SEO Agency Melbourne
Melbourne is one of Australia's most competitive digital markets, and every agency in the CBD will promise you page 1. Chris Lourenco, Director, runs your account himself, publishes what it costs before you book a call, and tells you which parts of this job genuinely need someone in the room.
Chris Lourenco, Director, runs your account. Who that is →
AI Overview
Loudachris is an SEO company serving Melbourne businesses from Adelaide, led by owner-operator Chris Lourenco, Director, so the person who runs your audit runs your account. SEO starts at $1,500+GST per month across 3 published tiers, month to month, with no lock-in contract. Services cover technical SEO, on-page and content, local SEO, digital PR, AI search visibility and monthly reporting. There is no Melbourne office, so we do not appear in the Melbourne map 3-pack and we say so rather than implying otherwise. Google Partner, 8 years, 21 5-star reviews on the Melbourne profile.
At a glance
- SEO from
- $1,500+GST/month
- Contract
- Month to month
- Who does the work
- Chris Lourenco, Director
- Certification
- Google Partner
- Melbourne reviews
- 19, all 5-star
- Australia-wide
- 150+ reviews
- Based in
- Wayville, Adelaide
- Melbourne map 3-pack
- Not eligible
The last row is the one nobody else publishes. The Melbourne map 3-pack needs a Melbourne address and a review profile in the hundreds, and we have neither, so we will not appear in it. Every other row is what you are actually buying.
What The Research Found
What no Melbourne SEO agency will tell you
Before writing this page we read every result on the 4 searches a Melbourne business actually types when it goes looking for an SEO agency. The same 3 gaps appear on almost every page in the top 12. Here they are, and here is where we sit on each one.
Nobody publishes what they charge
Across those 4 search results, not one agency page publishes its own rate card. Google has noticed the demand: 2 of the 4 questions in the People Also Ask box on those searches are about cost, and no page in the top 12 answers either of them with a number. Meanwhile the published market runs from roughly $800 a month at the low end to $10,000+ at enterprise, hourly rates cluster between $100 and $199, and a major agency directory puts the average SEO project at about $37,000 over roughly 12 months. That is a 12x spread, and every page you are comparing declines to say where inside it they sit.
Ours is on the page: SEO from $1,500+GST a month, in 3 tiers at $1,500, $2,500 and $4,000+GST. Month to month, with no lock-in contract. The full working is in our SEO cost breakdown.
Nobody names who will actually touch the account
Not a single page in that top 12 names the person who will be logging into your Google Search Console. You get a brand, a capability list and a stock photo, and you find out who was assigned to you after the invoice clears. Loudachris is different in a way that is easy to verify: Chris Lourenco, Director, does the work. Google Partner, 8 years, 200+ campaigns and $3M+ in managed ad spend. The same name is on the strategy, the reporting, and the reply when you email at 4pm on a Thursday.
Nobody tells you when a local agency genuinely matters
Of the 12 operators ranking for Melbourne SEO, 4 are not based in Melbourne at all. They run out of New Zealand, Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast, and all 4 conceal it. We are in Adelaide, at 21-22 Greenhill Rd, Wayville, and we would rather tell you exactly when that helps you and when it costs you.
An address buys a place in the Google map 3-pack. It does not buy organic position: on that same search, the operator with the strongest local signals of anyone ranks 12th. We set out exactly what proximity does and does not buy, and which part of it is closed to us, in where we are and what that changes.
The buyer's checklist
How to choose an SEO company in Melbourne.
Here are the 8 things worth checking, what each is actually testing, and our own answer to every one of them, including where we fall short. A checklist you cannot fail is a sales page wearing a lab coat.
Work out what proximity actually buys
What to check. Split the job into the parts that need someone in the room and the parts that do not, then check whether the agency is honest about the split. Ask for it itemised both ways.
Why it matters. Proximity is sold as a proxy for accountability and it is not one. On the Melbourne SEO results we analysed, the page with the strongest local signals ranks 12th organically: local presence converts into the map 3-pack, not into organic position. It is also the most faked claim on that search, with 4 of the top 12 operators based in New Zealand, Sydney, Perth or the Gold Coast and all 4 concealing it. The test is not where an agency sits, it is whether they tell you.
