The short answer
We are an SEO agency working with Box Hill businesses, with technical, content, links and local search handled by our own 32 staff rather than subcontracted out. Retainers are month to month. We have traded since 2015 and hold a 4.9 rating from 96 reviews.
Retail here is decided in a five minute window
Box Hill Central and the streets feeding it carry a retail density most suburbs never get near. Grocers, bakeries, jewellers, phone repair, optical, beauty, tuition centres, restaurants stacked two levels deep, and a good number of family businesses holding the same tenancy for twenty years. A lot of that trade runs in Mandarin and Cantonese as much as English.
The buying decision is fast and it happens on a phone, usually within a few hundred metres of the shop. Someone standing on the concourse or waiting at the station searches, looks at four map results, checks the photos and the hours, and walks. The website gets opened after that, if at all. Which means when a retailer here is choosing an agency, the thing being bought is rarely a blog. It is whether the profile, the hours, the products and the reviews are being managed by someone who knows they matter more than a home page rewrite.
The same pattern runs out along Whitehorse Road and into Blackburn, Surrey Hills, Burwood and Doncaster.
Five things worth asking before you sign anything, including with us
Most SEO proposals are hard to compare because they are written to be. These questions produce answers you can hold side by side.
Ask which pages they would write, by name, before you pay. A proposal that never mentions one of your actual products or services was assembled from a template and the work usually matches.
Ask who does the work and where they sit. Names and roles, not a staff count. Ask whether writing is subcontracted, and ask to see an unedited sample by the person who would be assigned to you.
Ask for owner level access to Search Console and Analytics in your own accounts from week one. If the only reporting you ever see is a PDF from the agency's rank tracker, you cannot check a single claim in it.
Ask what happens in month four if you leave. Who owns the pages, the profile, the Google Ads account and any content already paid for. Get it in writing before it matters rather than during the argument.
Ask where the links come from and whether they will name each one. Vagueness here almost always means bought, and bought links are your risk to carry, not theirs.
Why the rank report says number one and the till disagrees
Worth knowing before you read anyone's reporting. Local rankings change with where the searcher is standing. Most rank trackers check from a single point near the middle of the suburb, so a shop inside Box Hill Central looks like it is winning everything, because the tracker is effectively standing in the shop.
Run the same term from the station, from the far end of Whitehorse Road, and from a house in Blackburn, and the order changes. That grid view is the honest one, and it is the version we report. It also tells you something useful, which is how far your pin actually reaches and whether the neighbouring suburb is worth a page of its own or is already covered.
Ask any agency you are considering to show you a check run from more than one point. Most rank tracking tools do it. Not many agencies volunteer it.
Nearby suburbs we run the same work in
Retail catchments here overlap heavily, so accounts usually cover more than one.
SEO agency work in Blackburn, Surrey Hills, Burwood, Doncaster and across Melbourne. If you want the work explained rather than the agency, that sits on SEO in Box Hill, with the site on website design in Box Hill and the wider channel mix on marketing agency in Box Hill.
Send us the last report your current agency gave you. We will tell you what it left out.
How an account starts here
Free audit
Technical health, profile, competitors and your existing query data, delivered whether or not you continue.
Scope and price, in writing
Named pages, named deliverables and a monthly figure that does not move without your sign off.
First ninety days
Fixes and profile work first because they move fastest, then content in priority order.
Monthly review
Calls and enquiries, what was done, what it produced, and what changes next month.
Reasons retailers here stay with us
The same people every month.
You get a named account manager and the same writer, rather than whoever survived the last round of turnover.
We hand over the accounts, not screenshots.
Search Console, Analytics and the Business Profile stay in your name with our access sitting on top, so you can verify anything we report.
Nothing holds you here.
Retainers are month to month. If a quarter goes badly you can leave, which is a fair amount of pressure to keep on ourselves.
"Another agency quoted half this."
They might be worth it. Ask both of us the five questions above and compare the answers rather than the numbers, because the cheap retainer usually buys two hours a month and a report generator.