What should a small business pay for local marketing in Australia?
Who publishes this: OfficeStaff.ai helps Australian local businesses get found on Google, trusted through reviews and booked through their website and past customers.
The short answer
Between about $150 and $1,200 a month for Google profile management, or $450 to $3,000 a month once you add broader SEO, based on what Australian agencies publish themselves.
The profile itself is free. What you are paying for is somebody doing the work every month, and the gap between the top and bottom of that range is mostly competition and location count, not quality.
What the market actually charges
Australian agencies do publish their numbers, so this is not a mystery.
For Google Business Profile work specifically, one Australian guide puts one off setup and optimisation at $300 to $1,500 per location, and ongoing management at $150 to $1,200 per location per month, covering posts, reviews, questions and reporting. Full local SEO packages that include the profile come in at $800 to $3,000 a month.
Another Australian agency's pricing guide puts entry level SEO, aimed at limited budgets and lower competition, at $450 to $1,500 a month, rising to $4,500 and beyond for competitive city markets.
So if you are a single location service business being quoted $2,000 a month, you are not being robbed, but you are buying at the level meant for someone with far more competition than you have.
Before you pay anyone for this, including us, it helps to know where you actually stand. Get your Free Growth Audit.
What you should actually get for it
This is the part nobody publishes, so here it is.
At the bottom of that range you should get your profile rebuilt properly once, then genuinely maintained. Hours that are right, including public holidays. Every service listed the way customers describe it. New photos. Posts going up. Someone watching for the questions Google lets strangers answer about your business.
You should get every customer asked for a review the same way every time, and every review answered.
And you should get a report that shows you where you turn up across the area you serve, not a number and a graph.
If you are paying anything at all and not getting those things, you are paying for activity rather than work.
Why so many owners have been burned
Most small business owners are flat out doing the actual job. The marketing is the thing that never gets done, so at some point they hand it to somebody.
Then it goes wrong. They get a report full of graphs they cannot read. Nothing changes on the phone. The contract runs twelve months. By the time they get out of it they have decided that marketing is a con and the next person who rings gets short shrift.
That is not stupidity. That is a completely rational response to being sold something that did not work.
The industry earned it. There is a whole tier of operators who are brilliant at selling and have no interest in delivering, and they move on before anyone notices. If someone will not tell you their price until they have you on a call, that is usually why.
The smallest sensible amount
If your budget is genuinely tiny, do not spread it across three things badly.
Fix the profile first. It is free to own and it is the single thing that decides whether you turn up on that map. If you do nothing else, do that.
Then get reviews moving, because that feeds both the map result and whether somebody rings you rather than the business next to you.
The website comes third for most local service businesses, which is the opposite of what people expect. A beautiful website that nobody finds is the most expensive thing a small business can buy.
When you should not buy anything
If your service is not good enough yet, no amount of marketing fixes it. You will just get found faster by people who then tell everyone.
If you cannot answer the phone or return a message within a day, more enquiries will not help you. They will leak out the same hole the current ones are leaking out of.
And if you are not a fit, you are not a fit. Anyone who will not say that to you is selling, not advising.
What we charge, since we are telling you to ask
Reputation, which is every customer asked for a review and every review answered, is $149 a month plus GST, with readiness included and the first 14 days free. Adding your Google listing takes it to Local Authority at $349 a month, with readiness of $500. Front Office, which adds a booking website and follow up, is $499 a month with readiness of $750. On those two, readiness is included if you pay quarterly.
Those sit at or under the bottom of the published Australian range. That is deliberate, and the reason is that we are early and building a track record, not that there is less in it.
Monthly
- Google profile management (published range)$150 to $1,200 a month
- Entry-level SEO (published range)$450 to $1,500 a month
- Local SEO package including the profile (published range)$800 to $3,000 a month
- Reputation$149 a month
- Local Authority$349 a month
- Front Office$499 a month
One-off, before the monthly work starts
- Profile setup and optimisation (published range)$300 to $1,500 per location
- Reputation readinessIncluded
- Local Authority readiness$500 one-off
- Front Office readiness$750 one-off
Where to start
Before you pay anyone, including us, get someone to show you your own map. Not a score, the actual grid of where you turn up across your area, and who is ahead of you.
That one picture tells you whether you have a problem and how big it is. Everything else is a conversation about price with no facts in it.
About the author
Greg Hamlyn
Greg Hamlyn has been in business since 1981, and has spent more than twenty years coaching other business owners, most of them trades and service businesses around Australia. He started OfficeStaff after watching the same thing happen over and over. Good operators paying for marketing that never once showed them where they actually turned up, sitting on customer lists they never used. He will tell you if you are not a fit. Based on the Gold Coast.
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