The short answer is, SEO in Australia can cost you from 1,500 AUD per month all the way to 10,000 AUD per month. Meanwhile, a once-off audit can range from 2,000 AUD to 10,000 AUD. These may sound like a wide price range, but these numbers all depend on project scope, industry competition, URL numbers, and target keywords. This blog will go over specific price ranges, in-house SEO costs, what SEO packages can offer, and the dangers of cheap SEO. 

Anyone who’s wanted to get their message heard online has likely heard about the term SEO. Short for Search Engine Optimisation, it ensures that your website is being ranked highly in search engine results and favoured by search engine algorithms. Every organisation needs it, from giant corporations to family-owned businesses, and you might be missing out by not investing. This is because good SEO can turn everyday people into potential customers as they’re presented with your website when typing searches like: piano lessons, florists near me, or best hair salons in townsville.

While social media accounts can contribute positively to SEO, you might be missing out by focusing just on social media alone. Your website isn’t just a place with your phone number and address and mission statement, but can itself be a way to advertise your company.

By targeting specific key words relevant to your industry, a smart investment in SEO can be the make or break for your business or organisation. We have helped dozens of clients with their SEO at tfm.digital. With our years of experience, we wanted to share our expertise on the topic for anyone curious to take the leap into SEO and knowing what to keep an eye for before you pay. Here at TFM.digital Brisbane, we offer a variety of SEO services, and even offer extensive packages for optimising your website further.

Average Monthly/Hourly Cost

The average monthly costs for SEO can vary depending on the size of the company and scope of its marketing, but here are some averages:

• Average Small Business Cost: 1,500 AUD to 2,500 AUD per month.
• Average Medium Business Cost: 2,500 AUD to 7,000 AUD per month.
• Average Large Business Cost: to 5,000 AUD to 10,000 AUD per month.

Meanwhile, the hourly rate for hiring a single SEO professional can cost between 150 AUD to 200 AUD an hour. This price will depend on their expertise, the demands of the market, and scope of the task.

Why are SEO price ranges so wide?

Why the large differences in price? How is a business size quantified? It’s all about URL amounts. 

If you’re a small business, like a restaurant or a family-owned plumbing company, you probably only have between five to ten webpages at most that need to be checked. 

Meanwhile, if you’re a larger company that specialises in online retail, an ecommerce website will have hundreds, if not thousands, of URLS that need to be checked and verified individually to make sure they’re working correctly. 

Despite living in a highly-automated world, a lot of SEO is still carefully done by hand by digital communication professionals, and that potential work is reflected by the quote you’re likely to be given. 

Here are some things to consider that will affect your SEO price:

• Website Size: Simply put, the more pages on your website, the more time will be spent going over each page to make sure the meta tags are properly optimised (and working).
• Keyword Competition: Different keywords will have different levels of competitiveness. Some keywords have little competition and are very easy to rise in the ranks on, while others are extremely competitive and take a lot more time and work to climb the rankings on
• Audience Reach: Who are you trying to reach? Are you only targeting one group, or do you have a variety of products or events you want to be seen by different demographics? Making sure the SEO is properly optimised to different audiences can affect price.

This might sound like a lot to consider, but remember, the good thing about working with an agency proficient in this field is that they are making SEO suited to your specific needs, and any improved SEO that’s implemented is yours to keep forever. 

In-House SEO

Hiring your own in-house SEO is also a possibility, though you should first examine whether it’s the correct fit for your company. There are many things to consider. 

Firstly, a fully-trained in-house SEO specialist can cost anywhere between 75,000 AUD and 175,000 AUD. It’s a tricky balance knowing how much to post a salary for. On one hand, you might not have the budget for a highly-reputable SEO worker, but on the other, a lower-paid specialist might not have all the necessary skills.  

There’s also the fact that, for the most part, SEO is something that provides continuing returns with minimal updates needed, so for many businesses, it can make more fiscal sense to hire an agency to optimise your SEO in one fell swoop rather than hiring someone that will add to your payroll overhead.

What are SEO Packages?

