When someone searches for what you do
Be the name that comes up.
Someone three streets away types what you do into their phone. Someone else asks an assistant who to call. One business gets that job, and the rest never hear a phone ring at all. They just have a quiet week and no idea why.
Being better at the job doesn’t decide who gets picked. Being findable does.
What gets done
The actual work.
Not a monthly chart about impressions. Our trade calls it SEO. In practice it is three things, in this order, because the second one is wasted until the first is cleared.
Clear what stops Google
Expired certificates, pages Google has never filed, pages that take too long on a phone. In the anonymised worked example on our home page, Google had filed 3 of 41 pages. The other 38 could not turn up in a search at all, no matter what was written on them.
Pages for what people type
Your trade, plus the suburb, in the words a customer would use rather than the words the trade uses. One page for each thing you want the phone to ring about, and your Google listing treated as one of those pages, because for a local business the map result often takes more calls than the site.
Answers an assistant can quote
Assistants repeat pages that state things plainly: what you do, where, when you answer the phone, what you charge where you’ll say. We write yours that way, then put the customer’s question to an assistant ourselves and tell you whether your name came back.
You own everything. The pages, the listing, the tracking and every login are in your name from the first day.
One report a month. Written so you can read it in five minutes and know whether more people called.
The parts of it
Four pages under this one.
Most businesses need two of these and can safely ignore the other two. Each page says who it suits and who it does not, in those words.
Local search
The map box that sits above the results, and the Google listing that decides who is in it. For a business with a service area this is usually the fastest of the four.
AI search
Being one of the two or three businesses an assistant names when somebody asks who to call. There is no second page of results to be on.
Technical search
The pages Google has never filed, and whatever is stopping it. Nobody wants to buy this one, and more often than not it has to come first.
Shop search
For a shop rather than a phone: the category pages worth earning traffic, and the thousands of addresses quietly making them count for less.
Whether this is you
Who this suits.
Businesses with a service area and real competitors in it: trades, clinics, firms, anyone whose customers search by suburb and then ring the first name they trust. It suits you most when the work is worth enough that one extra job a month already pays for it.
It suits you less if you need the phone ringing this week. This work compounds and it compounds slowly. If the calendar is empty right now, paid reach is the honest answer and we will say so. That is the other kind of work, and it turns on far faster.
There are four kinds of work in total, and most businesses only need one of them at a time.
The work runs the same wherever you are, and the Sydney and Melbourne pages set out what the search looks like in one city. What it costs is settled after the audit, never before it.
What people ask first
The awkward ones.
These are the questions an agency would rather you did not ask, which is why they are on this page.
Can you guarantee I will be on page one of Google?
No, and nobody can. Google does not sell placement in its ordinary results and no agency controls the ranking. A guarantee is either about a term nobody searches, which is easy and worthless, or it is a claim the ACCC would treat as misleading. We tell you what we think is realistic and what it rests on.
My report says I am number one, but I search on my phone and I am on page four. Which is right?
Your phone is. Results change with where you are standing, what you searched before, and whether you are signed in, so a ranking checked from an agency computer can be true and useless at the same time. Ask for calls and enquiries instead. They only move when something real changed.
How do I tell a real SEO company from one that will just take my money?
Three tests. Ask what they will do in month one specifically, and see whether the answer contains nouns. Ask for a client in your trade you can ring, not the happiest one. Ask what happens to your logins if you leave. Anyone who will not answer the third one has already told you something.
Would I have got those customers anyway, without you?
Some of them, and an honest report says which. Someone who searched your business by name was already coming. The number that matters is people who found you searching for the thing you do and had never heard of you, and that is the one we report.
What does it cost?
We do not put a number on it before the audit, because the honest answer depends on what the audit finds. Australian agencies that publish prices mostly sit between 800 and 3,000 dollars a month. What we charge, and whether that is a fixed fee or a share of what we bring in, is your choice, and we put it in writing before anything starts.
Where to start
Ask for a deep audit.
Give us your web address. We check the site page by page the way Google does, price the traffic you are missing in dollars, and put a customer’s question to an AI assistant to see whether your name comes back.
We take on a small number of businesses at a time, and only when we are confident we can move the numbers. If we can take it on, you get a written plan: what we’d fix and in what order. If we can’t, you get a short, straight email saying so.
Free. A person reads it and answers within a couple of days.