SEO
Getting found by people who are already looking for what you do. No jargon reports, no vanity keywords, and no promises about positions nobody can guarantee.
The short answer
SEO is making a site easy for a search engine to crawl, easy to understand, and genuinely the best answer to what someone typed. For a local business it is three things in order: fix what is technically broken, get the Google Business Profile right, then publish pages that answer real questions. Most small businesses skip straight to the third and wonder why nothing moves.
What the work actually is
- A full audit first — crawling, indexing, speed, structure, content, profile, competitors
- Technical fixes: titles, descriptions, canonicals, schema, broken links, sitemap
- Local SEO: Business Profile, categories, service areas, reviews, citations
- Page structure that stops your own pages competing with each other
- Content aimed at what people type, not at what sounds impressive
- Internal linking that tells Google which pages matter
- Measurement in Search Console and Analytics, reported monthly in plain words
What we usually find
- Half the site not indexed, and nobody had checked
- The same title tag on twelve pages
- Three pages all targeting the same phrase and cancelling each other out
- A Business Profile with the wrong category and no photos since 2021
- Pages that rank on page two and have never been touched since publication
- No analytics, or analytics that stopped recording eighteen months ago
A job like this
A Capalaba trade business had 40 pages, of which Google had indexed 11 — a stray setting from a staging site had been blocking the rest for two years. Nothing about the content was wrong. Removing one line and submitting a sitemap tripled impressions inside six weeks.
How we sequence it
01
Audit
A written document with findings ranked by impact, not a 90-page automated export. You keep it whether or not you continue with us.
02
Fix the foundations
Technical work first, because content on a site Google cannot crawl properly is wasted money.
03
Local and content
Business Profile, reviews and citations, then pages that answer the questions your customers actually ask on the phone.
04
Measure and iterate
Monthly, in plain words: what moved, what did not, and what we are doing next. Pages sitting on page two get revisited rather than forgotten.
The parts of this with their own page
Local SEO
The map pack, the Business Profile, reviews and citations — where most local enquiries are actually won.
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, speed, structure and schema. The unglamorous half that everything else depends on.
AEO
Being the answer an AI assistant gives, not just a link on a results page. Increasingly where the research happens.
Questions about SEO
How long does SEO take to work?
For a local business on an established domain, expect movement on long-tail and suburb terms in six to eight weeks, and competitive head terms somewhere past month four. A brand new domain is slower — indexing comes first. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches or is about to do something you will regret.
Do you guarantee rankings?
No, and neither can anyone else — Google does not sell that and does not offer it. What we do commit to is a written scope of work, monthly reporting on what changed, and the reasoning behind each recommendation. If a provider guarantees a position, ask which keyword, and check whether anyone actually searches it.
Is SEO worth it for a small local business?
Usually yes, and often more than for a national one, because the competition is thinner and the intent is sharper. Someone searching for a trade in their own suburb is close to buying. The caveat is that if your Google Business Profile is a mess, fixing that first will beat any amount of on-page work.
What's the difference between SEO and paid ads?
Ads stop the day you stop paying; SEO compounds and keeps working. Ads are faster and better for testing which messages convert. Most small businesses are best served by fixing the fundamentals with SEO while using a small ad budget to learn what people actually respond to.
Do we need to keep paying forever?
No. There is a foundation phase — technical fixes, structure, content, profile — that is genuinely finite. After that, ongoing work is about publishing and maintaining, and plenty of businesses step down to a lighter engagement or take it in-house. We will tell you when you have reached that point.
Can you work on a site you didn't build?
Most of our SEO work is on sites we did not build. We start with an audit so you can see what is actually wrong before committing to anything ongoing.
Related reading: how long SEO takes · why you're not in the map pack · web design