This guide gives you the questions we would ask if we were hiring an SEO company ourselves, what the work should cost in Melbourne, and the warning signs that a proposal is padding rather than substance. We have included ourselves honestly at the end, along with the cases where we are the wrong choice.
Ask to see the reporting an existing client receives. How a company explains its own results tells you more than any pitch deck.
The short answer
The best SEO company for you is the one that can show you the specific work they will do in month one, name the person doing it, price it against your actual site rather than a package tier, and let you leave if it stops working. Everything else is decoration.
Most Melbourne businesses do not have an SEO problem. They have a supplier-selection problem. The work itself is well understood: fix what stops Google reading your site, publish pages that answer what your customers search, earn links that prove you are credible. Engagements tend to go well or badly depending on who does that work, how much of your fee reaches it, and how openly progress is reported.
What "best" actually means depends on your situation
Three businesses can search the same phrase and need three different suppliers.
If you are a local service business (a trade, a clinic, a studio) most of your opportunity is in the map pack and a handful of suburb-level searches. You need someone strong on Google Business Profile, citations and local content. You are unlikely to need a large agency with an enterprise content team.
If you run an online store your opportunity is in category pages, product schema and the technical mess that ecommerce platforms generate on their own. You need someone who has fixed faceted navigation before and can talk about crawl budget without reading from a slide.
If you are a B2B supplier or manufacturer your buyers are few, specific and high-value. Volume metrics will mislead you. You need someone willing to chase 40 searches a month because those 40 people are the entire market.
Most providers are strongest in one of these. Ask which one they do most, and ask to see it.
The seven questions to ask any SEO company
1. Who is actually doing the work?
Ask for the name and the seniority of the person who will touch your account week to week, not the person in the pitch. Some providers split selling and delivery between different people. That is not automatically a problem, but you should know it, and the fee should reflect it.
2. What will you do in the first 30 days, specifically?
A good answer names things: a technical crawl and the errors they expect to find, a keyword map, three pages rewritten, tracking fixed. A weak answer describes a phase. "Discovery and strategy" is not a deliverable, it is a calendar entry.
3. How much of my fee reaches the work?
This is a question few people ask. A retainer funds the work plus the structure around it: account management, offices and sales. None of that is unusual, and you are entitled to know the ratio, because it is the single biggest driver of what your money buys.
4. What happens if it does not work?
Ask them to describe a client engagement that underperformed and what they did about it. Anyone with a few years behind them has one. An agency that cannot produce a single example is likely to be very new.
5. Am I locked in?
Long minimum terms are usually justified with "SEO takes time". SEO does take time, but that argues for patience, not for a contract that removes your ability to leave. The two are not the same thing. We work on 30 day terms because the work should have to earn its place every month.
6. What does the reporting actually tell me?
Rankings and traffic are inputs. Enquiries, calls and revenue are outcomes. If the monthly report leads with impressions and keyword counts, you will find it very hard to tell whether you are getting value. Ask to see a real report from a live client with the names removed.
7. How do you handle AI search?
A growing share of Australians now get their answer from an AI summary and never click through to a website. That changes what content has to do: it has to be structured and specific enough to be quoted, not just optimised to rank. Ask how they are adapting.
What SEO actually costs in Melbourne
In our experience, retainers in this market start around $2,500 and commonly run up to $7,000 or more a month. Below roughly $1,000 you are usually buying either a very narrow scope or offshore work at volume. Above $3,000 you should be getting genuine strategic depth, not just more of the same tasks.
The number itself matters less than what sits behind it. A retainer at the top of that range can be better value than a cheaper one, or the reverse, depending on how much of the fee reaches the work. Ask for the scope in hours or deliverables, rather than package tiers.
On timing: most businesses see early movement in about 8 to 12 weeks, with the compounding gains after that. Anyone promising page one inside a month is either targeting phrases nobody searches or doing something you will pay for later.
Five red flags
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee is either meaningless or attached to keywords with no demand.
- No access to your own accounts. Your Search Console, Analytics and Google Business Profile belong to you. You should have access from day one.
- Reports with no losses in them. Every real account has terms going backwards. A report that only shows the green ones is a marketing document.
- Links they will not name. If they cannot tell you where a link came from, it probably came from somewhere you would not want.
- Pricing before diagnosis. A quote given before anyone has looked at your site is a package, not a plan.
Where we fit, and where we do not
We should be straight about our own position. Dizian is a lean, AI-enabled shop, not a large agency. The work covers technical fixes, content, local SEO and authority building. One experienced expert does the research, the audit and the decisions, owns the strategy and checks every output, with AI-enabled technology helping to organise and summarise. Our pricing stays competitive because delivery is AI-enabled, and we pass savings on where we can. We are an accredited Google Partner, we have been at this for over 14 years, and we work on 30 day terms with no lock-in.
We are a good fit if you want a senior person accountable for your account and you want more of your budget to go into the work.
We are the wrong choice if you need a large in-house team on site, if you want a dedicated account manager separate from the person doing the work, or if you are running a national brand campaign that needs a full creative department. Those are real needs and a bigger agency serves them better.
How to run the selection
Shortlist three. Send all of them the same brief and the same seven questions above. Compare the answers side by side rather than the proposals, because proposals are often structured differently. Then pick the one whose answer to question two was the most specific.
If you want a second opinion on where your current SEO budget is actually going, we will look at your site and tell you straight. Book a free digital audit at dizian.com.au/contact, or read how our affordable SEO in Melbourne pricing works and what our SEO services cover.
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