An SEO consultant in Melbourne who builds it, not just recommends it.

Melbourne SEO generally runs between $1,500 and $8,000 a month depending on scope and competitiveness. Our engagements sit at $2,500 to $5,000 a month. Below about $1,500 you are usually buying a report rather than work, and above $8,000 you should be getting a dedicated team rather than a consultant. The number that actually matters is deliverables per month, so ask for that rather than comparing headline rates.

An independent SEO consultant in Australia typically charges $150 to $300 an hour, or $2,000 to $6,000 a month on retainer. A consultant differs from an agency in that you get the senior person doing the work rather than an account manager relaying it to a junior. We work on monthly retainer from $2,500, and you get the scope and the number before anything starts.

Melbourne has a genuinely strong SEO community. StudioHawk, Impressive and Zib Digital are the larger agencies, and there are several respected independent consultants including Scott Shorter and Henry Wong. We are a smaller practice specialising in AI search and programmatic scale, which is a different offer from a full-service agency. If your need is traditional enterprise SEO at volume, one of the larger firms is probably the better fit and we will say so.

No, but the job has changed. Google now places a generated answer above the links, and a growing share of research happens inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot. That does not remove the need to be findable, it adds a second layer: being named inside a generated answer, which rewards structured data and factual consistency rather than backlinks. Businesses that do both will do considerably better than those doing either alone.

Three things. You work directly with the person doing the work rather than through an account manager. We build the systems and hand them over, so you own the content engine rather than renting it. And we build for AI search alongside Google, which most agencies still treat as a future problem rather than a current one.

Suburb and long-tail terms frequently move in four to eight weeks, particularly in the growth corridors and the outer east. Competitive Melbourne head terms take three to six months. We sequence the fast wins first so there is evidence the programme is working before the slow terms mature. A real example: one build reached 31 page-one keywords in month one.

Yes. We run Sydney, Brisbane and Geelong engagements as well, and some United States work. Melbourne is where we are based, which means on-site diagnosis is included here and is a travel conversation elsewhere.

Audit both layers, which means what you rank for in Google and, separately, what the AI assistants currently say when asked about your category. Then fix the foundations: schema, site architecture, internal linking and the Business Profile. Then start building coverage. Most of the first month is unglamorous and it is why the rest works.