An SEO consultant is usually one experienced person who audits your site, sets the plan and often does the work, while an agency is a team that can take on more of the doing at once. For most Australian small businesses the price gap is smaller than people expect: on 24 September 2026 the median published starting retainer was $960 a month for a consultant and about $1,100 for an agency. The real difference is what the money buys, and who you end up talking to.
We are an agency, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to write the version we would want to read if we were the ones hiring, which means saying plainly when a consultant is the better choice.
Key findings
- We read the websites of 89 Australian SEO providers on 24 September 2026. Only 36 of them (40%) published any price for their own SEO work, and consultants (11 of 28) were no more open about price than agencies (24 of 58).
- The median lowest monthly retainer was $960 for consultants (8 published) and about $1,100 for agencies (22 published). Agency prices were far more spread out, from $150 to $3,000.
- Of 76 Google results for “seo consultant” in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, 36 were agency pages and only 14 belonged to an individual consultant.
- Asked to recommend a freelancer in Sydney, four AI assistants named 12 different people. None of the three businesses in Google’s map pack was named by any of them.
- Asked whether a small business should hire a consultant or an agency, both ChatGPT and Perplexity said to start with a consultant unless you need a lot of ongoing work done.
What does an SEO consultant do, and how is an agency different?
A consultant looks at your website the way Google does, works out why you are not showing up for the searches your customers use, and tells you what to fix in what order. A good one will also do much of the fixing: rewriting page titles, restructuring service pages, sorting out your Google Business Profile, and chasing a handful of useful links. Some only advise and leave the doing to you or your web developer.
An agency does the same kinds of work, but with more hands. There is usually an account manager, a technical person, writers and someone who handles links or digital PR. That means more can happen each month, and the work does not stop when one person is sick or on holiday. It also means the person who sold you the service is often not the person doing it.
The words get used loosely. Plenty of one-person businesses call themselves an agency, and some agencies title their pages with the word consultant to catch the search. We sorted each provider by what its own website said about who does the work, not by the name on the logo. You will also see “SEO specialist” and “SEO freelancer” used for the same kind of person. Google’s results for “seo specialist” are mostly job ads, because that title is more often used for an employee inside a business or agency.
What does an SEO consultant cost in Australia?
We collected every price each provider published for its own SEO work: hourly rates, monthly retainers, audits and one-off projects. We ignored the “most agencies charge between” figures that fill pricing guides, because those are market estimates, not a price anyone has committed to. If you want the wider market picture, our guide to what SEO costs in Australia pulls together the published ranges from ten pricing guides. For what our own SEO agency service includes and costs, the page states it up front: from $2,000 a month for local businesses.
Here is what individual consultants published.
| Consultant (one person) | Published price for their own SEO work | What the page says it buys |
|---|---|---|
| Business Medics (Tom Walker), Sydney | $1,200, $2,300 or $2,999 a month | 5.5, 11 or 16 hours of SEO work a month, no contract on the two lower tiers |
| SEO Perth Expert, Perth | $220 an hour, or plans at $970, $1,760 and $3,300 a month, all including GST | Hands-on monthly plans after a $220 setup fee |
| Jared Bennett, Brisbane | $2,500 to $5,500 or more a month for most clients | Monthly retainer, scope set by the market |
| Aidan Coleman | $800, $2,000 or $4,000 a month | Local, multi-location and national tiers |
| Loudachris, Adelaide | Website SEO from $1,500 + GST a month; one-off Google Business Profile work $750 + GST | Month to month, no lock-in |
| Michael Wolf | From $1,500 a month | Ongoing SEO |
| Dave Hobbs (Freelance SEO) | Wix SEO packages from $950 a month | Ongoing SEO for Wix sites |
| Michael Sherry | From $650 a month | A starting guide, scoped per client |
| All Marketing (Mark Williamson), Perth | $150 + GST an hour | Senior digital marketing time, including SEO |
And here is a spread of what agencies published, including us so you can see where we sit.