Genuinely needs someone local
- The map 3-pack, which needs a real Melbourne address
- In-person strategy workshops
- Filming on site
- Walking a premises before writing about it
Does not need someone local
- Technical audits, crawl and index work
- Keyword research and content
- Digital PR, rebuilds and migrations, ecommerce
- Google Business Profile management and reporting
- AI search visibility
Our answer. We are Adelaide based, at 21-22 Greenhill Rd, Wayville, and we run the right-hand column for Melbourne clients from there, out to Dandenong, Frankston and Ballarat. Where we fall short is the left-hand column, and the map 3-pack in particular: no Melbourne address, and 19 reviews on the Melbourne profile against a pack floor in the hundreds. That pack is closed to us. If it is the whole of your plan, hire a Melbourne shopfront.
A published price you can read before a call
What to check. Whether you can find a real number on their site without handing over your phone number first.
Why it matters. Across the 4 Melbourne SEO results pages we analysed, no agency published its own rate card, and while 2 of the 4 People Also Ask questions on that search are about cost, no page in the top 12 answers them with a number. Published Melbourne rates run from roughly $800 a month at the low end to $10,000+ at enterprise, hourly rates cluster between $100 and $199, and a major agency directory puts the average SEO project at about $37,000 over roughly 12 months. A price you can only get on a call is a price built around you.
Our answer. SEO from $1,500+GST a month, in 3 tiers: $1,500, $2,500 and $4,000+GST. Google Ads management from $800+GST a month. Full breakdown on our SEO cost page. Where we fall short: $1,500 sits well above the bottom of that published range, so on price alone the cheap end of the market beats us every time.
Named clients you can look up
What to check. Full business and owner names you can search and ring, not a wall of logos.
Why it matters. A logo proves an invoice was raised once. A named owner is a phone call you can make.
Our answer. Our named Melbourne client is Mark L Hair. Mark Laird is a hair colour specialist who came to us wanting Instagram ads. We showed him the bigger opportunity sat in local SEO around hair colour specialist Melbourne plus content syndication, and he took it from there. He has since gone on to buy his own salon. Where we fall short: he is the only Melbourne name we have. Every other client we name is South Australian and labelled that way rather than left to read as local, on our results page.
Who does the work in month 6
What to check. The name of the person who will be in your account in month 6, and what changes once onboarding ends.
Why it matters. The person who runs the pitch is often not the person running the account by the second quarter, and that handover is where strategy quietly becomes a checklist.
Our answer. Chris Lourenco, Director, does the work in month 1 and in month 6: 8 years, 200+ campaigns, $3M+ in managed ad spend, Google Partner, and the same person accountable for all of it. Where we fall short: a named principal has a hard capacity ceiling, so when we are full we say no rather than quietly reassign your account.
Reviews on the platform your customers use, split by location
What to check. The review count per Google profile, city by city, not a single merged national total.
Why it matters. A national figure tells you nothing about the office that would run your account, and merging profiles is the oldest presentation trick in the category.
Our answer. There are 21 5-star reviews on the Melbourne Google profile, 95 on the Adelaide profile, and more than 130 Australia-wide. Where we fall short: 19 is a small number for a city this size, and we will not let the 130 read as a Melbourne figure. Ask every agency on your shortlist to split their reviews by profile and see how many can.
Willingness to show an account still climbing
What to check. A live account that is only part way there, not just the finished case study.
Why it matters. Case studies are chosen after the fact. An unfinished account shows you how an agency reports when the numbers are not yet flattering, which is what you will be reading in your own month 3.
Our answer. Trusted Mechanical, run by Travis Dunn at Lonsdale in South Australia rather than Melbourne, went live on 25 June 2026. Organic clicks have moved from about 5 a day to about 13, and average position is still around 32. Where we fall short: that is an unimpressive position number, and we publish it unfinished on purpose.
