About SERPDrive and the Person Doing the Work
I'm Arbaz. I founded SERPDrive and I do the work.
Ten years in this industry, and one conversation keeps repeating. A business owner tells me they're paying $4,000 a month. I ask what they get for it. They send me a dashboard with 280 keywords on it, most of them branded, the rest phrases nobody in Frankston has ever typed into Google. They're nine months into a twelve month agreement. They have never spoken to the person writing their content, because that person sits three layers below the account manager who sends the monthly PDF.
The work in that account is worth about $1,200. I know because I could price the deliverables in five minutes. The other $2,800 pays for the sales commission, the account management layer, and the office.
SERPDrive exists because I got tired of watching that happen and decided to do the opposite of it on purpose.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
Who I am
Ten years as an SEO specialist, split roughly between Australian local search and international organic growth. The local side means service area businesses: trades, care providers, clinics, professional practices. The international side means organic growth in markets where a single competitive page is fought over by people with real budgets.
What that decade actually consisted of is less interesting than it sounds, and I think that's the point. It was reading crawl logs to work out why Google was spending its budget on 4,000 filtered product URLs instead of the 60 pages that made money. It was building redirect maps for migrations, cell by cell, because one wrong row costs a client six weeks of traffic. It was a map pack ranking that refused to move for four months, through the citation cleanup and the review cadence and the category change, and then moved in week seventeen for reasons that only became clear afterwards. It was a category page that got rewritten three times before it finally converted in month five.
Nobody puts that on a homepage because it isn't impressive. It's just what the job is when you do it yourself rather than supervise it.
Why I rank my own websites, and why that matters to you
I build and rank my own sites. Some of them compete in US search, which is harder than anything in Australia by a wide margin: more competitors, more money behind them, and far less tolerance for a half-finished page.
There are nine engagements written up in full, each with the Ahrefs chart behind it and a page explaining what the numbers do and do not mean, including one published because it is the weakest commercial result of the set. There are client reviews from my Upwork engagements on the homepage, quoted in full, but a review is somebody saying the work was good rather than a before and after you can audit. So the proof point I lean on is the charts and my own properties.
Here's why. When an agency gets a strategy wrong, the client absorbs it. Six months pass, the retainer keeps clearing, and the agency writes it up as a learning. When I get a strategy wrong on my own site, I pay for it directly: the hosting, the content, the links, the months of nothing. That changes how you work. You stop chasing tactics that sound good in a proposal and start chasing the ones that survive contact with a live algorithm. You get suspicious of effort that can't be traced to a result.
I'm not going to hand you a screenshot with a revenue figure on it, because those are trivially faked and you'd be right not to believe it. What I'll do instead is walk you through the reasoning on your own site in the audit and let you judge whether it sounds like someone who has done this or someone who has read about it.
How I work
Senior-led, and I mean it literally rather than as a positioning line. The person who scopes your work is the person who does your work. One point of contact, and that contact is me.
Practically, this is what changes. When you email a question about why a page dropped, you get an answer from the person who looked at the page, not a summary relayed by someone who asked a specialist and paraphrased the reply. When something goes wrong, there's no gap between finding out and fixing it. When you want to challenge a recommendation, you can argue with the person who made it.
There is no sales floor here, no account managers, and no junior handover after the pitch. The team is small and senior on purpose, because the alternative is hiring cheaply and billing expensively, and that's the model I left.
I should be plain about one thing, because a careful buyer will want to know and I'd rather they heard it from me. I'm not based in Australia. I work Australian hours and serve Australian businesses, but the work is done offshore.
My view is that you're paying for the person doing the work, not for a lease in Surry Hills. The right way to judge an SEO provider is the quality of the work and the accountability behind it, not the postcode on the invoice. So rather than ask you to take that on faith, I've put the commitments in writing: guaranteed contactable hours, pricing published on the site, month to month terms with 30 days notice, and direct access to me. Every one of those is checkable, and any of them can be held against me.
What I believe
These are positions, not values, and each one costs something.
Prices belong on the website
Ours are on /seo-pricing/, from $990 a month. If a provider won't publish a number, the number depends on what they think you'll pay.
A lock-in contract is a confession
It says the provider expects you'll want to leave before the work is good enough to keep you. We run month to month, 30 days notice, any time.
Nobody can guarantee a ranking
Not me, not anyone. Google doesn't sell that and it can't be resold. A provider offering one is either lying or planning to rank you for a phrase with no searches.
A report that doesn't mention enquiries isn't a report
Rankings and impressions are diagnostics. The number that matters is how many people rang you, and that's the one we open with.
AI can research, but it shouldn't write the words you publish
We use it for clustering, data work and first-pass analysis. The page a customer reads gets written by a person who understands what your business actually does.
If search is the wrong channel for you, we'll say so
Some businesses have no meaningful search volume, or a product people don't Google. We'd rather lose the sale than take twelve months of fees to prove it.
Where we are and how to reach us
We work Australian hours. Guaranteed live and contactable 1pm to 6pm AEST, which means a real person on email or phone in that window rather than a promise to respond within a business day. Anything that lands outside those hours gets answered the same business day.
Our ABN is in the footer and you can check it yourself on the ABR in about twenty seconds. I'd recommend doing that with any provider you're considering.
What we are not
We're not a full-service agency. We don't design or build websites, though we'll happily tell your developer what needs changing. We don't run Google Ads. We're not the cheapest option, and there are plenty of cheaper ones if that's the deciding factor. We're not the right choice for anyone who needs results in thirty days, because month one is setup, Google Business Profile movement usually shows between weeks four and eight, and organic results start landing around month three or four.
Judge the work, not the page
Everything above is words about work, which is exactly the kind of thing you should be sceptical of on an about page.
So here's the cheap way to test it. Request the free mini-audit. Four fields: your website, your main competitor, your service area, your email. Within two business days I'll spend 30 to 45 minutes on your site by hand and send you three genuine findings, one quick win you can implement yourself without paying anyone, and one thing that needs help.
No automated PDF, no obligation, no call required unless you want one. If the audit reads like someone who understands your business, we can talk. If it doesn't, you've lost nothing and you've kept the quick win.
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
Great service, great communicator, patient, kind, helpful, and knowledgeable. Arbaz delivered a solid report that listed all the issues we face with our site, and answered all our questions. Happy!
I hired Arbaz to build links for our company website. He did well in his job. He manually outreached the website administrators and got us do-follow high DR/DA backlinks from the real website with high organic traffic, as we demanded. We noticed a great increase in our website domain authority due to the links Arbaz built for our website. He delivered on his commitments and was a pleasure to communicate with. I am extremely pleased with the outcome and will certainly work with Arbaz again.
Thank you for the invaluable SEO keyword research support you've provided during our recent projects. In a short period, your expertise has made a noticeable impact on our strategy and outcomes. Your ability to quickly identify relevant keywords and analyze market trends has been particularly impressive, directly contributing to enhancing our content's reach and effectiveness. Thank you Arbaz!
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Free, by hand, no obligation
Start with the free manual audit
Four fields: your website, your main competitor, your service area and your email. Within two business days a real person sends back three genuine findings, one quick win you can do yourself, and one thing that needs proper help.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask