The Best SEO Agencies in Melbourne: How the Options Compare

Full disclosure before you read any further: we’re StudioBetter, we’re an SEO agency, and we’re one of the five agencies compared below. Take that into account. What we’ve tried to do here is stick to information each agency has made public — no guessing at numbers nobody discloses, no invented claims about how anyone else performs for clients. Where something isn’t publicly available, we’ve said so instead of filling the gap.

“Best” is also doing a lot of work in that headline. The right agency for a solo Shopify store isn’t the right agency for a national franchise, and vice versa. So instead of crowning a winner, this is a side-by-side of five real Melbourne SEO agencies — StudioBetter, StudioHawk, Calibre9, Aperitif Agency, and Optimising — so you can see how they actually differ before you get on a call with any of them.

At a glance

Figures above are as published by each agency, or by third-party directories like Clutch, at the time of writing (July 2026) — not independently audited by StudioBetter. Review ratings weren't publicly confirmable for every agency, so we've left those out rather than guess.

StudioBetter

Where we sit in this list: a boutique Melbourne agency running SEO, Google Ads, and AI SEO under one roof, built around the idea that strategy should serve the business, not the other way around — dollars over clicks, conversions over rankings. No sales team and no account managers stand between you and the person doing the work, and there’s no lock-in contract — 30 days’ notice, and you’re free to go. We hold a 5.0 rating across 25 Google reviews. We’re a smaller shop than StudioHawk by a wide margin, which is a genuine trade-off: less scale, but every client talks directly to a specialist.

StudioHawk

StudioHawk is the largest agency on this list by a significant margin — Clutch lists 50–249 employees globally, and StudioHawk’s own site claims 120+ SEO specialists across Melbourne, Sydney, London, and Atlanta. Founded in 2015 by Harry Sanders, they’ve picked up genuine recognition, including four APAC Search Awards for Best Large SEO Agency and a Semrush Agency of the Year title. If you want an SEO-primary agency with the bench depth to run enterprise or international campaigns, their scale is a real advantage — it’s a different kind of business than a boutique shop, and worth it if you need that scale.

Calibre9

Calibre9 (based in Collingwood) is an SEO-only specialist agency claiming 15+ years of experience, with a particular emphasis on ecommerce SEO and Google Shopping — they picked up an APAC Search Award for a retail ecommerce SEO campaign. Their own site cites a 4.9/5 rating across 151 Google reviews, though we haven’t independently verified that figure. At around 16 staff, they sit in similar boutique territory to us, with ecommerce as a clearer specialisation.

Aperitif Agency

Aperitif Agency is a small, Melbourne-based team (around 8 core staff listed) covering SEO alongside PPC/SEM and paid social — a broader channel mix than the SEO-only agencies on this list. They’re a Google Premier Partner and picked up multiple wins at the 2025 Global Search Awards and 2026 APAC Search Awards, including Best Global Small SEO Agency. If you want SEO and paid media managed together under one roof, rather than split across two agencies, that’s their clearest differentiator.

Optimising

Optimising has been running since 2008 and, like Calibre9, is SEO-only by explicit stated policy — “it’s all we do,” per their own site. They’re a certified B Corporation and a member of 1% for the Planet, which matters if a supplier’s environmental and social governance credentials factor into your decision. We couldn’t independently confirm a public review rating for them at the time of writing, so we’ve left that cell blank rather than guess.

How to actually choose

The table above tells you what each agency says about itself. Here’s what we’d actually ask, if we were choosing an SEO agency and weren’t one of the options:

• SEO-only, or SEO plus other channels? StudioHawk, Calibre9, and Optimising are SEO-primary or SEO-only. Aperitif runs paid media alongside it. We run SEO, Google Ads, and AI SEO together deliberately, on the belief that they shouldn’t be optimised in isolation — but a channel split that works for a SaaS business might not suit a local service business, and vice versa.
• Boutique or scale? StudioHawk’s size means more specialists and more case study volume across more industries. Everyone else on this list, including us, is a smaller team — which usually means fewer clients per specialist and more direct access, at the cost of raw capacity.
• Contract terms. Ask directly what happens if it doesn’t work out. Lock-in periods vary by agency and aren’t always advertised up front.
• What “results” actually means to them. Rankings and traffic are easy to report and easy to inflate. Ask any agency you’re considering how they define success — if the answer is purely keyword position, that’s worth noting.

If it’s useful, our own SEO audit checklist is the exact list we run through on every audit — it’s a reasonable way to sanity-check any agency’s technical claims yourself, ours included.

Want to talk it through? Get a free audit and we’ll tell you plainly whether we’re the right fit — and if we’re not, we’ll say so.