Web design, SEO and conversion
Plain-English notes on what actually moves the numbers for a website.
How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and AI answers
A practical checklist: answer blocks on your pages, your site in Bing and Brave, and consistent business details. What we do, what is reported but unverified, and what nobody can promise.
Local SEO for tradies: service area pages without the doorway risk
How a tradie covers many suburbs without publishing near-identical pages. What a service area page needs, when a suburb page is worth writing, and what happened to six we published at once.
Website subscription or one-off build: how the costs compare over five years
A monthly website plan and a fixed-price build cost different amounts at different points. The arithmetic for Australian small businesses, what each one leaves out, and the catch in a 12 month term.
When Google stops recrawling your blog: the sitemap date that gave it away
Posts that returned 200, were indexed and were linked from the site still went months without a visit from Google. The cause was the date field in the sitemap, and it was wrong in our own template.
Google Ads for tradies: what we have learned running local accounts
How Google Ads works for a tradie, and four lessons from accounts we run: clean conversion tracking, phone clicks, weekday schedules and negative keywords. No promises, just what we saw.
Website launch checklist for Australian small businesses: 12 checks that caught real faults
A pre-launch list built from faults we found on our own client sites after launch: forms that did not deliver, tracking that was blocked, http that did not redirect and more.
Ad claims you can prove: writing Google Ads headlines without invented promises
The Google Ads editor suggests headlines with claims nobody has checked. How we replace them with ones the business can prove, and what a true claim did on a real account.
Google Ads tracking that looked fine and recorded nothing: a security header was blocking it
Our own security policy blocked Google Analytics and Ads tags on client sites for months, and eight site audits never flagged it. How it happened, why checks missed it, and how to test yours.
When your website host fails: what moving 11 sites in a week taught us
A lapsed plan on one hosting account took every site on it offline at once. What the symptom looked like, how we diagnosed it, and the questions worth asking about who holds your hosting and DNS.
Plumber and electrician website design: pages that earn the call
What a plumber or electrician website needs: the emergency basics, a page for each slow job, trust details like licences and certificates, and a quote form that does not scare people off.
Why Search Console's average position misleads, and what to read instead
A page at position 36 with thousands of impressions can be healthy, and a page at position 20 can be nowhere near page one. Three real cases from our client sites, and the check we run before touching a page.
Email stopped working after a website move: how to avoid it and fix it
Email lives in DNS records, not in your website. Three real moves, what we copied, what we dropped on purpose, and the check that catches a missing mail record before staff notice.
llms.txt for small business sites: what we know and don't
llms.txt is a proposed plain text file that points AI tools at your best pages. We have not measured any effect on rankings or AI answers, and here is what that means for you.
AI-generated photos on a business website: what went wrong when we tried
Generated images are cheap and fast, and they put a competitor's brand badge on a dishwasher. What we saw on client sites, the checks we now run, and when real photos are the better answer.
Google Ads schedules and budgets: three ways spend drifts from what you agreed
A weekday-only schedule that still spent on weekends, a one-day budget rise that stayed for two, and a bigger budget that bought fewer clicks. Real examples from a local service account.
How to show your Google reviews on your website without breaking the rules
Three ways to put real Google reviews on a business site, with the problems we hit on two client builds: a cache that keeps the rating fresh, a data limit of five reviews, and reviews that belong to another business.
Contact form says sent, but no email arrives: three ways it fails silently
After we moved a batch of sites to a new host, three forms failed in three different ways, and one of them still showed visitors a success message. How to test that your form really delivers.
Enhanced conversions and your privacy policy: update both together
Turning on enhanced conversions sends a hashed email and phone number to Google for each enquiry. A standard small business privacy page can become wrong the moment you do. What we changed and why.
SEO for tradies, with notes for plumbers and electricians
What SEO means for a tradie, what to do first, and how it differs for plumbers and electricians. Google Business Profile, job pages and honest limits, from sites we run.
IndexNow explained: what it does and what it does not do
IndexNow tells participating search engines a URL changed. It does not index the page, rank it or reach Google. What we saw submitting to Google, IndexNow and Bing together.
Local business schema: declare your business once, then refer to it
Most small business sites describe the same business again on every page, and the copies slowly disagree. What a single declared entity looks like, and what a wrong schema type can do to the searches you appear for.
Google Ads says 284 conversions. We counted about 30 real leads
Some conversion actions Google adds by default count taps and clicks that are not enquiries. How one local service account reported nearly ten times its real leads, and how to check yours.