Exit terms, and who owns what
What to check. Notice period, minimum term, and what happens to the content, the tracking and the profiles the day after you leave. Get it answered in writing before you sign.
Why it matters. A lock-in contract pays an agency to stop trying in month 4, and the ownership question decides whether 12 months of work leaves you with an asset or a rental.
Our answer. Month to month, no lock-in, so every month has to earn the next. Ask what you keep if you leave and you will have the answer in writing before you sign anything. Where we fall short: no lock-in also means no 12-month ranking promise, because nobody can make that promise honestly.
Whether they will take a business that competes with you
What to check. Whether they will sign a competitor in your category and your city, and what they tell you if they already have.
Why it matters. An agency running 4 plumbers across the same suburbs is optimising against itself. Somebody in that group has to come 2nd, and they will never be told it was them.
Our answer. Ask before you sign and we will tell you plainly whether we already work with a competitor in your category and your city, so you decide with the facts in front of you. Where we fall short: we will not promise blanket category exclusivity across Melbourne, because that is a promise the market breaks quietly and often.
A disqualifier, said plainly
If you need leads inside 30 days, do not buy SEO. Not from us, and not from anyone quoting you a 30-day result. In a market this size it is a 6 to 12 month build, and the first quarter is groundwork you cannot see from outside.
When the timeline is that short, the honest answer is Google Ads, which buys attention this week and costs from $800+GST a month to manage. Start there and add SEO once the pipeline is no longer on fire. If you would rather talk it through first, the strategy call exists for exactly that.
The comparison page 1 avoids
Local Melbourne agency, remote specialist, freelancer, in-house or offshore
Melbourne SEO consultants, agencies and freelancers all sell the same outcome and deliver it 4 different ways. Add offshore and it is 5. Cost is the easiest column to compare and the least useful, so read the proximity column first.
We work Melbourne from Adelaide and we say so in the first line, because 4 of the 12 pages ranking for these terms are run from New Zealand, Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast, and all 4 conceal it. That is a decision you should get to make on day 1, not discover in month 3. Here is the honest version, including the rows where the answer is not us.
| Model | Typical monthly cost | Who does the work | What proximity actually buys you | Time to first result | Exit terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local Melbourne agency | Published Melbourne rates run from about $800 a month at the low end to $10,000+ at enterprise | An account manager you meet, with execution passed to staff you do not | A Melbourne address, which is the one thing that can earn a map 3-pack listing, plus meetings in the room | 3 to 6 months organic. Map results can move sooner if the profile is genuinely active | Frequently 6 or 12 month terms. Ask before you sign, not after |
| Remote specialistThis is us | From $1,500+GST/month, across 3 tiers at $1,500, $2,500 and $4,000+GST | Chris Lourenco, Director. The person quoting is the person doing the work | Nothing you can measure in an organic ranking. It costs you the map 3-pack, which we concede below | 3 to 6 months, and you see the leading indicators well before that | Month to month, no lock-in. Leave whenever it stops earning |
| Freelancer | The cheapest local option. Australian hourly rates cluster between $100 and $199 | The freelancer, personally. That is the whole appeal and it is a real one | Real if they are genuinely Melbourne based. Verify the address rather than the phone number | Fast on a narrow, well-defined brief. Slow the moment the brief widens | Usually easy. There is also no bench when they are sick or take a bigger client |
| In-house hire | A full-time salary, plus superannuation, on-costs and the tool stack | Your employee, 40 hours a week, on nobody else | Total. They sit in your Melbourne office and learn your customers properly | The slowest start of the 5: recruit, notice period, then ramp-up | Notice, entitlements, and a vacancy you have to refill |
| Offshore provider | The cheapest headline number you will see anywhere, because the saving is entirely labour cost | A production team you never meet, often behind an Australian-sounding brand | Zero, and usually disguised. Ask which city, then ask for the street address | Reporting arrives fast. Rankings do not | Easy to leave, and you inherit whatever links were built in your name |
Every number in that cost column came from published market data, not from a quote request. Across the 4 Melbourne SEO search results we studied, no agency page publishes its own rate card, 2 of the 4 People Also Ask questions are about cost, and no page in the top 12 answers either of them with a number. A major agency directory puts the average SEO project at about $37,000 over roughly 12 months, which is the figure the silence protects. Ours is on the SEO pricing page, and the no-lock-in position is set out under no-contract SEO.