| Agency | Lowest published monthly SEO price | Notes from the page |
|---|---|---|
| SEO Perth Experts | $499 | Six tiers up to $2,999 a month |
| 3am Ideas | $950 | Local SEO, no lock-in |
| SEO Melbourne | $1,000 | Hourly consulting also listed at $150 to $300 |
| StudioHawk | $1,900 + GST | Stated on its consulting services page |
| Uprise Digital (this is us) | $2,000 | Local businesses, no lock-in contracts |
| Prosperity Media | Around $2,000 + GST | Entry local SEO campaign |
| Spicy Web | $2,200 + GST | Tiers at $4,400 and $6,600 |
| Bonfire | $2,990 | Perth SEO services |
| Websites That Sell | $3,000 + GST minimum | Hourly rate $150 + GST |
The chart below puts every published starting price on one line, so you can see how the two groups compare.
What the fee actually buys
The medians are close, so price alone will not settle the question. What changes is the kind of work behind the number. Business Medics is the most useful example we found because it publishes hours: $1,200 buys 5.5 hours of one person’s time a month, which works out at about $218 an hour, and the top tier drops to about $187 an hour. The few hourly rates we found sat in the same zone, from $150 + GST (All Marketing, and Websites That Sell on the agency side) to $220 including GST (SEO Perth Expert), with SEO Melbourne listing $150 to $300 an hour for consulting.
So a $1,200 consultant retainer is roughly five or six hours of a senior person. A $1,200 agency retainer might be the same hours split between an account manager, a junior and a report. Neither is wrong. You just need to ask whose hours they are.
Of the five agency prices at $500 a month or less, three came from a web host and two productised plans that lean on automated tools. No consultant published an ongoing monthly price under $650. That fits what you would expect: one person cannot survive on $300 clients, while a platform with software doing most of the work can.
Who Google shows when you search for a consultant
Search volume data for Australia shows about 1,600 searches a month for “seo consultant”, plus 1,000 each for the Sydney and Melbourne versions and 590 each for Brisbane and Perth. Most of those people want one person. Google mostly shows them agencies.
We pulled the top 20 Google results for that phrase plus each of the four cities on 24 September 2026, and sorted all 76 results by who they belonged to.
In the top 10 alone it was 16 agency pages, 13 directories or lists, 10 consultants and one other. Brisbane was the friendliest city for independents, with 4 consultants in its top 10. Adding the word “freelance” to the search flips it: 9 of the 19 results were individual consultants and none were agencies. If you want one person, put the word freelance in the search, or look at the name on the About page before you ring.
What ChatGPT and Perplexity advise, and who they named
As part of our shared study on 24 September 2026, we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode the same thing: “Can you recommend a freelance SEO consultant in Sydney? Give me a shortlist with reasons.”
The four chat assistants named 12 different people between them. Dave Hobbs was named by three (Gemini, Perplexity and Claude). Blake Smith, Phoebe Story, Tom Walker, Liam Ridings and Raffaella Bronzi were each named by two. ChatGPT’s five names and Gemini’s five had no one in common. Google AI Mode named one business only. And none of the three businesses in Google’s map pack for the same search was named by any assistant. All three were agencies, two of them with names that are simply search phrases, which is not what the question asked for. On this prompt the assistants arguably answered the question better than the map pack did.
That lack of agreement is normal. Across all 24 prompts in the study, 272 of the 394 businesses named were named by only one of the four chat assistants, and our study of how AI answers change between runs shows even the same assistant rarely repeats itself exactly. Being named once is not proof of quality, and not being named is not proof of anything bad.
We then asked ChatGPT and Perplexity a second question: “Should I hire an SEO consultant or an agency for my small business in Australia?” Their answers were close to identical in substance.
“For most Australian small businesses, start with an experienced independent SEO consultant rather than a full-service agency.”
