How to choose an SEO agency in Melbourne without signing a 12 month mistake

Search “SEO agency Melbourne” and you get about forty companies saying the same four things. Data driven. Proven results. Transparent reporting. No lock in contracts. The wording is close to interchangeable, so the search results tell you almost nothing about who is any good.

We are one of those forty, which is worth keeping in mind while you read this. The checklist below is still the one we would want a client to run us through before they hand anyone a card.

Work out what you are buying before you take the first call

Most proposals are priced against activity. Eight blog posts a month, forty backlinks, a technical audit in the first fortnight. All of that is real work, and it is only loosely connected to the phone ringing.

So write down one number before you talk to anybody. How many enquiries a month would make the spend obviously worth it? If your average job is $350 you need volume, and you need it soon. If you fit out commercial kitchens and one job is worth $60,000, four decent enquiries a quarter changes your year. That number sets your budget, your timeline, and the honest answer to whether SEO is even the right channel yet. Sometimes it is not. A new trades business with no reviews and no site history will usually see money faster from Google Ads while the SEO work builds underneath it.

What SEO actually costs around Melbourne

Almost nobody publishes this, so here is the range we see quoted in this market. Treat it as a sanity check rather than a price list.

Anything under about $700 a month is one junior splitting their week across twenty accounts. You get template blog posts and a monthly PDF. It is not really a scam, it is arithmetic. At that price nobody can afford to think about your business for more than an hour or two.

Somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a month is where a single location business starts getting work that moves: someone who actually knows your service area, content written against real search demand, technical fixes that get deployed rather than listed in a report.

Above $4,000 you are in multi location, ecommerce or genuinely contested territory. Conveyancing, personal injury, cosmetic clinics, anything anchored to the CBD. If you sit in one of those categories and someone quotes you $900 a month, they have not opened your competitors’ sites.

Six questions that sort the field fast

Ask these on the first call. How quickly the answers arrive tells you as much as the answers.

1. “Show me a client in a similar market, and tell me what their enquiries looked like before you started.” A traffic chart pointing up is not an answer. Traffic climbs while phones stay quiet all the time, and an agency that has never watched that happen has not been paying attention.
2. “Who does the work, and where do they sit?” Offshore production is not automatically a problem, because plenty of very good work happens overseas. Finding out after you sign is the problem, since it usually means the person you liked in the meeting will not touch your account again.
3. “What happens if I leave in month four?” You want the Google Business Profile, the Analytics property, the Search Console account and the website login sitting in your own name. Ask who owns the content that gets written, too. Some agencies rent it back to you.
4. “What have you tried recently that did not work?” Anyone doing this seriously has a story here. The core updates of the last two years flattened plenty of sites that were doing everything by the book. An agency with no failures has either been going six months or is not telling you the truth.
5. “What is your plan for AI answers?” This is the live question in 2026. When someone asks ChatGPT or an AI overview to recommend a supplier, your business either gets named or it does not, and what earns a mention is not identical to what earns a blue link. A blank look here is disqualifying.
6. “What would you not do for me?” You want to hear something declined. An agency that says yes to every add on is selling hours.

The contract terms that decide what you keep

Read the exit clause before the deliverables. A 12 month term is not automatically a red flag, since results on a competitive term rarely show inside three months and month to month pricing usually carries a premium for the risk. What matters is what you walk out holding.

Check four things. Whether the notice period is one month or three. Whether the accounts are registered to your email address or the agency’s. Whether the content and the site changes stay live after you go. And whether the monthly report counts calls and form fills, or only sessions and keyword positions.

Melbourne is not one market

A plumber in Brunswick and a plumber in Frankston are not competing for anything. The map pack is drawn tight around wherever the searcher is standing, so a business in Richmond can own a suburb three kilometres away and be invisible six kilometres out. This is why “we will get you to number one in Melbourne” means nothing as a promise. Number one for someone in Docklands, or someone in Werribee?

Ask any agency you are considering to name the suburbs they would go after first, and why those ones. If they cannot answer that in the first meeting they have not looked at your service area, your competitors or your review count, which means the proposal in front of you was written for somebody else.

What to do this week

Pick three agencies. Run the six questions past each of them, then ask all three for a 90 day plan specific enough that you could hand it to a different agency and have it executed. Two of them will not be able to produce it. The one that can is worth a second meeting.

If you would rather see that 90 day plan for your own site before you talk to anyone, get in touch and we will put one together for you.