Over the past few weeks I have been looking at who is advertising in each Canberra trade — plumbers, painters, roofers, builders, landscapers and the rest — and then following the click to see what the customer actually lands on. A few of those sites bothered me enough that I decided to do it properly.
So on 8 October 2026 I ran the same set of checks against 160 trade business websites in Canberra and Queanbeyan, across 16 sectors. Six were businesses I had personally seen running Google Ads. The rest were found the way a customer finds them: ranking for a search like “plumber Belconnen” or “roof restoration Canberra”, or named in one of the local “best of” lists. I checked the homepage of each site, not the whole site, and I used Google’s own Lighthouse tool plus a script that reads the page the way Google does. All scores are mobile scores, because that is where most of these searches happen.
This is what I found.
The numbers
Of the 160, 16 could not be checked at all: 11 domains no longer exist (but still appear in search results and lists), 2 have broken security certificates, and 2 return a “page not found” error on their own homepage. One of those 404s belongs to a business I had seen advertising. Seven more loaded but could not be scored by Lighthouse in this run. That leaves 144 pages for the on-page checks and 137 with a Lighthouse score.
| Check (homepage, mobile) | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse SEO score of 100 | 67 of 137 | 49% |
| Fails at least one Lighthouse SEO audit | 70 of 137 | 51% |
| No LocalBusiness structured data | 76 of 144 | 53% |
| No structured data of any kind | 14 of 144 | 10% |
| No meta description | 11 of 144 | 8% |
| Canonical tag missing or pointing elsewhere | 18 of 144 | 12% |
| No XML sitemap | 12 of 144 | 8% |
| No robots.txt | 10 of 144 | 7% |
| Missing at least one of: meta description, canonical, LocalBusiness schema, sitemap | 87 of 144 | 60% |
| Mobile performance score under 50 | 49 of 137 | about 36% |
| Largest content loads in over 4 seconds on mobile | 114 of 137 | 83% |
| No analytics installed at all | 46 of 144 | 32% |
The median Lighthouse SEO score was 92. That sounds fine until you know how Lighthouse scores: each failed check costs roughly eight points, so 92 means “one thing wrong” and 85 means “two things wrong”. Half of Canberra’s trade websites are one to three fixes away from a clean score. The most common failures were links Google cannot follow (24% of sites), vague link text like “click here” (19%), images with no alt text (17%) and no meta description (7%).
Mobile speed was worse. The median performance score was in the mid-50s, only 6 of 137 sites scored 90 or above, and on 83% of sites the main content took more than four seconds to appear on a simulated 4G connection.
What each missing piece actually costs
Meta description. This is the two lines under your name in Google. Without one, Google writes its own from whatever text it finds on the page, which is often a menu or a cookie notice. You are paying to appear and then letting Google improvise your pitch. One in twelve sites had none; a quarter had one so long it gets cut off.
Structured data. This is the invisible markup that tells Google “this is a plumbing business, here is the service area, the phone number, the hours, the reviews”. More than half the sites I checked have none of the local-business kind. Google can still work it out from the text, but it has to guess, and guesses do not get you into map results or AI answers. The advertisers were worse here than everyone else.
Sitemap and robots.txt. The sitemap is the list of pages you want Google to index; robots.txt is the list of rules for crawlers. Without them Google finds your pages whenever it happens to, and new service pages can sit unindexed for weeks. Only a minority of sites are missing these, but it was the same sites missing everything else.
Slow mobile pages. A homepage that takes four to ten seconds to show its content on a phone loses a share of every visitor, including the ones you paid for. Google also uses page experience as a ranking input. The slowest site in the sample scored 16 out of 100 on mobile and had a Google Ads tag on it.
The bar: Lighthouse SEO 100. Lighthouse is Google’s own open-source audit tool, and its SEO category is a checklist of about ten technical basics: a title, a description, a page Google is allowed to index, a valid canonical, descriptive links, crawlable links, image alt text, valid robots.txt. It does not measure rankings or content quality. It is a floor, not a ceiling, and every page a business pays for should clear it. When I rebuild a site I guarantee 100 on every page because there is no good reason for a page to score less. Half of Canberra’s trade sites already do; the other half have no excuse either.