Bing Places for service area businesses: should you bother?
Bing Places is Bing's version of a Google Business Profile. For a tradie or mobile service that works from home, here is what to set up, what to hide and what to keep identical.
A security update that broke every page: why we release website changes in stages
A routine framework upgrade passed every automated check and still took our own site down. What happened, how we found it, and why updates now go out to a small share of visitors first.
Why contact form emails land in spam, and how to check yours
A contact form that sends mail as your own domain without authorisation is treated like a forged message. What SPF, DKIM and DMARC do for form emails, and a five-minute test to run on yours.
Reading a Google Ads search terms report: what to exclude and what to keep
A five day search terms report from a local service account, with the terms that wasted money, the ones that only looked wasteful, and why most of the leak came through broad and phrase match.
How to set up Bing Webmaster Tools for a small business website
Verify your site, submit the sitemap, send new pages and check what Bing actually did with them. The setup we use across more than 40 sites, including the quota limits a young site runs into.
Meta titles and descriptions: what an audit of 12 of our own sites found
We ran a title and meta description check across twelve sites we build and run. Most problems came from one template, not from individual pages, and that changes how you fix them.
Lost to budget or lost to rank: why a bigger Ads budget bought fewer clicks
Google Ads reports two reasons you miss out on impressions. A real account raised its budget, fixed one and found the other. What each means and what to do about it.
Search Console numbers that look wrong and are not
http rows at position one, pages with impressions and no searches, dates that do not match your calendar and a position that jumped in a week. Four oddities from real sites, and what each one means.
Domain expired even though auto-renew was on: what happened and what to do
A client's .com.au went dark on 3 October with auto-renew switched on. Why auto-renew can fail, how to tell an expired domain from a broken site, and how fast it came back.
We measured our answer blocks. The honest result was small.
Our first tally said answer blocks lifted pages by almost five positions. A stricter re-measurement said under one. How we found the error, and what it means for anyone trying to win AI answers.
What a Google Ads management fee should cover in Australia
Before you compare prices for Google Ads management, compare what the fee covers. A checklist of the work behind a monthly fee, with a real example of a check that caught a budget left too high.
We deleted eight of our own blog posts. Here is why.
Eight posts on our own site had a combined zero clicks. We removed them, redirected each one, and fixed the links pointing at them. How we decided which posts to cut and how to do it safely.
Why your site ranks for trades you do not offer
An appliance repair site's best suburb searches were for electricians, air conditioning and carpet repair. What caused it, why we did not write content for those searches, and what we changed instead.
Does a small business website need a privacy policy in Australia?
Most small businesses are not covered by the Privacy Act, but some are regardless of size. How to find out which side you are on, and what a short privacy page should say either way.
How to check your suburb pages for duplication
A simple overlap score shows how alike your location pages really are. We measured four trade sites, and removing the shared blocks fixed the overlap and left the pages thin.
Phone click tracking that counts the wrong clicks
A call tracking rule that fires on any event with 'phone' in its name counts people typing in a form box as phone calls. How it inflated one account's call numbers, and how to test yours.
How we structured a first Google Ads campaign for a builder
The real launch spec for a regional builder: budgets, locations, one ad group and landing page per service, exact and phrase match, and the things that went wrong on launch day.
Moving a website off Wix: what the cutover looks like, step by step
A real move from Wix to a new host, with the order of steps, the one DNS error that blocked us, and what to check before and after the name servers change.
Suburb pages: what happened when we published six at once
A pest control site added six near-identical suburb pages in a day. A week later the searches it ranked for in the top 30 fell sharply. What we measured, what we ruled out, and what we would do differently.
A website accessibility checklist for small business
Six checks a business owner can run on their own site in an afternoon: text alternatives, contrast, keyboard use, form labels, headings and zoom. Each one maps to a published WCAG success criterion.
Website maintenance plans: what they should cover
What a website maintenance plan should actually do each month, who is responsible for which part, how to tell real work from a line item, and how our plans handle it.
What should be in a monthly SEO retainer
Most SEO retainers get sold as a monthly fee for 'ongoing work', with no list of what that covers. What a working month should actually contain, what the report needs to show, and the contract terms worth reading before you sign.
Bookings on your site, or in the booking tool?
People ask whether there's one thing that does the website and the bookings together. There is, sort of, three ways, and the right one depends almost entirely on how many bookings you take.
Counting the enquiries you already get
Almost nobody we talk to can say how many enquiries their website produced last month. Not roughly. At all. Which makes every decision after that a guess, including the expensive ones.