ChatGPT, web search on, 24 September 2026
Perplexity said the better choice is usually a consultant “if you need senior advice, a clear roadmap, or a limited scope of work”, and an agency “if you need ongoing execution across content, technical SEO, local SEO, and reporting, and you do not have internal capacity”. ChatGPT went further and suggested starting with a paid discovery project and a 90-day plan, then deciding whether the workload justifies a team. Neither named a single provider.
Look at where that advice came from, though. ChatGPT cited three sources: one independent consultant’s blog, Google’s own guidance on hiring an SEO, and the ACCC. Perplexity linked 20 pages, and 17 of them were written by consultants or agencies selling one side of this exact decision. The advice is sensible, and as an agency we agree with most of it, but it is built on marketing pages rather than independent research. If you care about how assistants choose those sources, we cover it in how businesses get recommended by ChatGPT.
SEO consultant vs agency: a fair decision table
This is the table we would give a friend. It leans towards a consultant more often than you might expect from an agency blog, because for a lot of small businesses that is the right call.
| Your situation | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One location, one or two core services, a site under about 30 pages | Consultant | The work fits into a handful of senior hours a month, and you get the expert directly |
| You have a web developer or writer who can make changes | Consultant | You are paying for direction, not labour you already have |
| You need an audit, a second opinion or a plan before committing | Consultant | A one-off project is cheaper than a retainer and tells you what the site really needs |
| Budget under about $1,000 a month | Consultant, or do it yourself with guidance | At that price an agency package buys a few hours or leans on automation, so one senior person’s hours go further |
| Several locations, or dozens of service and suburb pages to build | Agency | The volume of writing and technical work is more than one person can keep up with |
| SEO has to line up with Google Ads, Meta ads or a website rebuild | Agency | One team coordinating the channels avoids three suppliers blaming each other |
| Search is your main source of leads and a quiet month hurts | Agency, or a consultant with a named backup | You need the work to continue through holidays and illness |
| Regulated advertising, such as legal or health | Either, if they know the rules | Industry knowledge matters more than team size |
A few notes on the edges. If you are a law firm, the advertising rules shape every page, so whoever you hire needs to know them; our overview of law firm marketing in Australia covers what that involves. Builders are a similar case: SEO for builders is mostly project pages, suburbs and reviews, and many builders also run paid social, which tips things towards one team handling both. And if you already have a marketing person on staff, you may only need a consultant in an advisory lane, which is the split we describe in AI SEO agency versus in-house.
What to check before you hire anyone
The checks are the same either way. Google publishes a short page on whether you need an SEO and how to choose one, and its list of interview questions is still the best starting point: what results do you expect and in what timeframe, what is your experience in my industry and my city, and will you share every change you make and why. It is also blunt about the biggest warning sign: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
Google Search Central’s own short video on hiring an SEO covers the same ground and is worth watching before your first call.
On top of Google’s list, these are the questions that separate a good consultant from a bad one, and a good agency from a bad one:
- Whose hours am I buying? With an agency, ask to meet the person who will do the work, not just the one selling it. With a consultant, ask whether any work is passed to contractors or offshore teams.
- How many hours does my fee buy? Business Medics publishes this. Anyone can tell you if you ask.
- What happens when you are away? A consultant should have an answer. “Nothing happens for two weeks” is an honest one, and fine for many businesses.
- Who owns the accounts? Your Google Business Profile, Search Console, analytics and website logins should be in your business’s name, with the provider added as a user.
- What are the exit terms? Read the notice period and any automatic renewal. The ACCC explains the rules on unfair terms in standard form contracts, which cover many small business contracts.
- Is the price including GST? Many pages do not say. SEO Perth Expert includes it, most agencies quote without it, and on a $2,000 retainer that is $200 a month.
Our longer checklist on choosing a marketing agency without getting burned covers red flags in proposals, and our list of Sydney SEO agencies shows how we compared providers on published evidence.