What a Melbourne address actually wins
The map 3-pack, and very little else. On this exact search result, the page carrying the strongest local signals sits 12th organically, which tells you proximity converts into the map and not into position. The 3-pack is closed to us: there is no Melbourne office, and the Melbourne profile carries 21 5-star reviews against a pack floor in the hundreds. If a map listing is the entire goal, hire a business with a Melbourne street address. How that pack is won is set out in local SEO.
Where the remote row wins instead
Organic Melbourne rankings are a keyword, content and technical problem, and none of those 3 care where the work is done. They care who is doing it, which is why the person on this page is named. If a monthly meeting in your boardroom is the actual deliverable, take row 1 and we will tell you so on the strategy call rather than sell around it.
Where We Are
Where we are, and what that actually changes for you
Loudachris Digital Marketing sits at 21-22 Greenhill Rd, Wayville, in Adelaide. There is no Melbourne office, and this page is not going to pretend there is one. Chris Lourenco, Director, runs Melbourne accounts from Adelaide, and every Melbourne client has known that from the first conversation.
That costs us exactly one thing, and it is worth naming before you read another line of this page.
The map 3-pack is closed to us, and we are not going to pretend otherwise
The 3 business listings that sit above the organic results for "SEO agency Melbourne" are decided by a verified Melbourne address and a review profile running into the hundreds. We have 19 reviews on our Melbourne profile and no Melbourne address. So we will not appear there. No budget, no retainer and no amount of work changes that, and any agency that tells you otherwise is selling something it cannot deliver.
If the map pack is the thing you are buying, hire a firm with a Melbourne office and a decade of Melbourne reviews behind it. That is the one advantage being local genuinely wins.
What being local does not win is organic position
When we looked at the 12 pages holding the top organic results for the main Melbourne SEO terms, 4 of them belonged to operators based in New Zealand, Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast. All 4 present as Melbourne businesses. None of them tells you where it actually sits. Meanwhile the page on that result set carrying the strongest local signals of the lot ranks 12th organically.
Local presence converts into the map pack. It does not convert into organic rank, which is where buyers who compare 3 agencies before enquiring actually land. The difference between us and 4 of the pages you are weighing us against is not the postcode. It is that we told you ours.
The review numbers, split the way they should be
19
5-star reviews on our Melbourne Google Business Profile. This is the Melbourne number.
95
5-star reviews on the Adelaide profile, where we have been based for 8 years.
150+
5-star reviews Australia-wide, every profile added together. Not a Melbourne figure.
Those 3 numbers stay apart on purpose. The Melbourne number is 19. Folding it into the national total would make this section read better and would be the first dishonest thing on the page.
Behind them sit 8 years, 200+ campaigns and $3M+ in ad spend managed as a Google Partner. The record is on our results page, and the person running your account is on his own page, not behind a stock photo. If the honesty is the part you want to test, ask us something hard.
The structural problem nobody writes about
Melbourne is not 1 local search market. It is several.
Most cities have a single gravity. Commercial catchments bend back toward 1 centre, so a business that earns local visibility tends to hold it across most of the metro. Melbourne does not behave that way, and that structural difference changes what a local SEO plan should be trying to do before a single keyword is chosen.
Greater Melbourne runs more than 30km across in most directions and it has genuinely competing centres rather than 1 dominant one. The CBD, Richmond, Box Hill, Dandenong and Footscray each hold their own commercial catchment. Each one carries its own cluster of searchers, its own set of nearby competitors, and its own map pack.
