much writing and corroboration the work needs each month. Most specialist agencies in Australia sit in that same band. Below roughly $2,000 a month you are usually buying a report rather than the work, and above $10,000 you are often paying for the account layer between you and the person doing the job. The wider market picture, including what the large agencies charge and why, is in our breakdown of what SEO and AEO cost in Australia.
How long it takes
Expect early movement in the first three months and the real compounding from around month six. Technical fixes and page work land fastest. Questions that use your brand name move before category questions, because an engine needs corroboration from sources that are not you before it will recommend you to a stranger. Search is ongoing work rather than a project, and anyone selling a one-off fix at a meaningful price is selling against the nature of it. The timeline is set out month by month in how long AEO takes.
How you will know it is working
Rankings stay in the report, but they are no longer the whole scoreboard. Alongside them you get citation share, accuracy and displacement: how often the engines quote you, whether what they say about you is correct, and who is holding the space you used to hold. We run the same measurement at industry scale and publish it. The AI Visibility Index put buyer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews across ten Australian sectors. In the service industries, eight of 149 answers named a business at all, which is the gap this work exists to close.
Agency, consultant, or your own hire
An agency is not automatically the right answer, and we would rather say so on the first call than win a retainer that does not fit. If you already have a senior marketer in-house who knows what needs doing and needs capacity rather than judgement, a consultant is usually better value. If nobody owns search internally, an agency covers strategy, execution and writing without you building a team for it. We set out the honest comparison in SEO consultant or SEO agency, and there is a longer checklist of what to ask before you sign in our guide to choosing an SEO agency.
Keep reading: SEO vs AEO explained, what SEO and AEO cost in Australia, and local SEO for Melbourne businesses.