Absolutely! SEO consultants are experts in driving relevant traffic to your website, that results in increased new business. We use a variety of techniques to optimise your website, including keyword research, content creation, technical optimisation and digital PR practices. This helps ensure that you’re reaching the right customers and that they’re finding what they need on your site quickly and easily. With an effective SEO strategy, you can expect to see an increase in leads/sales and a boost to your bottom line.

The cost of SEO services can vary greatly depending on the size and complexity of your website, the amount of work required to optimise it correctly and any other specific goals you may have. Generally speaking, Australian SEO services start from around $1000 per month on the very bottom end, with ongoing packages ranging up to the tens of thousands of dollars per month, so there’s something to suit every business.

Regardless of your budget,  it’s important to remember that SEO is an investment in the future of your business, and a properly optimised website can pay for itself many times over.

Employing an SEO specialist in-house will likely cost your business somewhere in the range of $90,000 – $150,000 per year in Salary. In addition, you will also likely have to hire copywriters, designers/developers, and also pay for PR, SEO software, and other things that might fall under the execution of the SEO. Taking your SEO in-house is likely to be much more expensive than hiring an SEO freelance consultant – this should be one of the main considerations. A freelance SEO consultant will generally have a team of their own (usually contractors or partners) as i do, which are comprised of all of those mentioned roles such as copywriters and developers. The consultant will manage all of those roles for you so that you only need to communicate to one person about the project.

Larger organisations and websites will probably benefit from engaging an SEO expert full-time in-house.  Having someone in-house who is knows the exact ins and outs of the business (from within) and can constantly communicate with internal stakeholders can be a great asset and ensure the success of your SEO efforts. At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide what’s best for your business. An experienced SEO consultant will be able to provide you with advice and guidance on the best strategy for you, so a hybrid approach of in-house specialist + outside consultant is often an option as well.

I have no problem helping businesses understand their needs, and have recommended to large businesses to hire in-house in the past.

Definitely. Local SEO is a great way to boost visibility within your local area and attract more customers. Optimising your website for local searches can ensure that it appears in search engine results when people are looking for businesses like yours in the vicinity. This helps you stand out from the competition, reach more customers, and grow your business.

SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’. It’s the process of improving a website and domain in order to increase its visibility in organic (unpaid) search results. SEO involves using various techniques and strategies, such as research, technical optimisation, content creation, link building, UX and more, to ensure your website is optimised and ranks highly in Google’s SERP. The aim is to increase the number of visitors, leads and conversions from your website, that leads to increased business revenue & profit. Ultimately, it’s about building up your website and domain to be a complete asset for potential customers. SEO is one of the most important and cost-effective tools to improve the return on investment of your marketing budget in the modern-day.

While it is possible to do some very basic SEO yourself, hiring an experienced Australian SEO expert will give you the best results. An SEO expert has in-depth knowledge of how search engines work, vast experience covering hundreds of different websites, models and industries, has built test websites and completed hundreds of experiments to help understand what works and what doesn’t. They’re also well-versed in optimising websites for maximum visibility, so they can help you get ahead of your competition.

There are several considerations to be made when comparing an SEO freelancer to an agency.

Service

Consultant: Personalised Service: You work directly with the expert – Jack, ensuring a deep understanding of your business and goals. It’s my reputation on the line.
Agency: Team-Based Service: Multiple specialists handle different aspects of SEO (e.g., technical, content, backlinks).

Point of Contact

Consultant: Consistent Point of Contact: No middle layers—direct communication with the person managing your SEO strategy and execution all the way through.
Agency: Account Managers: You often interact with an account manager who relays information between you and the SEO team

Experience

Consultant: Expert-Led Strategy: The consultant personally designs and implements the SEO plan, with greater focus and precision.
Agency: Structured Processes: Agencies follow set procedures, which can sometimes limit customisation and flexibility.

Cost vs Output

Consultant: Lower Overheads: Fewer operational costs, so more of your budget is spent on actual SEO execution, driving better results for less money.
Agency: Higher Overheads: Larger teams and infrastructure mean more of your budget goes toward maintaining the agency’s operations.

Approach

Consultant: Tailored Approach: Flexible and adaptive to your specific needs, with a more hands-on approach to every task.
Agency: Less Personal Involvement: With a rotating team or high employee turnover, you may have multiple contacts over time who need to re-learn your business.