That last part is what quietly wastes budget. Map results are assembled relative to where the searcher is standing, not relative to a city. A business sitting at the top of the pack for a query typed in Richmond can be absent for the identical query typed in Box Hill, because the candidate set around the searcher has changed entirely. You are not competing on 1 grid. You are competing on several, and each has different incumbents.
| Question | Single-centre metro | Melbourne |
|---|---|---|
| How far a ranking travels | A strong local position tends to carry across the metro | A position earned in 1 centre stops at the edge of that centre's catchment |
| What a realistic footprint looks like | The city, treated as 1 target | The 2 or 3 centres you have a real reason to be visible in |
| Where the effort goes | 1 grid, deepened | Chosen centres, plus the surfaces that ignore proximity entirely |
Why we will not sell you a page for every suburb
The obvious response to a polycentric city is to publish a page per suburb and hope 1 of them catches. We do not do it, and we will talk you out of it. A grid of near-identical suburb pages, published by an operator with no presence in any of those suburbs, is a doorway pattern. It reads as content built for an index rather than for a person, it splits authority across pages that each rank for nothing, and it puts the rest of the site at risk for a handful of low-volume queries. We are Adelaide based and we say so on this page, so a page written as though we sit in Footscray would be a claim we cannot support.
The honest version is narrower and works better. Pick the centres where the business has a genuine reason to be found, meaning where it services, where it delivers, and where its existing customers already come from. Build real depth for those. Then put the remaining effort into the surfaces that are not proximity weighted at all: organic positions, comparison and cost queries, and the answers assistants assemble. Those reach the whole metro, because they are not tied to where the searcher happens to be standing.
The mechanics behind all of this, proximity, the grid and what actually moves a map position, are set out on our local SEO page.
What the engagement actually contains
The 6 SEO services in Melbourne we run, and what each one puts in your hands
Every engagement runs on the same 6 pillars. Which of them carries the weight in month 1 is decided by what the crawl and the search data say about your site, never by a package name on a pricing table. Rates start at $1,500+GST/month across 3 tiers ($1,500, $2,500 and $4,000+GST per month), month to month with no lock-in. What sits inside each tier is published in full on our SEO pricing page, and the wider method is set out on our main SEO page.
Technical foundations
Nothing else compounds until Google can crawl, render and index the site cleanly. We start with a full crawl of every URL, then work through indexation status in Search Console, Core Web Vitals measured on real mobile connections, render-blocking scripts, redirect chains, orphaned pages, duplicate title tags and thin templates that drag down an entire folder. Schema markup goes on at the same time: LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ and Article where each one earns its place.
You receive: a prioritised fix list with a severity rating against every line, and then the fixes shipped. Not a 60 page PDF handed over for someone else to action. Where the platform is locked, we write the exact tickets your developer needs.
On-page and content
Melbourne demand splits into hundreds of long-tail queries a homepage was never going to answer. We map every commercial keyword to a single owning page, end the cannibalisation where 3 of your pages compete for the same term, then rewrite titles, meta descriptions, H1s and body copy against real search intent rather than a keyword density target. Where the page does not exist yet, we write the brief and the page: service pages, suburb pages for Dandenong, Frankston and Ballarat, cost guides and comparison pages.
You receive: a keyword-to-URL map, a rolling content calendar, and published pages you approve before they go live.
Local SEO and the map pack
The map 3-pack is a separate ranking system to organic, decided on address, proximity, categories and review volume. For clients who hold a Melbourne address we run the whole pack programme: Business Profile categories and services, geo-consistent citations, review generation, photography, Q&A and posts. On ourselves we will be straight with you. We are Adelaide based, we hold 21 5-star reviews on our Melbourne profile against a pack floor in the hundreds, and we do not rank in the Melbourne 3-pack. We concede it in writing rather than quietly hoping you never check.
You receive: a grid-based pack ranking scan and a monthly review count. Full detail on our local SEO page.
Digital PR and links
In a market this contested, links are still what separates page 1 from page 3, and the ones that hold are earned rather than bought. We build authority through digital PR: data-led stories worth a journalist's time, expert commentary, industry and association listings, sponsorship of things you genuinely sponsor, and reclaiming the unlinked mentions your business has already collected. Our own domain sits at DR 62, so this is a method we run on ourselves before we run it on you.