The third option: hiring an SEO specialist
Some businesses skip both and hire their own SEO specialist. SEEK’s salary data, updated for September 2026, puts the average salary for a search engine optimisation specialist in Australia at between $80,000 and $90,000 a year. On a 38-hour week that is roughly $40 to $46 an hour before super, leave, tools and your own time managing them.
That looks cheap next to $150 to $220 an hour for a consultant. The catch is that you are paying for 38 hours every week whether there are 38 hours of useful SEO work or not, and one person on salary does not bring the range a consultant or agency has seen across many clients. For most businesses under a few million dollars in revenue, a full-time hire only makes sense when search is already producing a lot of the leads and there is a steady queue of pages to write.
How we did this research
On 24 September 2026 we ran live Google searches in Australia (desktop, top 20 results) for ten phrases: “seo consultant” on its own, with each of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, and with “freelance” and “cost” added, plus “seo specialist”, “seo agency pricing australia” and “seo packages australia”. We set aside directories, marketplaces, social sites, job boards and overseas listicles, then added the independent consultants the AI assistants named in our shared study. That gave 93 provider websites.
For each one we fetched the homepage, the page that ranked, and up to three pages linked with words like pricing, packages or cost. We extracted every price the provider stated for its own SEO work, checked each quote by hand, and classed the provider as a consultant (one person, as described by their own site) or an agency (a team). Three sites blocked our requests and one turned out not to sell SEO, leaving 89: 28 consultants, 58 agencies and 3 we could not place. Market figures in pricing guides were excluded, and so were two agencies whose only figures were a keyword add-on or tiers framed as a market guide.
The limits are real. The sample is the providers Google shows for these searches, not every provider in Australia. We read pages without running JavaScript, so a price shown only by a script could be missed. Only 8 consultants and 22 agencies published a monthly price, so the medians are indicative rather than precise, and GST treatment was often unstated. The AI answers were a single run of each prompt through the API versions of each assistant with web search switched on, not the consumer apps, and AI answers vary from run to run.
Frequently asked questions
What does a SEO consultant do?
A consultant reviews your website, works out why it is not showing up for the searches your customers make, and sets a plan to fix it in order of impact. Most also do the work: page rewrites, technical fixes, Google Business Profile updates and some link building. Some only advise and leave the changes to you or your developer, so ask which kind you are talking to.
How much does an SEO consultant cost?
Among the Australian consultants we checked on 24 September 2026 that published a monthly price, the lowest retainers ran from $650 to $2,500 a month, with a median of $960. The hourly rates we found were $150 + GST and $220 including GST. Most consultants, 17 of the 28 we checked, did not publish a price at all, so expect to ask.
What is the average salary for an SEO specialist in Australia?
SEEK puts the average salary for a search engine optimisation specialist in Australia at between $80,000 and $90,000 a year, on its salary page updated for September 2026. That is before super and other employment costs. Senior and management roles pay more.
Is a freelance SEO consultant cheaper than an agency?
Not by as much as most people expect. The median published starting retainer was $960 for consultants and about $1,100 for agencies in our sample. The bigger difference is that a consultant’s fee buys one senior person’s hours, while an agency’s fee is shared across a team and some overhead.
Can I switch from a consultant to an agency later?
Yes, and it is a common path. Start with an audit and a 90-day plan from a consultant, then move to a team if the workload grows beyond one person. Make sure your accounts, content and website stay in your business’s name so the handover is easy.
Is SEO replaced by AI?
No. AI assistants still build their answers from websites, and Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond the normal basics of being indexed and eligible to show in Search. What has changed is that being named in an AI answer now matters as well as ranking, which is why whoever does your SEO should also check how you appear in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
If you would like a second opinion on whether you need a consultant, an agency or neither yet, we are happy to look at your site and tell you honestly, even if the answer is that a consultant suits you better. You can see what we include and what we charge on our SEO services page for Australian businesses.
