Where Australian buyers actually look now
The path from "I need a plumber" to "I've booked one" has split into several lanes, and most business owners are only watching one of them.
Search is still the biggest lane. Google handles the overwhelming majority of Australian search traffic, close to 94% by most tracking. But the shape of a results page has changed. Roughly two thirds of Australians have now encountered an AI-generated summary sitting above the usual links, and a growing share of buyers, particularly those in their thirties and forties, are asking a chatbot to recommend a local business outright. That answer is built from structured signals: a complete Google Business Profile, service areas written in plain language, recent reviews that mention specific suburbs and jobs. If those signals are thin, the machine reaches for a competitor instead. You never see the enquiry you didn't get.
The second lane is social search. TikTok reaches more than half of Australian adults, and among younger users it functions as a search engine for product research and recommendations, not just entertainment. Instagram behaves as a video-first discovery platform. A brand that treats both as billboards rather than search surfaces tends to burn budget on content nobody looks for.
The third is suburb-level intent. Someone in Fremantle searching for a physio is not the same customer as someone in Joondalup, and campaigns that target "Perth" waste reach on both. Industry benchmarking suggests well over half of local searches end with a click on a business profile before a website is ever visited, which makes profile optimisation the cheapest traffic most small operators will ever earn.
Priya runs a physiotherapy clinic in Parramatta. She spent a year paying for blog posts about back pain while her Google profile listed opening hours that had been wrong since a renovation. Fixing the profile, adding three service pages built around "sports physio Parramatta" and asking every discharged patient for a review moved her enquiry volume more than the content ever did.
The price list nobody publishes
A 2026 audit of published pricing across 140 Australian agencies found that 78% advertise no prices at all. The numbers below come from the minority that do, in Australian dollars, before GST. Regional agencies tend to publish lower entry points than capital city firms, so treat these as a market map rather than a quote.
| Service | Common advertised entry | Typical SME range | What a fair scope includes | What should raise a flag |
|---|
| SEO retainer | Around $1,500 per month | $1,200–$2,500 monthly; $5,000+ for competitive national terms | Keyword set tied to revenue, technical fixes, local profile work, monthly reporting with a strategy call | Vague deliverables, no access to your own analytics, twelve-month lock-in with no exit clause |
| Google Ads management | Around $1,400 per month | $1,200–$3,500 plus ad spend | Conversion tracking set up properly, negative keyword hygiene, landing page input, fortnightly reporting | Management fee quoted as a percentage of spend with no cap, or a flat fee with no optimisation time |
| Website build | Around $8,400 per project | $2,500–$15,000 depending on page count and integrations | Mobile-first build, page speed, schema markup, training on the CMS, ownership transferred to you | Templates sold as custom, hosting locked to the agency, no handover documentation |
| Social media management (organic) | Around $1,200 per month | $950–$2,500 | Platform-appropriate formats, a publishing calendar, community replies, monthly performance review | Volume promises measured in posts rather than outcomes |
| Paid social management | Around $1,200 per month | $1,200–$2,500 plus ad spend | Creative testing, audience and exclusion setup, pixel and conversion API checks | Reporting that only shows reach and impressions |
Two things sit outside these figures and should be budgeted separately: media spend, and the cost of decent creative. A retainer that covers management but not assets will produce technically correct campaigns nobody wants to watch.
Three setups that tend to work
A local service business in one or two suburbs
Marcus runs a plumbing outfit out of Geelong. His entire digital strategy fits on a single page: a profile he updates himself, review requests sent by SMS after every job, four service-area pages written for the towns he actually drives to, and a modest Google Ads budget restricted to a fifteen kilometre radius with call extensions. He spends less than the median local SEO retainer in Australia and books more work than he did on a broad state-wide campaign. When enquiries slowed in winter, he could see exactly which suburb had dropped and adjust the radius the same week.
A retail brand selling through social
Sarah sells homewares from a small shop in Fort Brisbane. Her early influencer partnerships were with accounts in the hundreds of thousands and converted badly. Shifting to micro-creators, people with ten to a hundred thousand followers who actually use the products, lifted engagement substantially. Industry data puts average engagement around 3.9% for that tier against roughly 1.2% for accounts ten times the size. She now runs a rolling set of five creator collaborations a quarter and reuses the strongest footage as paid creative.
A professional firm chasing larger contracts
For accounting practices, consultancies and B2B suppliers, LinkedIn is the one Australian platform where job title and company size targeting still works with any precision. Cost per click runs higher than Meta. Conversion quality usually justifies it. Company pages underperform individual voices, which is why a partner who posts twice a week about client problems tends to generate more pipeline than a branded page posting the same volume. Employee-led content is doing similar work for consumer brands: Cotton On's staff vlogs read as entertainment, not advertising.
How to run the first ninety days
Start by auditing what you already own. Check that your domain, Google Ads account, analytics property and business profile are all registered under your business, not the agency's. This one step prevents most of the disputes that end up in small claims.
Then pick a single conversion to optimise for. A call, a form submission, a booking. Not three. Every report you receive for the next three months should lead with that number and the cost per unit.
Set the review rhythm before the campaign starts. Ask every customer, every time, and reply to the positive and the negative. Reviews feed both the map pack and the AI summaries that increasingly sit above it.
Write the scope down. Deliverables, reporting cadence, who owns the assets, notice period. Australian Consumer Law applies to the claims you and your agency make in market, so testimonials and performance promises need to be able to be substantiated if challenged. Any email or SMS marketing also needs consent records that satisfy the Spam Act, which is worth confirming before a database gets imported into a new platform.
Practical local starting points: business.gov.au for the compliance basics, your state small business office for subsidised advisory sessions, and the local chamber for referrals to agencies other owners have actually used. Ask any shortlisted agency for two clients in a similar category and call them without the agency on the line.
Ninety days is enough to know whether a partner is working. Set three checkpoints, one per month, and agree in advance what happens if the numbers don't move. A good agency will welcome that conversation. One that flinches at a thirty-day exit clause is telling you something useful about how confident it is in its own work.
If you are renegotiating a retainer right now, pull your last invoice and match each line against the table above. Most owners find one line they cannot explain, and that line is usually where the next improvement is hiding.
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