You receive: a live link log with every referring domain won, its date, its authority and its anchor text, plus the angles still in flight. We never buy placements or touch private blog networks, because both are a penalty waiting to land on you.
AI search visibility
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot now answer a large share of the questions that used to begin a search. Across the 4 Melbourne SEO results pages we analysed, this was the clearest gap of the lot: pages announce an AI search section header and then put no method underneath it, no entity work, no citation strategy, nothing an assistant could pick up and quote. We do the opposite. We structure entities and schema so a model can parse who you are, build the citable assets that get quoted back, and track which prompts surface your business and which surface someone else.
You receive: a prompt visibility report beside the ranking report. The method is documented on our AI search page.
Reporting, and what lands in your inbox
The monthly report comes from Chris Lourenco, Director, and it opens with the numbers that pay you: enquiries, calls and form fills, ahead of impressions. Under that sits ranked keyword movement pulled from Search Console rather than a third-party tracker, the pages that gained and the pages that lost, every change shipped that month, and what is queued for the next one. Losses get reported in the week they happen, not buried at the back.
You receive: that report, and an invoice that has to justify itself every 30 days, because the engagement is month to month with no lock-in. Rates start at $1,500+GST/month and are published in full on our cost page, which almost nothing else on this results page does.
All 6 are running on live accounts today, and the numbers behind them sit on our results page. If you want to know which 2 or 3 would move your site first, send us the domain through the contact form and we will tell you what the crawl says, before you spend anything.
Month 1, Month 3, Month 6
The schedule is published. So is the exit.
Nobody can tell you the week you will rank in Melbourne, and anyone who names a date is guessing. They do not control Google's index, what your competitors spend next quarter, or how much neglect your domain is carrying. What we can publish is the build schedule: what gets made, when it gets made, and what is sitting in front of you at the end of each stage.
Read it next to the terms, because the 2 things only mean something together. Publishing a 6 month plan is easy when the client is locked in for 12. Publishing it when they can leave at the end of any month on this page is the harder promise, and that is the one we make.
Month 1
Diagnosis and repair.
- Crawl, index and site speed audit, with the fixes actioned rather than emailed to you as a to-do list
- Keyword map built service by service and suburb by suburb against what Melbourne actually types
- Your Google Business Profile categories, services and service areas rebuilt
- Money pages rewritten and conversion tracking set up, so month 3 has a baseline worth beating
At the end: a starting line and a written scope. Impressions tend to move before positions do, and positions before enquiries.
Month 3
The first honest movement.
- Service and suburb pages published on a fixed cadence
- Internal linking rebuilt as the page count grows
- Citations, syndication and a review flow feeding the profile
- The month 3 report set directly against the month 1 baseline
At the end: Trusted Mechanical is the live example, and they are in Lonsdale SA, not Melbourne. Their site went live 25 June 2026, organic clicks roughly doubled from about 5 a day to about 13, and average position is still about 32. Genuine movement and an unfinished job at once.
Months 4 to 6
Enquiries, if it is going to work.
- Coverage pushed into the terms that convert, not the ones that flatter a report
- Conversion fixes on the pages already pulling traffic
- Content extended into the corridors that earn it, such as Dandenong and Frankston
- A straight call on what to keep funding and what to stop
At the end:Adam Plumbing & Gas, an Adelaide client rather than a Melbourne one, went from 13 to 41 new Google clients a month and hit 41 in month 4, after 5 agencies over 10 years had not got there. That is the strong end of the range, not a forecast for your business.
What arrives, and how often.
The report lands once a month, every month, written by Chris Lourenco rather than exported from a dashboard with a logo dropped on the front. It carries the same 6 numbers every time so you can watch them move: clicks, impressions, the count of distinct search terms you appear for, average position, map pack position on your core terms, and enquiries. Underneath sits what was done that month and what is queued next.
When a number goes backwards it stays in the report. You are on month to month terms with no lock-in, which means that report is also the only thing justifying the next invoice. The monthly cost is published in full, and the named clients above are on our results page.
Named results
Melbourne results, and results from elsewhere, all named.
