Do I need to pay for SEO?

The SiteRoot team · 21 August 2026 · 7 min read

Someone rings on a Wednesday afternoon offering to put your business above every competitor in your suburb for A$799 a month. They know your trade, and the first month is half price. It is a good pitch, and the question under it is fair.

Here is the short answer. For most single location small businesses in Australia, you do not need to pay for SEO to start with, and quite possibly not in your first year. Nearly everything that decides whether a local customer can find you is either free or a one off piece of work, and on a five page site a monthly retainer often does not have enough genuine work in it to earn its keep month after month. There are situations where paying is clearly the right call, and they are listed further down.

What people mean by SEO, and which parts are already done

It covers four different jobs sold as one.

The site itself. Does each page have its own real title and its own plain description rather than the same one copied across the site. Does it load quickly on a phone. Are there actual pages for the actual services you sell. Is there a file listing every page so search engines can see what your site has on it. Mostly one off work, and on a decent modern site most of it is already done.

Your listing. The free Google Business Profile, plus your business name, address and phone number matching everywhere you appear. The highest value work available to a local business, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.

Words on pages. A page about the thing you want to be asked about, written by someone who does the work. Ongoing if you want it to be.

Other sites mentioning you. Your industry association, your suppliers, the club you sponsor. Slow, mostly earned, and not something a retainer can conjure honestly.

Notice how much of that is free or already finished. Which is the reason to be sceptical of a monthly fee before doing the free parts.

The free thing worth more than the paid thing

If you do one thing after reading this, claim and fill in your Google Business Profile.

It is free. It is the listing that appears with the map, which on a phone usually sits above the ordinary results, and for "plumber near me" searches it is very often what gets tapped first. Filling it in takes an hour: verify the business, set your real hours, set the suburbs you travel to, choose the right category, add photographs of your own work, and answer the questions people post on it.

Then keep it current. Hours that changed after Easter and a number from your last phone both quietly send work to someone else.

If an agency is charging a retainer while your opening hours are wrong, that tells you what the retainer is.

Reviews are the part you can actually influence

Reviews sit right next to that listing, and unlike most of this post they respond directly to effort.

The effort is asking. The moment the job is finished and the customer is happy is the only moment they will ever do it, and a link sent by text while you are in their driveway works far better than an email on Friday. That is free.

What you must not do is buy them, write them yourself, or pay for a bundle. Fake reviews are misleading conduct, the ACCC treats them as such, and the platforms are fairly good at spotting the pattern. A genuine risk, not a grey area.

When paying for SEO does make sense

There are real cases.

• You are in a crowded metro market where several competitors already do this properly. Everyone has a decent site and a full listing, so the remaining advantage is in work that takes sustained effort.
• You have multiple locations, or a service area covering dozens of suburbs. That is a structural job, and it is more work than one afternoon.
• You sell online. When a change in visits maps directly to revenue, you can measure what the money did, which is the thing that makes a retainer sane.
• You have a specific problem. Your site does not appear anywhere at all, or you changed addresses and everything fell over. That is a diagnosis job: pay a specialist for a few hours rather than signing for a year.
• You already advertise and somebody is measuring it. Whoever can tell you what a lead costs today can tell you whether this worked.

If none of those describe you, your money does more this year on better photographs of your own work and an hour with your listing.

What to ask before you hand over a card

Five questions. A decent operator answers all five happily.

1. What will you actually do in the first month, in plain words, without initialisms?
2. What will you report, and what number tells us in six months whether this worked?
3. Who owns the pages, the words and the accounts you create? If I leave, what comes with me?
4. Is this month to month, or is there a lock in and an exit fee?
5. Do you promise a position?

That last one matters most, and the right answer is no. Nobody controls where a search engine puts you. Anyone who promises a position is either selling something they cannot control, or planning to show you a result for a phrase nobody searches for.

The promises that should end the call

• A promise that you will be first, or any promise about position.
• "We have a relationship with Google." There is no such relationship to have.
• A method they will not explain because it is proprietary.
• Hundreds of directory listings as the main deliverable.
• A monthly report that is a list of tasks performed, with no number in it that relates to your business.
• Anything involving buying links.

What you can do this month for nothing

1. Open your site on your phone and tap the phone number. If it does not start a call, that is the most valuable fix available to you.
2. Send yourself an enquiry through your own form and find out which inbox it lands in. Owners are surprised by this more often than you would think.
3. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
4. Ask your last three happy customers for a review, by text, today.
5. Fix any price or opening hour on your site that is no longer true.

That list is free, takes an afternoon, and is most of what a first year retainer would spend months arriving at.

Where SiteRoot sits

We are self serve software. We are not an SEO service, we do not run marketing, and nobody here will do outreach on your behalf. "Built to be found" gets used to imply a service. We are not selling one.

What we do is the site side of that list, at build time, so it is not a project you commission. Every page gets its own title and its own plain description rather than the home page's copied across, a mistake our own marketing site made for months. Phone numbers are tap to call links. The enquiry form emails you at your own address. Photographs load as the visitor reaches them. Your site publishes a file listing every page so search engines can see what is on it, a plain summary file AI assistants can read directly, and the facts about your business, trade and service area in a form search engines read rather than guess at.

None of that is a promise about where you appear. It is the part you can actually control, done once, and included in A$16.50 a month including GST (A$15 plus GST).

14 days free, then A$16.50/month (A$15 + GST). Card asked for during your 14 days, one free trial per customer, cancel anytime.

The honest summary

Being found is mostly a listing, a current site and reviews. All three are free or close to it, and none require a retainer. Pay for help once you have done those and hit a wall you can describe, and pay for hours rather than for hope.