SEO packages: what you should actually get for your money

“SEO package” is the most-shopped and least-defined product in digital marketing — 590 Australians a month search for it, and what they find ranges from genuine monthly programs to a PDF of robot noises. Here's what should actually be inside the box at each price, so you can compare quotes like for like.

The anatomy of a real package

Strip the branding and every honest package is five workstreams: local visibility (profile, reviews, citations); on-page (titles, structure, internal links on the pages that earn money); content (written for a target search, by someone who's spoken to you); technical health (crawlability, speed, fixes with URLs attached); and reporting you can read without a glossary. The tiers differ in hours per stream, not in secret ingredients.

Tier by tier: what's reasonable to expect

Starter / local (~$750–$1,200/mo): profile fully managed, review system running, top 5–10 pages optimised over the first months, one solid content piece monthly, quarterly technical checks. This wins uncrowded local niches outright.
Growth (~$1,200–$2,500/mo): everything above plus suburb/service page builds, 2–4 content pieces, active link earning, grid rank tracking.
Competitive (~$2,500+): serious content velocity, digital PR, technical program — justified when each customer is worth thousands or the niche is a knife-fight. Anyone selling a Cairns sole trader this tier first should explain why the starter maths doesn't work.

The padding, itemised

Learn to spot deliverables that exist to fill a PDF: “50 directory submissions monthly” (junk citations — a few dozen clean ones, once, is the whole job); “unlimited keywords tracked” (tracking is free; ranking is the work); “10 guaranteed backlinks/month” from sites they won't name in advance; “social bookmarking” (it's not 2011); and rank reports for keywords nobody searches — the oldest trick going: guarantee #1 for a phrase with zero volume, deliver it, invoice.

Five questions that sort every quote

1. How many hours of work does this price buy, and from whom?
2. Which specific pages and keywords get worked first — and what data chose them?
3. Can I see last month's report for a current client (redacted is fine)?
4. Who owns the content, the profile and the site if I leave? (Correct answer: you. Full agency-choosing checklist here.)
5. What's the exit? Month-to-month or a contract with teeth?

Any package that survives all five is probably honest, whoever sells it. Ours are built to survive them by design — prices published, hours stated, month-to-month, everything yours. That's the whole trick: there is no trick.

What a month actually looks like

Deliverable lists are abstract until you see a calendar, so here's a real shape. Month one on a local-tier package: the audit and priority plan in week one; Google Business Profile rebuilt (categories, services, photos, Q&A) in week two; title and meta rewrites across the top ten pages in week three; citation cleanup and the review system installed in week four — plus the first report explaining all of it. Month three looks different: one new suburb or service page written and published, two or three review responses drafted, an earned-link placement in progress, rank-grid movement reviewed and next month's targets adjusted from the data.

If a provider can't sketch you their version of that calendar — what happens in week two of month one — the package is a price point, not a program. The rhythm is the product.

The pricing traps around the package

The monthly figure isn't the whole invoice. Watch for: setup fees — a modest one ($300–$800) covering genuine onboarding work is defensible; a four-figure one on top of a lock-in contract is a fee for signing; the 'pause' trap — contracts where pausing forfeits your ranking work or restarts a minimum term; annual prepay discounts — a 10% saving that removes your only leverage over a provider you haven't tested; and asset ransom — 'we host your site/content on our platform', which converts your website into their retention tool. Month-to-month with everything in your name costs slightly more per month and is worth every cent the first time you want to leave.

What a Cairns package should include that interstate ones don't

Location-page agencies sell the same package in forty cities, which means nothing in it is built for this one. A genuinely local package shows up in the details: suburb-level rank tracking across the corridor rather than one CBD pin (rankings here change from Trinity Beach to Gordonvale); content that handles the wet season, the tourist rhythm and the way FNQ customers actually search; links from organisations that exist here — the chamber, the clubs, FNQ media — not 'Australian business directories' in bulk; and review strategy tuned to categories that dominate Cairns (tours, trades, hospitality). Ask any interstate quote which Cairns suburbs they'd target first and why. The pause tells you what the package knows about the place.