SEO service
Local SEO Services for Businesses That Sell to Their Suburb
Three businesses show up in the map box. Everyone else sits behind a "more places" link almost nobody taps. If your competitor is in that box and you're not, that's where your missing calls went.
Our local SEO services exist to fix that one thing: the three-pack for the suburbs you actually service, plus the organic listings underneath that catch the scrollers.
Clinics, trades, law firms, childcare centres, gyms. Same mechanics, different levers for a Bendigo shopfront versus a ute covering Brisbane's northside.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
How Google picks the three businesses in the map pack
Google weighs relevance, distance and prominence.
Relevance is how well your profile and site match what was typed. A search for "emergency electrician" won't pull a profile that only says "electrical contractor". Largely in your control, and most leave it half done.
Distance is how close you are to the searcher, or to the suburb they named, and you cannot change it. A Frankston physio will not rank in Camberwell no matter how good the SEO is. That's exactly why the other two matter so much.
Prominence is how well known Google thinks you are: review count and velocity, mentions across the web, links, brand searches. It's the slow one, and it separates the businesses in the box from the ones just outside.
Google Business Profile optimisation, done properly
For map pack results your profile does more work than your website, and most are 40 per cent filled in.
Categories, where the money is
The primary category does more for you than any other field, and most businesses pick it wrong. Google decides much of what you're eligible for from that dropdown alone.
A Hawthorn dental practice sets "Dentist" because that's what they are, while the margin comes from veneers and "Cosmetic Dentist" is the category competing for those searches. A plumber sets "Plumber" when 60 per cent of jobs are hot water replacements, where "Hot Water System Supplier" is barely contested. We pick it from your job data, not your job title, then stack the secondary categories around it.
The rest of the profile
Services
each listed separately with a description, not one line saying "all electrical work".
Products
underused outside retail. Gyms list memberships, clinics list treatments.
Description
750 characters, written for a human, naming the suburbs you cover.
Photos
geotagging is a myth, recency is not. Ten real ones a month beats 200 from 2021.
Posts
weekly. They fade after a week, which is the point.
Q and A
you can ask and answer your own. Seed six on pricing, call-out fees, areas, after-hours.
Attributes and booking links
some are Maps filter options, so a blank field drops you from a result set.
Month by month
What the first year usually looks like, and when you can leave
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- Technical and local foundations
- Google Business Profile movement
- Organic rankings
- Compounding
- You can leave
Month 1
Setup-heavy. Crawl issues, tracking, the Google Business Profile, and the pages that earn money first. We do not dress month one up as results.
Typical timing, not a guarantee. Thirty days notice applies in any month, with no exit fee and no clawback.
Service area businesses and storefronts are set up differently
If customers come to you, the address stays public and rankings lean on proximity to the shopfront. If you go to them, you hide the address and set service areas, and Google still ranks you from your registered location, not the middle of that area.
The common mistake is listing all of Victoria, or twenty suburbs stretching 90 kilometres. It dilutes relevance and extends nothing. Pick the suburbs you genuinely attend, roughly a 30 minute drive, and let paid cover the rest.
Compare the models
What you are actually buying, laid side by side
Three ways people have bought SEO before they ring us, and the way we sell it.
SERPDrive
$990, $1,990 or $3,490 a month
- Who does the work
- The senior who scoped it. No account manager, no junior handover, contactable 1pm to 6pm AEST.
- What the report shows
- The deliverables listed for your tier, every month, with the work shown and an honest read of the numbers when they are not moving.
- When it goes wrong
- At the three month mark we go through the data honestly. If the volume in your niche is too thin, we say so rather than roll you into another quarter.
- The contract
- None. Thirty days notice in writing, any month, no exit fee and no clawback. You keep everything.
Reviews, and why velocity beats the total
A competitor with 400 reviews and none since March is more beatable than one with 90 and four a week. Google reads the pattern, not the total.
Asking works when it's easy and immediate: a short link texted while you're still at the job, or handed over at checkout by the person who served them. Not a monthly email blast. We set the flow up so it runs itself.
Respond to all of them, five stars included. Two sentences is plenty, and the reply is indexable text. For a bad one, answer once, calmly, with the facts and an offer to sort it offline. One two-star among thirty fives reads as real.
Never buy them. Google now strips reviews, suspends profiles, and sometimes posts a public "suspicious reviews" notice. One Gold Coast client lost 60 in a week and took five months to recover.