Every claim below has a name attached to it. Search the business, open the site, read their reviews, form your own view. That matters more than volume here, because we are about to be honest about how many Melbourne clients we can point to by name.
Mark L Hair
Mark Laird, hair colour specialist, Melbourne
Mark came in wanting Instagram ads. What he was shown instead was that the bigger opportunity sat in local SEO around "hair colour specialist Melbourne", paired with content syndication that put his expertise in front of people already searching for the skill rather than for a salon name.
He ran with it. He went on to buy his own salon.
That last part is his achievement, not ours, and he tells it better than we do. What we claim is narrower: the channel was wrong when he arrived, and correcting it gave him something worth building on.
That is 1 named Melbourne client
Competing pages on this search show 8 client logos, or 13. We would rather name 1 you can look up than show a wall of logos with no outcome attached to any of them. If you want a longer Melbourne list before you commit, we do not have one yet, and inventing it would be the first small lie of the relationship.
What we can show you instead is the work on record in the cities where we have been at it longest. Same director, same process, same reporting. More of it sits on the results page.
Named clients elsewhere, so you can check the work
Each one is labelled for what it is. None of these are Melbourne.
Adam Plumbing & Gas
Adam Nettleton had been through 5 agencies over 10 years before this one. New Google clients moved from 13 a month to 41, hitting 41 in month 4.
Fine Automotive Detailing
Ali went from position 9 to position 1 in Google Maps for "car detailing Adelaide" in about 2 months.
Trusted Mechanical
Travis Dunn went live on 25 June 2026. Organic clicks have gone from about 5 a day to about 13, and the site still averages about position 32. Reported unfinished on purpose, because month 2 of an SEO campaign is not a success story yet.
The review split, kept apart on purpose
The Melbourne Google profile carries 21 5-star reviews. The Adelaide profile carries 103. Across Australia the total is more than 130. We keep those 3 numbers separate every time we use them, because 150+ is not a Melbourne number, and an agency that quietly merges its review counts is telling you something about the rest of its reporting.
Behind them sit 8 years, 200+ campaigns and $3M+ in ad spend managed as a Google Partner, all of it directed by Chris Lourenco, Director.
Pricing
Melbourne SEO pricing, published before you call.
Here is the number the rest of this search result will not give you. There are 3 tiers, month to month, no lock-in, and they are the same rates a business in Adelaide pays. Where you land depends on how hard your category is to win, not on your postcode and not on what we guess your budget will stretch to.
We are Adelaide based and we carry no Melbourne office, no Melbourne fitout and no Melbourne lease. That shows up in the rate card rather than in a brochure.
| Tier | Monthly | Who it suits | What is included | What is not |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suburb cluster | $1,500+GST | A Melbourne business drawing from 1 pocket of the city. A trade working the inner north, or a clinic whose patients come from 4 surrounding suburbs. | Google Business Profile work, review velocity, suburb-level targeting, on-page and technical fixes, and reporting written in plain English. | A full monthly content program or ongoing link acquisition. Both sit in the tier above. |
| Metro-wide competitive | $2,500+GST | Targeting Melbourne as a whole in a category where 20 other businesses want the same phrase. Most Melbourne work starts here. | Everything above, plus a monthly content program, deeper technical work, and earned links only. We do not buy them. | Google Ads management, which is priced separately from $800+GST/month. |
| High-competition or multi-city | $4,000+GST | Legal, medical, finance and trades at scale, or a Melbourne business that also wants Sydney and Brisbane. | Aggressive content and authority building across every city and service you want found in, weighted to the pages that carry revenue. | A ranking guarantee. Nobody can honestly sell a position by a date, at any price. |
What the price does not depend on
- How long you sign for. There is no lock-in and no exit fee, so the only thing holding you is the reporting. That is covered in no-contract SEO.
- How you found us. Search, referral or a reply to an email, the rate card is the same document.
- Which suburb you trade from. Toorak and Truganina pay the same, and an agency where that is not true has told you something about how it prices.
