I'm Ayman, and I run Ayman Results, a small SEO agency in Western Sydney. "How much does SEO cost?" is the first question nearly every tradie asks me, usually straight after "does it actually work?" Fair enough. A lot of tradies I meet have already paid someone for SEO and got nothing for it.
So here's a straight answer. I'll give you the price ranges Australian businesses are paying in 2026, what you should get at each level, and how to work out whether it's worth it for your trade. I won't pretend there's one price for everyone, because there isn't.
The short version
- Most Australian small businesses pay $1,500 to $3,500 a month for SEO. Local tradies working one area often pay $800 to $1,500.
- The price depends on how busy your trade is, how big your area is and what shape your website and Google profile are in.
- Under about $500 a month, you're usually paying for reports, not work.
- Good SEO for a tradie focuses on your Google Business Profile, service and area pages, citations and reviews, and reports calls and enquiries, not just rankings.
- It pays for itself when a few extra jobs a month cover the fee. Work out your number before you sign anything.
What tradies actually pay for SEO
Australian SEO cost guides published in 2026 land in roughly the same place. One puts the typical small business at $1,500 to $3,000 a month. Guides for Brisbane and Melbourne give $1,500 to $3,500. For a single-suburb service business chasing the Google Maps top 3, one Melbourne guide puts it at $800 to $1,500 a month.
| Monthly price | Who it suits | What it usually means |
|---|---|---|
| Under $500 | Nobody, really | Automated reports, a few directory listings, very little real work |
| $800 to $1,500 | A tradie covering one main area | Google Business Profile work, a handful of new pages a month, citations, review strategy |
| $1,500 to $3,500 | Busier trades, bigger areas, several services | All of the above plus more content, link building and a website that needs real work |
| $3,500+ | Multiple locations, very competitive trades | Several cities or regions at once, heavy content and links |
You'll also see one-off setup fees, often for a new website or a full audit. A tradie website is a separate cost from monthly SEO, though plenty of agencies, including us, do both.
The question isn't "how cheap can I get SEO?" It's "how many jobs does it need to bring in to be worth it?"
What changes the price
How busy your trade is
"Emergency plumber Sydney" is a fight. "Septic tank cleaning Hawkesbury" isn't. The more businesses chasing the same searches, the more work it takes to get above them. Plumbers, electricians and builders in Sydney are at the busy end. Niche trades are often surprisingly easy. When we started with WeFlow Pressure Cleaning, the competition looked crowded but turned out weak, and they hit Google's first page in about four weeks.
How big your area is
Ranking across one region, like Western Sydney or the Hills, is very different to ranking across all of Sydney. Google Maps leans heavily on distance, so covering a bigger area takes more pages, more reviews and more time.
Where you're starting from
No website? A profile with two reviews and no services listed? That's more work up front than a tradie with a decent site and 80 reviews. STC Tank Cleaners had no website at all, so the first job was building one.
What you should get for your money
Whatever you pay, a good local SEO service for a tradie should include most of this. If yours doesn't, ask why.
- A benchmark before anything starts. Where you rank now across your area, ideally as a geo-grid scan, so you can see what changed later.
- Google Business Profile work. The right primary category, every service listed, every field filled in, weekly posts and photos.
- Service and area pages. A proper page for each main service and each area you want to win, not one page with a bullet list.
- Citations. Your details listed consistently on the directories that matter, like Apple, Bing and the ones already ranking for your trade.
- A review plan. A simple way to ask every customer, so reviews keep coming in.
- Reports that mean something. Calls, quote forms and clicks from Google, not just a list of rankings for phrases nobody searches.
- Your access to everything. You own your website, your domain, your Google profile and your analytics.
I've laid out the full process we follow in how to rank higher on Google Maps, if you want to see what the work looks like week by week.
Red flags in cheap SEO
Cheap SEO isn't always bad, and expensive SEO isn't always good. But these are the signs I see again and again in the accounts tradies bring to me after they've been burnt:
- Guaranteed #1 rankings. Nobody controls Google. Promising a position is a guess, or worse.
- Long lock-in contracts. 12 or 24 months with no way out if nothing happens.
- They own your website or Google profile. Australia's small business ombudsman has warned about firms that keep your website when the contract ends.
- Hundreds of links for $99. Cheap bulk links can do more harm than good.
- Reports full of rankings, but no calls. If the phone isn't ringing more, the rankings aren't the right ones.
- Nobody can tell you what they did this month. You should be able to get a plain answer.
If you're comparing agencies right now, I wrote a list of questions to ask before you hire an SEO agency. Use it on us too.
Will SEO pay for itself?
Here's the simplest way to work it out. Take the monthly fee, and divide it by your average profit per job. That's how many extra jobs a month SEO needs to bring in to break even.
For most tradies, three or four extra jobs a month from Google is very achievable once you're in the top 3 on the map. The catch is time. SEO usually takes 6 to 12 weeks to start moving and longer to hit full speed, so you need to be able to carry the cost for a few months first. If you need calls this week, Google Ads can bridge the gap while SEO builds.
Try this week
- Work out your average profit per job, and how many extra jobs a month a given fee would need.
- Ask how many of your jobs last month came from Google. If you don't know, start asking every customer "how did you find us?"
Can you do SEO yourself?
Yes, a lot of it. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your photos cost nothing but time. If you've got a few hours a week and some patience, you can make real progress on your own, and my Google Maps guide walks you through it.
Where most tradies stall is the website side: service pages, area pages, title tags, schema, citations. It's not hard to understand. It's just slow, and you've got jobs to run. That's the part people usually hand over.
What it looked like for a Sydney flooring company
Jimmy at Design Timber Flooring had already paid an SEO agency thousands and got nothing. So he had every reason to be suspicious. We built his website and ran our local SEO process. He now ranks in the top 3 on Google for "timber flooring contractors".
For a flooring job, a handful of those 26 quotes turning into work pays for months of SEO. That's the maths that matters. If you're in Western Sydney, here's how we price and run SEO in Western Sydney, and if you're a small business anywhere in Sydney, here's our small business SEO.