The website work: suburb pages, citations and consistency
When a suburb page earns its place
A suburb page works when it has something specific to say: jobs you've done there with photos, the local quirk (heritage overlay in Fitzroy, hard water in Adelaide's north, sixties copper piping in inner Canberra), the staff who cover it.
It becomes a doorway page when it's the same 400 words with the suburb swapped. Fifty of those drag the whole site down, and we have audited sites where deleting them lifted everything else.
The rule: if you can't write 500 words about that suburb you couldn't write about any other, don't publish it. Five to twelve of these, not sixty.
Citations and NAP consistency
NAP means name, address, phone. Google cross-checks these across the web, and an old address or dead mobile sitting on eleven directories reads as a less certain business.
The Australian listings worth the effort: True Local, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, StartLocal, Localsearch, plus industry associations (ADA, Master Plumbers, Law Society, ACA) and your local chamber. Industry ones carry more weight than generic aggregators. We build eight a month and fix wrong ones as we find them.
How long does local SEO take
Profile movement usually shows in four to eight weeks, because Google re-crawls it constantly. Organic local pages take three to four months, then compound from month six.
Competitive metro suburbs take longer. Inner Melbourne cosmetic dentistry or Sydney family law is six to nine months of steady work. Regional and outer suburban markets often move inside a quarter because nobody else is trying.
Month one is setup-heavy and quiet. If that's a problem, say so now.
What this costs
| Package | Monthly | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Local | $990 | One location or service area. GBP optimisation, weekly posts, 8 citations, review system, 2 pages, 1 article, 20 keywords |
| Growth | $1,990 | Several suburbs or services. 5 pages, 3 articles, 4 links, technical fixes, 50 keywords |
| Authority | $3,490 | Competitive metro. 8 articles, 8 links, digital PR, AI search visibility, 150 keywords |
One-off Google Business Profile setup is $690 if you want the foundation fixed and nothing ongoing. Full detail on the SEO pricing page. No lock-in, 30 days notice.
Run the sum
How many enquiries a month each tier has to bring in
The only sum that matters, and it changes completely with what you sell. Move these to your own numbers.
Each enquiry is worth about $420 at that rate. That is revenue, not margin, so apply your own margin.
Local
$990 a month · One service area
3 enquiries a month to break even
GrowthMost common
$1,990 a month · Multi-suburb or service
5 enquiries a month to break even
Authority
$3,490 a month · Competitive metro
9 enquiries a month to break even
Fees are the published monthly prices, in Australian dollars, ex GST. If the number for Authority is not realistic for your business, Authority is the wrong buy, and we will say so.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionHow long does local SEO take?
Four to eight weeks for map pack movement, three to four months for organic local pages, compounding from month six. Competitive metro suburbs run six to nine months. Anyone promising the three-pack in three weeks is either about to spam your profile or is guessing.
Do I need a physical address?
You need a real one for verification, but it doesn't have to be public. Service area businesses hide it. What you can't do is use a virtual office or a mate's warehouse. Google runs more video verification now, and a fake address gets you suspended.
Can I do this myself?
Partly, and you should. Categories, services, photos, posts and asking for reviews are all things an organised owner can run in two hours a month. Harder without experience: competitor category analysis, which suburb pages are worth building, technical fixes and links. Start with the profile yourself.
What if my competitor has 400 reviews?
Check the dates. If the last was in March, you can pass them inside a year at four a week, because recency carries weight. If they're still collecting steadily, compete on category precision, service coverage and organic listings rather than volume.
Does my website even matter if the map pack is what counts?
Yes, two ways. Google reads your site to work out what the profile is about, so one thin page caps your map pack ceiling. And plenty of local searches still end in an organic click below the map, particularly research-heavy ones like childcare and legal.
Do you guarantee the three-pack?
No, and anyone who does is lying to you. Nobody controls Google's index. We commit to the specific work, published pricing, and a monthly report showing map pack position by suburb, so you can see movement or hold us to account for its absence.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Get a map pack visibility check, free
Send four things: your website, your main competitor, the suburbs you service and your email. A senior person spends 30 to 45 minutes checking where you sit in the map pack across those suburbs, then sends back three real findings, one fix you can do yourself this week, and one thing that needs proper work.
Two business days. No automated PDF, no sales call unless you want one. If your market isn't worth paying for SEO in, we'll say so.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
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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