Searches for a B2B SEO agency in Australia have gone from 30 a month to 110 in the last year. And they're still climbing.
I pull this data most weeks, and that's one of the steeper curves I've seen in a category this small. Something has shifted in how Australian B2B companies think about organic search. From speaking to different business owners, AI is making people nervous about visibility they used to take for granted.
So more businesses are shopping. Here's what page one looks like from the buyer's side, and why the order it's in tells you almost nothing.
The demand curve is steep, and it's recent
Month by month in the Australian database: 30 searches last September, 40 by January, 50 in April, then 70, 90 and 110 through winter. That's close to 4x in 12 months with no sign of flattening.
"B2B SEO services" did something similar, 30 to 70 over the same stretch. "B2B SEO consultant" and "b2b seo consulting" both sit at 40 a month.
Small numbers, obviously. But 110 searches a month in a category where a single client is worth 5 figures is a very different proposition to 110 searches a month for t-shirts, which is the argument I made in more detail in how much search volume is actually good.
Page one is 8 B2B SEO agency service pages saying the same thing
I ran the live results for "b2b seo agency" on google.com.au in August. The top 8 are all agency service pages. Nothing else gets a look in until position 9.
Their descriptions are close to interchangeable. "Grows your qualified pipeline." "Generating qualified leads, commercial opportunities." "Pipeline-focused organic growth." "Commercial intent, authority and measurable growth."
4 different companies. 1 sentence.
It gets better. 2 providers ranking for that term open with a contrarian line.
One leads with "Most SEO agencies chase rankings. We chase revenue." Another, a few positions down, goes with "Most SEO agencies sell you rankings. We sell you pipeline."
Both of those are agencies. The anti-agency pitch has become an agency pitch, and the whole page has converged on one promise that now carries no information at all.
An AI Overview now answers the question before page one gets a look in
Google runs an AI Overview on this search, and on "b2b seo consultant" and "b2b seo consulting" as well. So the first thing a buyer reads is a summary Google assembled from a handful of sources it picked.
That matters more here than in most categories. When the 8 pages underneath all promise the same thing, the summary at the top does the actual shortlisting, and it draws from whoever explained the topic most clearly rather than whoever ranks first.
If you're an agency reading this, that's your problem too. If you're buying, treat the summary as a starting list and nothing more.
Almost nobody in this market sells the alternative
Across 89 organic results for that term, exactly 1 positions itself as freelance or independent. One.
Everything else is a team selling capacity, and capacity is a real product. If you need 12 pieces of content a month and an outreach team working the phones, go and buy it.
It's a poor fit when your actual constraint is that nobody has sat down and worked out which 40 keywords are worth owning. Adding people to that problem tends to make it slower.
I've written about why a marketing agency isn't always the right call in the context of website redesigns, and the structure of the problem is identical here. The person who wins the account is rarely the person running it 12 months later.
A difficulty score of 16 means the ranking order is close to arbitrary
Keyword difficulty on "b2b seo agency" sits at 16 out of 100. For a term with this much commercial value, that's very low.
In practice it means the pages ranking got there without much of a fight. Nobody has built serious authority around the term, so the order you're looking at mostly reflects who bothered to build a page and point a few links at it.
Which means the ranking order tells you nothing about who does good work. Position 2 beat position 12 at SEO. That's the entire signal you're getting.
Worth sitting with, because most buyers build their shortlist straight off page one. If you do that here, you're shortlisting on SEO ability, which is at least on-topic, and on nothing else whatsoever.
I've published a guide to comparing SEO consultants in Australia with a weighted scorecard and the compliance checks that apply to anyone touching your analytics. Build your shortlist with that. Google's own guidance on whether you need an SEO is a useful sanity check before you spend anything, and it's refreshingly unexcited about the whole category.
Where an independent fits, and where one doesn't
I'll argue my own corner honestly. An independent consultant makes sense when you want senior thinking applied to a specific problem, and you want the person who diagnoses it to be the person who fixes it. That describes a lot of Australian B2B businesses running a marketing team of 1 or 2.
An agency makes more sense when volume is the bottleneck. Multiple markets or languages, heavy digital PR, 8 or more substantial content pieces a month, or a large site where the hold-up sits with engineering. In those situations you want a team, and I'd tell you so.
The thing to avoid is picking either one off a search results page that difficulty score 16 built.
If you'd like a read on which of those two your situation actually calls for, that's where my B2B SEO consulting work starts.
