SEO pricing and deliverables · My invoice, a real report, and what breaks

What Do You Actually Get When You Pay for SEO?

What is on my invoice, by tier

These are the three plans I sell, copied from my own pricing page, so you can hold me to them. Every plan starts with a one-time setup and runs month to month with 30 days notice. All prices are plus GST.

What the setup fee buys before the monthly work starts

Website audit, backlink audit, Google Analytics setup, Search Console setup, keyword research, buyer-intent research, competitor review, a content topic map, an internal linking plan and the first month’s content direction. That is the whole list. The setup exists so the monthly work is built on your real data and your real competitors, not a template.

Most local trades sit on Basic or Growth. Accelerate is for a business fighting for a capital-city term or a whole region. If I think you are on the wrong tier I will say so on the audit, in either direction.

What a month of SEO actually looks like

Month one: setup and foundation

The audit, the keyword and competitor research, Analytics and Search Console connected, tracking checked, the technical fixes that can be done straight away, and the content plan agreed. Nothing ranks in month one. What you get is the baseline, in writing, that every later report is measured against.

Every month after that

• One or more new pages or articles, depending on tier, each built for a search your customers actually make, with full heading structure and the answer in the first hundred words.
• Links and local mentions from real Australian directories and partner sites. Nothing bought, nothing spammy.
• A post on your Google Business Profile every day, built from your own job photos, linked to the matching service page. I run this on every profile I manage.
• Reviews checked daily. Any review still unanswered after 24 hours gets a reply drafted in your voice for you to approve.
• Rank tracking on an agreed keyword list, from your city, on desktop and mobile, independent of whatever Google shows you on your own phone.
• The monthly report, which is the next section.

What the report shows, with a real one

Here is the report I sent a Brisbane southside plumber for the 30 days to 11 October 2026, numbers as pulled. I have left the business name out. The point is what a report has to contain, and what an honest reading of it looks like.

Monthly report, plumber, Brisbane southside, 13 September to 11 October 2026

What	Number
Google Search clicks (Search Console, exact total)	272
Google Search impressions	39,280
Average position across all searches	25.4, up from 31.5 the month before
Website sessions (Google Analytics)	462
Calls from the Google Business Profile	6
Website clicks from the profile	17
New Google reviews in the window	0, of 117 total at 5.0

Search Console totals are pulled without a query filter, because the per-keyword rows undercount; profile figures come from the Business Profile performance reporting. Every client’s report uses the same sources.

What the honest reading of it said

Position was up, clicks were up nine percent, and the business was still quiet, which is exactly the kind of report that needs a translator. Two things explained it, and both went in the notes.

Most of the clicks were not customers

Four how-to articles took the bulk of the 272 clicks, the top one alone 128 of them, read by people fixing a rainwater pump or clearing a toilet themselves. The money pages were invisible: the home page at position 42 with 3,622 impressions and 15 clicks, the hot water page at position 39 with 4,209 impressions and one click. Traffic up, phone flat. That reading moved the next month’s work onto the service pages and the profile, which is where the Maps diagnosis came from.

The conversions number was a tracking fault, and I said so

Google Analytics was reporting more than 1,700 “conversions” because every default event, page views and scrolls included, had been marked as a key event. The real figure was four form submissions. I cleaned it so the next report shows single digits, and told the owner in advance that the drop was a fix, not a fall. A report that keeps printing 1,700 looks better and is worth nothing.

Why the report is written in my own words

A client told me this year that one of my reports read like it was written by a machine. He was right, and the next one was rewritten by hand. Plain numbers, a few sentences on what moved and what is next, no filler sections. If you cannot read your SEO report in five minutes, it was written for the agency, not for you.

What I measure reviews against

The report counts new reviews in the window against a target every cycle, because a profile that stops collecting reviews reads to Google as a business slowing down, whatever the total says.

Live from my own rank tracking

Current numbers from the tracking I run across every business I manage, updated every cycle.

The part nobody invoices: noticing what broke

Three faults from this year, each one invisible on a deliverables list, each one costing real money. This is what the attention part of the fee pays for.

