SEO pricing in Australia is unusually opaque, and the reason is not mysterious: the outcome is uncertain, so most agencies would rather discuss it on a call where they can qualify you first.
Here are the numbers.
The typical range
For a small Australian business, an SEO retainer is typically $1,400 to $2,500 a month. Boutique agencies in Sydney more often start at $2,000 to $4,000, and the same pattern holds across services — Sydney generally starts higher than Brisbane for the same work.
Above that band you are usually buying a national or e-commerce campaign, with digital PR and a content team behind it. Below it, something has to give, and what gives is almost always the amount of human time in the month.
Why the floor exists
SEO is not a product with a marginal cost close to zero. It is somebody's week.
An SEO specialist in Australia averages around $85,000 a year before on-costs, and employers pay roughly 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary once superannuation, leave and workers' compensation are counted. Divide a very low retainer by any honest hourly rate and you can see how many hours are actually in it.
This is why cheap retainers tend to arrive as a dashboard. Reporting can be automated; the work cannot. If a proposal is mostly a description of what you will receive rather than what will be done, that is usually what has happened.
The question worth asking instead
Not "how much is the retainer" but "what share of it becomes changes actually made to my website?"
This sounds like a technicality and it is the single biggest determinant of whether an SEO retainer works. A very common arrangement looks like this: an SEO agency audits your site, produces recommendations, and sends them to you. You forward them to whoever built the site. That developer is not on a retainer, quotes for the work, and the quote sits in your inbox for six weeks.
Nothing is wrong with anybody's work in that story and nothing happens for a quarter. The recommendations were correct and they became tickets.
So the useful questions for any agency are:
- Can you change my website yourself, or do your recommendations become somebody else's job?
- What will you have changed in the first month, specifically?
- Who writes the pages — you, or me?
The third one matters more than people expect. "Content" is where most SEO budgets actually go, and "we will provide a content plan" and "we will write the pages" are separated by most of the cost.
What the money buys, roughly
At a normal small-business retainer, a month typically contains some mix of:
- The behind-the-scenes work that lets Google read the site properly (technical SEO)
- Structured data so services and reviews can appear in results (schema)
- One or two new pages, planned and written
- On-page changes to existing pages
- Some link and citation work
- A report
The mix is the negotiation, and it is worth reading a proposal closely for it — what an SEO retainer actually includes goes through the clauses. A business whose site is technically sound and thin on pages needs a different month from one with fifty pages and a crawl problem.
Where AI search sits
Most Australian specialists now price AI search visibility separately, from around $3,200 a month. It is a genuinely different contest: assistants cite sources that are specific, consistent and easy to lift, and research puts fewer than one in ten of the pages they cite in Google's top ten for the same question. You can be quoted by ChatGPT without ranking, and rank without ever being quoted — which is the whole argument for treating it as a separate job.
Whether it deserves its own invoice is a fair argument. We include it, because in practice the two jobs touch the same pages and splitting them creates the handover problem described above in miniature.
What we charge
The subscription that includes search work starts at $750 a month, and search work is inside it rather than beside it — along with hosting, AI search visibility, conversion work, new pages as you add services, and a set number of development hours each month agreed before we start.
That is deliberately not an SEO retainer. It exists because the pattern that wastes the most money in this market is the one above: search recommendations that need a developer who is not in the room. If the same team that ranks the site can also change it, that failure mode disappears.
For comparison, a business buying a website care plan, an SEO retainer, AI search visibility and automation from four separate suppliers is commonly paying about $8,200 a month in total, with four invoices and nobody accountable for the result.
Before you sign anything
Ask for the previous month's work log from any agency you are considering — not the report, the log. What was actually done, and to which pages.
An agency doing real work will have one and will usually be pleased to be asked. An agency that cannot produce one is telling you something more useful than any proposal will.