The short answer
An SEO agency should name the person doing the work, show you a live report with the bad months still in it, and let you leave with your content and profile intact. We work with Southport businesses as a 32 person in house team, trading since 2015 and rated 4.9 from 96 reviews, with no lock in contract.
The suburb fills and empties three times a day
Southport is a working centre before anything else, and its venues live off that rhythm. Court lists and hospital shifts fill Chinatown at lunch, the cafes around Australia Fair turn over from eleven until two, then the place empties by half past five when the Nerang Street and Scarborough Street towers let out.
Then it refills. Dinner along Young and Davenport Streets, the clubs and pubs, function rooms taking Christmas bookings from the law firms two streets away, and event weekends where the parklands and the light rail put thousands of extra people within walking distance of every table.
Which makes hospitality here a harder search problem than it looks. Your customer is deciding in the next twenty minutes, on a phone, from a footpath. You are either in the map pack with current photos, correct hours and recent reviews, or invisible when the decision gets made. It is also why so many Southport venues have been through three agencies. Failure here shows up in a quiet Friday, not a quarterly report.
Four lines in an SEO proposal worth arguing about
Most proposals in this suburb look alike and sit within a few hundred dollars of each other. The differences are in the line items.
"Optimisation of 5 keywords."
A billing device, not a method. A page ranks for dozens of variations whether you paid for them or not, and a cap at five gives the agency a reason to say no when you ask about a sixth. Same with "20 directory submissions", where perhaps a dozen citations in Australia are worth having and some carry a fee you inherit.
Ranking reports with no location set.
This catches venues hardest. A tracker set to "Australia" shows you at position two for a term that, checked from a phone on Scarborough Street, puts you at nine. Ask where the tracker runs from, ask for mobile map pack positions, and check the report leads with calls rather than impressions.
Who owns the Google Business Profile.
For a venue that account is the business, and it is the core of any local SEO work. Some agencies add themselves as owner rather than manager, and getting it back is painful. Check your role today.
Then the question that never appears in writing. Ask whether anybody has looked at your booking system. A venue's real leak is often between the map pack and the reservation, and an agency that has not asked is selling traffic to a broken door.
Us, against that checklist
We do not sell keyword counts. You get pages, profile work and links, scoped in plain words. Content is written by our staff and you can be on a call with the writer. Rank tracking runs from the suburb you sell in, on mobile, and reports lead with calls and bookings, with the terms that went backwards left in.
Where we lose. We are not the cheapest, and a good freelancer will beat us on price for one channel.
We are an hour up the M1 and we are not going to pretend otherwise
Our office is at 1 Cheshire Street, Pallara QLD 4110, in southern Brisbane, about an hour up the M1 from Southport. It is the only address we have, and we will not rent a suite on Scarborough Street to plant a second listing, because that breaches Google's guidelines.
Two honest consequences. We do not appear in the Southport map pack, so if you found this page it came through organic results. And we cannot be at your venue in fifteen minutes. What it does not change is your ranking, since an agency in a Southport tower has no proximity advantage for you.
Where else this team runs accounts
The same people work as an SEO agency in Labrador, Main Beach, Ashmore, Bundall and Surfers Paradise, citywide at SEO agency on the Gold Coast, and nationally from service areas.
How an account starts
The audit comes first
Before any retainer. Rankings from your suburb, profile health, and the venue above you.
A scope with pages named
Not keyword counts. What gets built, in what order, and what it should move.
First ninety days
Technical and profile work early, then content and links.
Monthly call
Twenty minutes on what happened and what is next, document sent beforehand.
Reasons to shortlist us
You can talk to whoever is doing the work.
Before you sign, not after. If a practitioner cannot be produced during the sale, they will not appear later.
The bad months stay in the report.
Terms that dropped, tests that failed, months the number went backwards. An agency that only reports wins is editing.
Everything is in your name.
Profile, analytics, content and any accounts we set up, so leaving costs a phone call.
"Our last agency locked us into twelve months."
Usually justified with the line that SEO takes a year. It does take time, which is an argument for patience rather than a penalty clause.