For context before you compare quotes: published Melbourne SEO rates run from about $800 a month at the low end to $10,000 and above at enterprise level, and hourly rates cluster between $100 and $199. A major agency directory puts the average SEO project at roughly $37,000 over about 12 months. The middle tier here sits under that average across a year and asks for no commitment beyond the month you are in.
Publishing any of this is the real differentiator. Across the Melbourne SEO search results we studied, not 1 agency page shows its own rate card. Google knows buyers want it: 2 of the 4 People Also Ask questions on that result are about cost, and no page in the top 12 answers either of them with a number. That gap is not an oversight. A rate card makes an agency comparable, and comparison is uncomfortable when the price moves depending on how the call goes.
The full working is in the SEO cost guide, and cheap SEO covers what actually happens below about $1,000 a month, which is where most of the bad Melbourne experiences start. Chris Lourenco, Director, quotes every engagement personally, and the quote does not move because of how keen you sound on the phone.
Beyond metro Melbourne
Regional and outer Victoria, where almost nobody has bothered to compete
Across the 4 Melbourne SEO search results we analysed, exactly 1 page in any top 10 reaches past the metro area at all. Every other page stops at the city limits. That leaves most of the state, and a reasonable share of the businesses in it, contested by a field of almost nobody.
It is also the ground where a CBD address stops paying. Local presence converts into the map 3-pack for the area a searcher is standing in, not into organic position somewhere else, and an inner-city agency is no more local to Ballarat than we are. What wins the organic result out there is a page genuinely written about Ballarat, and we compete for that on level terms from Adelaide.
Search behaves differently once you leave the metro. Packs are smaller and turn over less often. The competing field is frequently 3 or 4 businesses rather than 30, so holding position 1 costs a fraction of what the same term costs in Richmond or Carlton. And while total demand is lower, it is far more concentrated: whoever ranks first for a regional service term takes a much larger share of everyone in that town who is looking for it. Fewer clicks available, a much bigger slice of them.
The honest version: some regional terms do not carry enough volume to justify a $1,500+GST month on their own. Where that is the case we say so before you sign, and the answer is usually a cluster of towns rather than a single one. If you want the mechanics of how proximity, reviews and pages interact first, start with local SEO, or take the pricing straight to what SEO costs.
Questions Melbourne business owners ask us.
You're based in Adelaide - can you really do SEO for Melbourne?
How much does SEO cost for a Melbourne business?
How long until I see SEO results in Melbourne?
Do you do local SEO for specific Melbourne suburbs?
Can I combine SEO with Google Ads in Melbourne?
How much does SEO cost in Melbourne?
How much does an SEO consultant cost?
Is there a lock-in contract?
Is an SEO agency worth it?
Why does no Melbourne SEO agency publish its prices?
Will you take on a competitor in my category?
Do I need a Melbourne based SEO agency?
Where are you actually based?
Do you cover the outer suburbs and regional Victoria?
Who actually does the work?
What happens in the first 90 days?
What happens to my site, content and Google Business Profile if I leave?
How long before we see results?
Can you guarantee first page rankings?
Do you have Melbourne clients we can look at?
Does SEO still matter now that AI answers the question?
What do you do differently for AI search?
Can you promise citations in ChatGPT or AI Overviews?
2 ways to start
Book a time, or just send it through.
The strategy call runs 30 minutes, costs nothing, and ends with what we would do about your rankings whether or not you hire us.
If a call with someone in another state is not how you want to start, send it through instead and Chris will reply by email.
Prefer the phone? 0403 454 199.
Book Your Free Melbourne SEO Strategy Call
We'll audit your site, show you where Melbourne competitors are outranking you, and give you a clear action plan. 30 minutes. No cost. No obligation.
Or call 0403 454 199 or email chris@loudachris.com.au
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Dominate the map pack across Melbourne suburbs. GBP, citations, and review strategy.
Ready to outrank your Melbourne competitors?
Stop paying for SEO that doesn't deliver. Talk to Chris directly and get a clear plan built for Melbourne's competitive market. No lock-in contracts. No juniors. Just results.
Call 0403 454 199