What local SEO should cost an Australian trade business

Trade owners ask what this should cost, and get a wall of vagueness. Here is how pricing actually works in the Australian market, what changes it, and what to check before signing anything.

We don't publish our own prices on the site because the right scope depends on your trade, your suburbs and the state of your profile. What we can do is explain the structure honestly.

Local search work for a trade business is ongoing, not a project. The recurring components are usually profile management, review generation, rank tracking and reporting, plus content and technical work on the website.

If a proposal is a one-off fee with no ongoing component, ask what happens in month two. Profiles decay: reviews go stale, competitors keep collecting, categories change, posts stop.

Scope is driven by a handful of practical variables rather than by how impressive the deliverable sounds.

• How many suburbs you want visibility in — more area means more tracking and more content.
• How competitive your trade is locally — Parramatta electricians is a different problem to Camden roofers.
• Whether the profile exists and is verified, or needs to be recovered from suspension.
• Whether a website exists, and whether it can be built on or needs replacing.
• How many services you offer that need to be targeted separately.

A few patterns reliably indicate a package not worth buying.

• Guaranteed number-one rankings. Nobody controls Google's results; guarantees are marketing, not capability.
• Ranking reports that show a single position rather than coverage across your service area.
• Lock-in contracts of twelve months or more with no exit.
• The agency owning your domain, your website or your Google profile.
• Review gating, review buying, or anything described as 'reputation filtering'.
• No mention of the Google Business Profile at all — a website-only proposal is missing the main asset.

Rankings are a means, not the outcome. The measures that matter are calls from the profile, direction requests, form enquiries and — the only one that really counts — booked jobs you can trace back.

Ask for tracking that connects search visibility to actual enquiries before you start, not after.