Your rankings dropped. Find the date first
The instinct after a drop is to start rewriting. Nearly every drop we get asked about turns out to have a date attached to it, and the date narrows the cause to one of about six things before you touch a single page.
How to read a website speed test without panicking
A red 38 at the top of a PageSpeed report looks like a verdict. It's usually the least useful number on the page. Here's which parts of a speed test to read, what Google's pass marks actually are, and what to ignore.
How to tell whether your website was built badly
Owners judge an inherited site by how it looks, because that's the part you can see. The worst-built site I've opened this year looked completely fine and hadn't delivered an enquiry email in months.
Website integrations: what to connect first, and what to leave alone
A client had his enquiry form wired into a CRM, a spreadsheet, Slack and a welcome email. It was genuinely impressive. Five enquiries that month never arrived anywhere, and nobody had noticed.
Who actually owns your website, and why it's often not you
The domain, the DNS, the hosting and the Google profile are four separate accounts, and on most small business sites at least one of them is in someone else's name. You find out at the worst possible moment.
Conversion rate optimisation when you haven't got the traffic to test
Almost every CRO article assumes thousands of visitors a month. On a few hundred, the maths says you'd finish your first A/B test somewhere around 2028, so the job becomes something else entirely.
Migrating off WordPress in 2026: why, where to go, and what it actually costs
The security numbers got worse again, the hosting bill never shrinks, and the cost of rebuilding has collapsed. When to leave WordPress, when to stay, and where each kind of site should go.
Changing your domain name without losing what you've built
The search side of a domain change is well documented and mostly goes fine. The part that costs people money is email, and nobody puts it on the checklist.
How people actually shortlist a builder
A building client reads your website five times over three months, usually with someone else looking over their shoulder. A gallery of finished kitchens answers none of what they're worried about.
Plumber websites: your site won't win the emergency, and that's fine
Nobody reads a website with water coming through the ceiling. The money is in the jobs people sit on for months, and almost no plumber writes a word about those.
Redesigning your website without losing your rankings
The traffic drop after a rebuild is almost never the design's fault. It's a list of old addresses nobody wrote down before the old site was switched off.
Electrician websites: what actually gets the after-hours call
The evening caller with no power gives your site a few seconds and wants three answers. A checklist for hours, callout terms and coverage, plus the job pages that win the daytime quotes.
Wix and Squarespace SEO: where the platform stops helping
Builder sites we take over almost always have their SEO settings filled in correctly. The ceiling is real, but it sits somewhere else entirely, and plenty of businesses never reach it.
Why your website isn't showing up on Google
Most sites we're told are invisible turn out to be indexed and ranking badly, which is a different problem with a different fix. The genuinely invisible ones are usually one leftover setting from build day.
Getting Google reviews without being weird about it
Most owners who say they can't get reviews are asking at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, or filtering who they ask. Fixing the timing does more than any request template.
Small business SEO: what to do first when you've got about an hour a week
Most small operators don't need a strategy. They need to know which four or five things to do first, and which ones they can safely ignore until the phone starts ringing.
Local SEO: the half that happens on your website
Fixing your Google Business Profile gets you into the map pack in one suburb. Getting into the next four is a job for your website, and most sites never even say where they work.
Tradie websites: what actually gets you the call
Most tradie websites lose the job in the first twenty seconds, and it's almost never the design's fault. Here's what we find when we open one on a phone, and what to fix first.
Why your website feels slow, and what it's quietly costing you
Slow sites lose enquiries before the phone ever rings. Here's what usually causes the lag when we audit a site, and the handful of things that actually fix it.
Does your business show up when customers ask ChatGPT?
More people are asking an AI assistant who to hire instead of scrolling Google. We started checking whether our clients get named. A lot don't yet.
Google Business Profile: where local customers actually find you
For most local businesses the map pack sends more enquiries than the website's homepage. Here's what we check on a Google Business Profile, and why it's usually the fastest win.
What custom website development actually costs in Australia
Real numbers on what custom website projects cost in Australia, where the money goes versus Wix, Squarespace and WordPress, and how Pagecog's monthly plans compare.
Custom website development in Australia: what to know before you build
Thinking about a custom website? Here's what it actually means, what to expect when you hire someone, what to avoid, and why we're a fast and upfront Australian team.
How to choose the right website development company in Australia
Most web development companies sound alike. The checks that separate them: their live sites, who owns your accounts, the redirect plan, the three year cost and who looks after the site after launch.