You may have also heard of SEO services offering SEO Packages, much like we provide at tfm.digital. These can provide an even more comprehensive view of your website, mainly through extra research into web-visitor behaviour, website maintenance, and turning the knowledge gained through research into hyper-relevant content to boost your SEO.

These include:

• Conversion Rate Optimisation: Also known as CRO, it simply means having users in your website do a desired action in your website. Be it making a purchase or asking for a quote, CRO is the art of turning your website visitors into paying customers. 
• Website Maintenance: It’s one thing getting your website in front of people, but it’s another to get them to stay on it, let alone click. Optimising your site’s metatags, making sure the site’s usable across browser and mobile versions, or even revamping your site with a fresh look are all potential services. 
• Blog Writing: While SEO research is important for identifying relevant keywords and optimising your website’s reach, a proven method that improves a site’s SEO is blog writing. Agencies offer services involving creating blogs about frequently asked questions using specific keywords that will rank well in search engines and lead people to your blog.

Even though these packages charge more than SEO services alone, it’s a worthwhile investment, as the good thing about these packages is that they offer permanent positive changes to your website and helpful research insights that are yours to keep forever. They don’t disappear as soon as you stop paying invoices. 

Beware Cheap SEO Services

That’s all well and good, but your inner Scrooge may be tempted by the call of finding the cheapest rate possible. Overseas outsourcing on Fiverr, or locals with extremely low rates will purport to offer services promising to instantly “hack” your SEO or get your site to Google’s front page for a fraction of the cost of professional SEO agencies. However, as we all know, if something sounds too good to be true, it’s because it usually is. There are a variety of risks with going down this path:

• Inconsistent Quality: Gig workers have a diversity of skill levels, and it’s difficult to screen for people who have the skills you need. Half-baked SEO can tank your website and make it more expensive in the long run when you hire someone else to fix it.
• Market Understanding: Overseas services have a lack of understanding of the Australian market, and might not be able to fully take advantage of opportunities or trends relevant to Australian audiences. Even gig workers who are based locally can be a risk. They might not have the industry knowledge, connections, or experience needed to help your website.
• Accountability Who?: When things go wrong—and they often can—freelancers can cut-and-run after they are paid and won’t have the same level of responsibility as an established agency who has to follow Australian standards and laws.

Underhanded tactics to keep an eye for 

That being said, avoiding low prices can’t guarantee your protection from getting a poor SEO service. Knowledge is power, and you can arm yourself and your business with it by knowing how to protect yourself from shoddy SEO providers. Here are some things to look out for.

• Lack of Transparency: Unscrupulous SEO providers will be difficult to get a hold of and will give infrequent and unclear reports on your progress, and will have very vague and generalised ideas for your website that aren’t specific to your needs. 
• All SEM, No SEO: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be useful in some cases, but just note that SEM involves paying services like Google Ads to buy ad space at the top of search results. While this pay-to-win tactic may be tempting, your high ranking only lasts as long as you’re paying for the services, and can be extremely expensive to boot. SEO is a marathon, not a race. Stick to your guns and you will see your site organically climbing the top.
• Backlink Packages: If an SEO provider offers something like a “1,000 backlink package,” AVOID AT ALL COSTS! The way they create these are by generating backlinks to your website via Private Blog Networks (PBNs), mass blogs that just exist to create backlinks to your site. These practices are marked as fraudulent by Google, and can completely destroy your website’s SEO that take months to build up again. 
• Forever Payments: Some shifty providers will demand that you continue to pay them to maintain your website traffic. That’s not how SEO works. While monitoring keyword trends to match changing trends is important, no reputable SEO person or agency should hold your website ransom by manipulating your website traffic into dropping off when you stop using their services.

Ready to take the plunge?

To sum up, in SEO marketing, you get out what you put in. Being able to capture organic traffic from people actively searching for services in your industry are crucial to standing out among your competitors.

Have any more questions, or want to know about something we didn’t cover here? You’re welcome to ask us directly for your digital marketing needs.  

You can curate the help you get from us to be as much or as little as you need. We don’t believe in a one-size-fits all approach, and will endeavour to help bring out the best of your organisation. 

Get in touch with us here.