The contact form that was rejecting real leads

A Hunter Valley painter’s only contact form was telling customers their enquiry looked like spam. A homeowner sent a screenshot of the error. The cause was a spam filter switched on with none of its fields mapped, plus two fields sharing one ID, so every genuine message scored as junk. Nothing had got through for eleven days, 90 of the 92 stored submissions were unread, and the rejected ones were gone for good. Fixed the same afternoon, proven with a test submission. No ranking report would ever have shown it.

The ad conversions that were not conversions

A Gold Coast electrician’s Google Ads account showed 15 leads in a fortnight. They were page loads. A tag was firing on every visit, so Google was counting traffic as conversions and recommending automated bidding on the strength of it. The real booking form was invisible to tracking. Fixing the measurement came before any keyword change, and it is why that account now reports real contacts at a real cost. The full story is in SEO versus Google Ads.

My own site, sending Google in circles

Fusiongrowth.com.au had a setting that redirected every dead URL to the home page with a temporary code, so Google kept re-checking dozens of old pages forever and treated the home page as a soft error, and the sitemap had quietly stopped serving. I found both while diagnosing my own September drop, fixed them, and weekly search impressions went from 1,032 to 3,093 inside a month. I include it because the same two faults are on more client sites than not, and because I would rather show you my own mistake than pretend I do not make them.

What you are not paying for

• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google. Every timeframe above is an estimate from my own clients, and the pricing page says so.
• A page for every suburb. Doorway pages get filtered and make a site look thin. Service pages that say where you work, and a profile set up for your real area, do the job.
• Twelve-month contracts. Month to month with 30 days notice. If the work is good you stay anyway.
• Reports nobody reads. See above.
• A team. There is one person here. The person who audits your site writes the pages and sends the report, and you can get him on the phone.

Does it work?

Three results from my own reporting, two of them in the clients’ own words.

• A Toowoomba skip bin business, from page 3 to number one in six months. In the owner’s Google review: “Within 6 months, Kieran had me ranking number 1 for skip bins Toowoomba and I started getting regular enquiries straight from my website.”
• A Brisbane southside plumber, from page 5 to the Maps 3-pack in under 90 days, with 67% more calls and 54% more profile views.
• A Gold Coast electrician, top 3 in Google Maps for “electrician Gold Coast” with 2.4 times the website leads he had before.

The full case studies sit on my SEO Ipswich page, and the profile side of the work is explained under Google Business Profile optimisation.

How to check what your current provider is doing

Frequently asked questions

How much should I expect to pay for SEO in Australia?

For a local trade or service business, $500 to $2,000 a month plus GST, with a one-time setup, is the honest range, and the lower two tiers cover most of them. Under about $300 a month cannot pay for real work; it buys automated reports and directory links. Above $2,000 a month only makes sense when you are competing for a capital city or a national term. My tiers and what each one includes are listed above, and the same figures are on my SEO service page.

Is paying for SEO worth it for a small business?

Yes, when the business is real, local and able to answer the phone, and when someone is measuring calls rather than clicks. The plumber’s report above shows why both halves matter: the work produced 272 clicks in a month, but the honest reading of where they came from changed what got done next. I wrote a longer answer in is SEO really worth it for my business.

What should a monthly SEO report include?

Exact totals from Search Console, not estimates; profile calls and website clicks from the Google Business Profile; new reviews against a target; keyword positions from independent tracking; and a few sentences in plain English about what moved and what is next. If a report needs a translator, or every month reads the same, ask what the numbers are being pulled from. The sample above is the real format I send.

How long until SEO pays for itself?

Maps results often move inside weeks once the profile is fixed; page-one positions for your main services take three to six months; the compounding happens from month six. The timeframes in each tier above are estimates from my own clients, not guarantees. A Toowoomba business reached number one in six months; a Brisbane southside plumber reached the 3-pack in under 90 days; neither was promised a date.

What happens to the work if I stop paying?

You keep all of it. The pages, the profile improvements, the tracking, the reports and the content stay yours and keep ranking. That is the difference from ads, where the clicks stop the day the budget does. Every plan is month to month with 30 days notice, so stopping is a decision you can make any month.