SEO retainer cost in Australia: what you get each month

A monthly SEO retainer should come with a specific list of what happens inside it every month, and most don't say what that list actually is. The proposal names a price and a term, and what the fee buys gets discovered later, usually around month three, when someone asks what's been done and the answer is a screenshot of a chart trending up.

A chart isn't a list of work. A retainer should produce a specific, checkable set of things every month, and a reasonable buyer should be able to name what that set is before signing anything.

What a working month looks like

Ongoing SEO work breaks down into a small number of jobs, not a general state of "optimisation". Someone should be checking the site for crawl errors, broken links, slow pages and indexing problems, and fixing what turns up rather than filing it for later. New or updated pages should go up against demand that's actually there in Search Console or elsewhere, not a quota of two blog posts a month regardless of whether anyone's searching for them. Someone should be looking at who outranks you and why, and saying honestly when that gap isn't worth chasing. And the numbers at the end of the month need to connect to enquiries and traffic, not only to position, because a keyword climbing four places with no change in clicks hasn't done anything for the business yet.

That's roughly the shape of it, and it's worth comparing against whatever list your own provider gives you. Our SEO page lays out the same four areas, which is less a pitch than a checklist most legitimate agencies cover some version of.

What do you get each month for a retainer?

Each job below should be visible in the month's report as a list of things done, with the evidence next to it.

Our SEO add-on is $549 a month AUD, GST inclusive, month to month, on top of the $298 a month website plan. It covers Search Console and keyword reporting, on-page fixes, new content and Google Business Profile upkeep. See pricing. We do not quote a market range for retainers, because the ranges we have seen are agency guides and not something we have verified.

What does a GEO retainer add?

A GEO or AI search retainer is the same work plus a second way of measuring it. The extra jobs are checking whether Copilot and ChatGPT cite your pages, and publishing pages that give an assistant something worth citing.

What we have measured on our own properties points at one kind of page. Pages that put scattered official information into one sourced table were cited far more often than pages on the same template without one. A builder licence check page we publish, with eight state registers and 31 outbound links, was cited 520 times in six months in Bing's AI Performance report. Two property development guides, one with 158 dollar figures in a stage by stage budget and one with before and after zoning rules, were cited 1,025 and 3,121 times. Pages on the same template with no dollar figures had fewer than 143 each. That is a handful of pages on two sites, so it is a pattern worth testing and not a guarantee. See what is an SEO audit for the technical base.

What we've seen across our client sites

How long results take is the question owners ask first, and our own numbers are mixed.

• Rebuilds moved the Search Console counts. One carpenter's site went from 1,721 to 9,069 impressions and from 39 to 114 clicks, comparing 28 days in May and June with 28 days in September and October 2026. A property information site went from 5,464 to 14,961 impressions and 51 to 134 clicks over the same kind of window. Both were rebuilds, not retainer work alone.
• Small edits are hard to judge. We tested question style answer blocks on existing pages. Read honestly, the August batches moved pages by about 0.77 positions against a control after 28 days, and later batches showed no measurable effect. An early reading of 4.8 positions turned out to be drift across the whole site.
• Google may not have looked yet. Of 97 pages we had edited, 25 had not been re-crawled since the change, and bulk resubmission had no effect.
• A stale sitemap starves a section. One builder's blog fell from 1,212 impressions across 21 pages to 306 across 12 after its sitemap dates stopped changing, so Google saw nothing new to fetch.

So a fair retainer promises work and reporting, not a date for a ranking. Judge it at three months on whether the list of work was done and the counts are moving, and at six on enquiries.

What are the warning signs of a poor SEO agency?

Walk away from a guaranteed number one ranking, because nobody controls Google's algorithm. Be wary too of anyone who cannot explain in plain English what they will do this month. Buying links or spinning content is the kind of activity Google's spam policies target, so paying for it can make a site worse.

The good signs are the reverse. Work is tied to enquiries and revenue, with rankings treated as a means. Content is written by people, in line with Google's helpful, reliable, people-first content guidance. You can see what was changed, when, and what happened next in the analytics. The minimum term, what is included each month and what happens when you leave are stated before you sign. If your site already exists and is not ranking, an SEO audit with the fixes implemented comes before an ongoing retainer, because an audit handed over as a report with no implementation is only half the job.

What the report should show

A report that only shows position changes is reporting on the tool, not the work. Ask for the actual list of what happened this month: which pages were published or fixed, which technical issues were closed, which links were reviewed. Then ask what that produced. If a ranking moved and nobody can say which change caused it, or whether it just happened to land inside a core update rolling through that had nothing to do with either of you, the report is decoration rather than evidence.

Contract terms worth reading before you sign

Since November 2023, Australia's unfair contract term protections apply to small businesses as well as consumers, and the threshold is generous: any business with fewer than 100 employees is covered. The ACCC's own guidance gives a term that lets one party change the price at any time while the other side can't exit as a worked example of what "unfair" looks like in practice, which is closer to a standard retainer clause than most people realise.

Read the document for three things specifically: the minimum term, the notice period to cancel, and what happens to the work when you leave. Do the pages that were written stay published. Does account access get handed over cleanly. None of that should require a phone call to find out; it should be written down.

Before you buy twelve months of it

If nobody's looked at the site's technical health in the past year, a retainer isn't the first purchase. Fix the foundations, watch what a month of reporting on the fixed site actually shows, then size an ongoing engagement to what that report says is worth doing. Small business SEO, in order covers where a retainer sits in that sequence in more detail.

Ask whoever is proposing a retainer to show you the specific list of what they did for another client last month, not the plan for you next month, before you sign anything.