Price guide Updated August 2026
How much does SEO cost in Australia?
SEO in Australia is almost always a monthly retainer, and the published ranges sit between $500 and $5,000 a month. StudioHawk publishes $500 to $5,000 per month. Firewire Digital publishes $1,500 to $5,000 and up, with campaigns starting from $2,500 a month. Where you land inside that spread depends on your competition, your service area and how much is done for you.
Written by Tyson Farrington, who runs tyso from Canberra. The market figures on this page are other agencies' own published numbers, named where they appear. The tyso numbers are tyso's, and they are the same ones published elsewhere on this site.
What does SEO cost in Australia in 2026?
Between $500 and $5,000 a month for managed SEO, going by what Australian agencies publish themselves. StudioHawk publishes a range of $500 to $5,000 per month. Firewire Digital publishes $1,500 to $5,000 and up per month, with campaigns starting from $2,500 a month and a custom quote after a free audit. Cheaper offers exist, and so do far dearer ones.
Those are their numbers, not mine, and they are quoted here because they are published. A range that wide is only useful with two more things attached: what moves you inside it, and what a number below the floor usually means. Both are below.
What affects the cost of SEO?
Four things move the price of SEO: how much setup the site needs before any monthly work makes sense, whether you are competing in one city or nationally, how many serious competitors are already doing the work, and whether it is managed for you or you are doing it yourself with advice.
Setup, then the retainer
The first stretch is setup: the audit, the technical fixes, the Google profile, the first pages. After that the monthly buys work that only pays off by repeating. A flat monthly with no heavier start is usually spreading the setup quietly rather than skipping it.
Local or national
Local search for one city is a different job to competing nationally. Local is decided by your Google profile, your reviews and how close you are to the person searching. National is decided by pages and links, takes longer, and costs more every month it runs.
How hard your competition is
A trade with three serious competitors in town is cheap ground. One with twenty agencies already working the same searches is not. The price follows how much work it takes to get past them, which has nothing to do with how much the result is worth to you.
Done for you, or done yourself
Doing it yourself costs hours and tools instead of a retainer, and it works if you genuinely have the hours. Managed costs money and hands the hours back. The middle version, paying someone to point while you do the work, is the one that usually stalls.
Is SEO a one-off cost or an ongoing one?
Both, and the split is the part worth understanding. There is a one-off block of setup at the start: the audit, the technical fixes, the profile rebuild, the first pages. Then there is a monthly, which buys the work that only produces anything by repeating: new pages, reviews, profile activity, and measurement.
A one-off fix on a site nobody tends decays, slowly and then all at once. The honest test on any retainer is whether you can name what was done last month. If you cannot, you are paying for the arrangement rather than the work.
Why is under $500 a month a red flag?
Because the arithmetic does not work. Real SEO is hours: someone writing pages, tending your Google profile, chasing reviews, fixing what breaks. At a hundred or two hundred a month there are no hours in that budget, so something has to give, and it is always one of the same four things.
Nothing is actually done
A monthly report generated out of a tool, a handful of automated directory submissions, and no human hours spent on your business at all. The report arrives, the rankings do not move, and the invoice keeps clearing.
Pages made in bulk
One page written once and reused across dozens of clients with the suburb swapped out. Google filters that, and has for years, so the content you paid for was built to be ignored.
Links bought by the hundred
Cheap links from networks that exist to sell links. It is against Google's own guidelines, it can earn a manual penalty, and cleaning it up costs more than the work you were trying to save on.
Volume instead of attention
A retainer that cheap only survives at hundreds of clients, so your account gets whatever attention is left over. On a busy month that is none, and nobody writes to tell you which months those were.
What does tyso charge for SEO?
tyso does not sell a standalone SEO retainer. The search work runs inside a system rather than as its own billed line, so there are two published numbers worth putting on this page, and the free audit sits in front of both.
The free audit
No charge
It reads your site, measures your mobile speed with Google PageSpeed, and asks an AI assistant who it recommends in your suburb. You see the score before it asks for an email.
Deep Audit
$490
The serious version: your website, your Google Business Profile and your AI-search visibility read properly, with a fix roadmap and the competitor picture. Credited in full against any build within 60 days, so if you go ahead it cost you nothing.
The Growth Engine
$4,950 install, then $497 a month
Not an SEO retainer, and it would be dishonest to line it up against one. It is the website, the Google Business Profile, local SEO, AI search and RELAYX instant lead response, installed and run as one system on a twelve-month minimum. The search work is a part of it rather than the whole of it.
That is the whole SEO-side price list. The website cost guide carries the build prices, the care plans and the fix sprint for a site that already exists.
Found & Chosen is the flat-price starter for a trade getting nothing from Google, and the Growth Engine is for one already getting enquiries and wanting double. What the search work actually involves is on SEO for tradies, or SEO in Canberra if you are local.
Questions
How much does SEO cost in Australia?
Between $500 and $5,000 a month for managed SEO, going by the ranges Australian agencies publish. StudioHawk publishes $500 to $5,000 per month. Firewire Digital publishes $1,500 to $5,000 and up, with campaigns starting from $2,500 a month. Where you sit inside that depends on your competition, your service area and how much is done for you.
What affects the cost of SEO?
Four things: how much setup the site needs before a monthly makes any sense, whether you are competing in one city or nationally, how many serious competitors are already doing the work, and whether it is managed for you or you are doing it yourself with advice. Competition and scope move the number most.
Is SEO a one-off cost or an ongoing one?
Both. A block of setup at the start, then a monthly after it. The setup is the audit, the technical fixes, the Google profile and the first pages. The monthly buys the part that only works by repeating: new pages, reviews, profile activity and measurement. A one-off fix on a site nobody tends decays.
Is SEO worth it for a small business?
It is worth it when the searches exist and you can take the work. Run it on one job: if a won job is worth a few thousand and a month of work costs a few hundred, the maths is not subtle. If almost nobody searches for what you sell, it is not worth it, and anyone honest will tell you so before taking a deposit.
What is a good SEO budget for a small business?
Set it from what one extra job is worth, not from a percentage of revenue someone quoted at you. For most Australian trades a single won job covers a serious monthly several times over, and that ratio is the only one worth budgeting from. If one extra job would not cover it, the budget is wrong, or the service is.
Is SEO dead in 2026, or just changing?
Changing, and quickly. People now ask an assistant instead of scrolling ten links, and the assistant names two or three businesses. The signals it reads are mostly the old ones: a complete Google profile, facts that agree, reviews, plain answers on your own pages. The work did not die, the surface it feeds moved, and the honest version of it now includes measuring what the assistants say about you.
Do you have a monthly SEO price?
Not as a standalone line. The search work runs inside the Growth Engine, which is $4,950 to install and $497 a month on a twelve-month minimum, and that also carries the website, the Google Business Profile, AI search and instant lead response. If you only want to know where you stand right now, the audit is free.
How do I get a number for my own business?
Run the free audit. It reads your site, measures your mobile speed with Google PageSpeed, and asks an AI assistant who it recommends in your suburb, then shows the score before it asks for an email. What it finds is what any honest quote would be built out of anyway.
Get the number for your business.
The audit goes and looks: your site, your mobile speed, and what an AI assistant says when someone asks who to call in your suburb. You see the score before it asks for an email.
Rather talk it through? Book a call.