The short answer
Choosing an SEO agency on the Gold Coast is a filtering problem, because there are more suppliers here than in almost any comparable market. Ask who writes the content, where the links come from, who holds the accounts, and what happens when one person takes leave. AR Digital Solutions answers those with 32 in house staff and no lock in contract.
Nowhere else in Queensland has this many people selling search
Ask five Gold Coast operators who does their SEO and you will get five names, none of which the other four have heard of. That is not an accident.
Search has the lowest barrier to entry of any channel sold here. Paid media needs an ad account and a budget, web design needs a portfolio, and SEO needs a rank tracker and a report template. Results arrive slowly enough that a supplier can be paid for six months before anyone can tell. So the field fills up: capable independents in home offices around Mermaid Waters and Currumbin, studios above shopfronts at Nobby Beach and Chevron Island, freelancers on co-working desks in Robina, resellers putting a Gold Coast badge on offshore work, and web designers adding a search line to the invoice without hiring anybody to deliver it.
The buying pattern makes it worse. Much of the search sold here goes to venues, tour operators, gyms and accommodation, who buy in a quiet month, judge it in a busy one, and change supplier when the season turns.
None of that means the market is bad. Some of the best search people in the country live between Coolangatta and Coomera. It means the difference is invisible from the outside, so here is how to tell.
Six questions that sort the field
Ask these on a first call and take notes. Anyone good will enjoy answering them.
Who writes the content, and can I read something they published last month?
Content is where most of a retainer goes. Ask for a live URL, and ask whether it was written in house, subcontracted, or generated and lightly edited. The third is fine if somebody who knows your industry rewrote it.
Show me the last twenty links you built, with URLs.
This thins a shortlist fastest. Either those sites have real audiences or they exist to sell links, and you inherit the profile either way.
Will you work in my Search Console, and show me a query report with brand terms stripped out?
Brand traffic climbing is how a flat campaign is made to look successful, and removing your own name is the most revealing filter in search reporting.
Where do the pages live, and what happens when I leave?
Some suppliers publish location pages on a domain they control and point them at you. That traffic is not yours.
This city is 57 kilometres long. Is the plan one page or forty, and who writes the forty?
Mass generated suburb pages with the name swapped are a filtering risk rather than a shortcut.
What happens when the person running my account takes three weeks off in January?
A one person operation has one honest answer, and if January is your season you want it before you sign.
Then the part nobody puts in a proposal. A good independent here will beat us on price and often on turnaround for a single channel. What they cannot do is cover six disciplines or absorb a resignation.
Our answers, including the ones that lose us work
Content is written by our own staff and you can be on a call with the writer before you sign. Links come with URLs and a reason for each. We work in your Search Console, and every report separates brand terms from the rest. Pages live in your CMS and leave with you. Area coverage gets built suburb by suburb, only where you trade.
Where we lose. We are not the lowest quote you will get, for one small scope an independent is often the better call, and we will not sign a twelve month term.
Answered before you ask it
Our office is at 1 Cheshire Street, Pallara QLD 4110, an hour up the M1. It is the only address we have, and we will not rent a desk at Robina for a second listing, because that breaches Google's guidelines.
So we do not appear in the Gold Coast map pack, and this page reached you through organic results. We also cannot be at your premises in twenty minutes. What it does not affect is your ranking, because map results are measured by distance from your pin, not ours.
Where else this team runs accounts
The same people work as an SEO agency in Southport, north in Brisbane and Logan, and across the Coast from Coolangatta to Coomera. If you want the work explained rather than the agency, read SEO on the Gold Coast.
What the first ninety days look like
Audit first, retainer second
Technical health, rankings checked from the suburb you sell in, and what the last supplier left behind.
A scope with pages named
Not a keyword count. What gets built or rewritten, and what each page should move.
Fix, then build
Technical and profile work early because it is fastest, then content, then links.
Monthly call
Enquiries first, then terms, with the months that went backwards left in.
What you get that a one person shop cannot
Six disciplines under one roof.
Technical, content, local, links, paid and development, 32 staff in house since 2015. Nobody waits on a subcontractor to reply.
Continuity through your busy season.
Leave, illness and January are covered by the team rather than by an apology.
Everything in your name.
Domain, hosting, analytics, Search Console, profile and content, so leaving costs a phone call.
"Every agency we have used sounded like this."
Probably true, so do not take our word for it. Ask us the six questions, ask the other two the same six, and compare answers rather than proposals.