It should also be noted that often in this day and age of digitalisation, global interconnectivity and remote working, many of Australia’s most experienced SEO specialists are moving out of agency jobs, and into freelance consulting, or in-house roles. Many (not all) agencies also grow at rapid pace due to the demand of SEO, and are unable to hire experienced SEO specialists to manage their clients, leaving businesses with an inexperienced SEO account manager which can be frustrating.

It depends on the complexity of your website, your current domain standing, any previous SEO done (good or bad), and the goals you have for it. Different businesses also define ‘results’ differently, so it’s important to discuss this during consultation. Generally, though, if your business’ website has got some age behind it and has had some SEO worked on previously, you should be able to start seeing some progress within a few weeks or months. With some easy optimisation, small quick wins can often be easy to get, but for true growth, you ‘generally’ need to stick with it for at least 6 months. The most successful businesses understand that SEO is a long term investment, and those who invest for several years and beyond are truly seeing the greatest results. SEO is an ongoing process requiring regular updates and maintenance to remain effective. In short, an SEO program never ends. But neither do the positive results that come from the program.

The results of your SEO program depend on how you define ‘results’, the goals you’ve set and the amount of work that needs to be done to reach them. It also depends on how much your business is ready to invest. The more your business is able to invest, the more SEO activity can be executed on an ongoing basis to drive harder and faster results. Generally speaking, you can expect higher rankings for relevant search queries and improved brand visibility as the indicators for progress, and increases in organic traffic, increased leads and conversions as the business bottom-line performance result metrics. We also track user engagement metrics which can help validate whether users are interacting and engaging with the website’s content, design and architecture.

SEO offers numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. Firstly, it can help you reach a wider audience and increase your online visibility. It can also become one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies as generally the longer you invest in SEO, the more that results ‘generally’ grow with snowball effect. SEO enables you to target specific topics that are related to your business, giving you an edge over your competitors if you are providing sufficiently more information, or higher quality information on those topics – it’s all about showing Google and your customers that you are the expert and authority on the subject, and are credible to be providing that information. SEO can help you build trust and credibility for your business, leading to more leads and conversions. All these benefits combine to boost your business in the long run.

An SEO consultant is someone who specialises in optimising websites for search engines. They have a deep understanding of the industry and can provide advice on how to improve your website’s visibility in organic search results. An SEO consultant can help you develop an effective SEO strategy that will increase traffic, leads, and conversions from your site. They can also help you monitor your progress and make necessary changes to ensure that your website remains optimised for search engines.

Highly recommended SEO’s like myself spend a considerable amount of time auditing your current website & domain to understand it’s current standing; devising a long-term strategy to then be executed to an extremely high standard over time. SEO is generally a mix of technical SEO, off-site SEO, copywriting and UX performance enhancements. The best SEO’s are highly data driven and make decisions based on data and experience rather than ‘feeling’.

No, you don’t necessarily need a website development team for SEO. While it can be beneficial to have a website developer on-board, an experienced SEO consultant can generally undertake programs for optimising your website for search engines without involving web developers. This being said, if your website uses a complex CMS, or you wish to restrict front-end access, then I am able to communicate, as well as prepare documentation for your developer/s to implement themselves. If the website has poor UX or there are clear UX improvement opportunities then i will make recommendations to an existing developer partner, or can refer you to my preferred partner.

A typical SEO program includes (but is not limited to) the following tasks:

• Research – the process of identifying clusters of keywords relevant to your services or products (offerings), and topics related to your business (semantics) that people are searching for on search engines
• On-page optimisation – making structural and/or technical enhancements to your website
• Content creation – using research to write and publish more content that will help expand your audience and drive users towards your services
• Link building – offsite SEO strategies such as digital PR which generate a consistent velocity of backlinks to your domain from highly authoritative and relevant sources
• Testing – ongoing incremental testing – what works for one website does not necessarily work for another. There is no cookie-cutter approach. All improvements made to the site and changes in general require close monitoring and testing for changes in data
• Reporting – deep data insights into the performance of your SEO program, and valuable information about what needs to be changed or improved

A quality SEO consultant should be able to facilitate all these tasks and more to create an effective SEO strategy that will deliver results. Your business will likely need a mix of some or all of the above to succeed – this exact mix will depend on your current SEO standing, budget, your industry, and your goals.