Advertising vs not advertising
This was the part I wanted to know. I counted a site as “advertising” when the Google Ads conversion tag was installed on the homepage. That is a lower bound: of the six businesses I had personally seen advertising, only three had the tag, so the real number of advertisers is higher than 24 of 144.
| Homepage check | With Google Ads tag | Without |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse SEO 100 | 10 of 23 (43%) | 57 of 114 (50%) |
| Missing one or more of the four basics | 16 of 24 (67%) | 71 of 120 (59%) |
| No LocalBusiness structured data | 16 of 24 (67%) | 60 of 120 (50%) |
| No H1 heading | 5 of 24 (21%) | 12 of 120 (10%) |
| Mobile performance under 50 | 15 of 23 (65%) | 34 of 114 (30%) |
| Lighthouse Best Practices 90+ | 0 of 23 | 56 of 114 (49%) |
| Google Ads tag but no analytics at all | 5 of 24 (21%) | — |
The advertisers are not better. On the basics they are slightly worse, and on mobile speed they are clearly worse, which makes sense: ad sites carry more tracking scripts, and nobody is checking what those scripts do to load time. Not one of the 23 advertising homepages reached 90 on Lighthouse’s best-practices check. Five of the 24 have a Google Ads tag and no analytics, which means somebody set up conversion tracking and nobody set up a way to see where the visitors go afterwards.
A Belconnen-area painter running Google Ads has a homepage with no meta description, no canonical, no structured data, no sitemap and no robots.txt. A home builder running ads has no meta description and no structured data. A plumber running ads has links Google cannot follow and a mobile speed score of 28. These are not obscure businesses. They are the ones winning the auction for your search.
Of the 24 advertisers, 5 had both the four basics in place and a clean Lighthouse SEO score.
What to fix first
If you own one of these sites, the order is simple, and most of it is a day’s work for whoever built the site.
- Run Lighthouse on your homepage (free, in Chrome’s developer tools, or on PageSpeed Insights) on mobile. Fix every failing SEO audit. They are specific and they tell you exactly what is wrong.
- Write a meta description for every page that a customer might land on. Sixty to 155 characters, says what you do and where.
- Add LocalBusiness structured data with your name, address, phone, hours and service area. One block of JSON on each page.
- Check your sitemap and robots.txt exist and that Google Search Console has the sitemap.
- Get the mobile performance score above 50, then above 70. Usually this means compressing images, removing unused plugins and tag scripts, and getting the hero image to load first.
- Only then look at the ads account.
Closing remarks
Here is what I think is going on. Most Canberra trade businesses are hiring someone to run ads, and nobody in that arrangement is responsible for the page the ad lands on. The ads person optimises the ads. The web person built the site two years ago and has not looked since. The owner sees clicks on an invoice and assumes the rest is working. The audit says it is not: two in three advertisers are missing a basic, and not one has a clean best-practices score.
The order should be the reverse of what most people do. First, get the website to the SEO baseline: Lighthouse 100 on every page, structured data, a sitemap, a mobile page that loads. Second, optimise the Google Business Profile, which is where most Canberra trade enquiries actually start; I will cover that in the next post. Third, earn local visibility with reviews, citations and content that answers what people in your suburb search for. Only after that put money into ads, so the clicks land somewhere that converts.
At Connect Your Way I do all four of these myself, for each client, in that order. The SEO-optimised rebuild and the Business Profile are the baseline; paid ads come after, and only when the page they land on deserves the spend.
If you run a trade business in Canberra and want to know how your own site scores, send me the address and I’ll run the same checks and tell you what I find. If I am on a job when you call, Mel, our AI receptionist, will take the details.
Method note: 160 homepages checked on 8 October 2026 with Lighthouse 12.8 (mobile) and a page-reading script; 144 loaded, 137 scored. Google Ads presence was judged by the conversion tag on the homepage, so it is a lower bound. Performance scores are lab scores on a simulated 4G connection. No business is named.