We're becoming an SEO company. Here's the starting line.

The short version. I started Connect Your Way as an AI company, and the business owners I met kept bringing up SEO, so we are becoming an SEO company for Canberra businesses, with AI as an add-on. Two things at once: “SEO agency” in Canberra is a crowded search that will take us a long time to earn, and our own starting line, measured on 1 October 2026, shows it. But for a local business like a bathroom renovator, the first results do not take six months. Below are our red dots, and a link to what two weeks did for a client.

What changed, and why

I started Connect Your Way as an AI company. I also built askhat.com.au, which is still running as my own project, separate from Connect Your Way.

I met business owners through many channels, and lots of them started talking about SEO. One conversation stuck. A bathroom renovator told me he had spent heavily on marketing with nothing coming back, and that there was “no SEO guy in Sydney and Canberra”. I came away thinking: this is the market.

And someone who had seen what I built with askhat handed me three businesses to manage for SEO.

So we listened. Connect Your Way is becoming an SEO company, and we are starting over in public.

What that means from now on

Every page we build is guaranteed to score 100 on Lighthouse SEO; if one scores less, we fix it free until it does. That is a technical score; we never promise a ranking. The work is websites built to that standard, and local SEO for Google Search, Google Maps and AI answers. AI integration stays as an add-on, and chatbots are still a product (the one on this site is the demo); they just don’t lead. The homepage still puts AI first; I’m rewriting it to match.

Closing the chatbot case study

Part 1 promised three things for “ai chatbots canberra”: Search Console for the chatbot page, GA4 chat opens, and enquiries.

Google Search Console, query “ai chatbots canberra”, all pages, last 28 days (14 September – 11 October 2026).

• Impressions: 80, about 20 a week: roughly a third of the 57 the chatbot page alone had in the week of 27 August – 2 September.
• Average position: 7.7 across all our pages, against 6.7 for the chatbot page alone that week. On 24 September I wrote that our homepage was ranking first for this query within a week of the changes. That was one search I ran on 15 September, the day they went live: one result, not a steady ranking.
• Clicks: one (1.3%), dated 14 September, within a day of the rework going live, so I can’t credit it to the new title.

Part 1 said that if the click-through rate was still zero after four weeks, the title was not the problem and we would say so and look again. One click I can’t credit to the new title is as good as zero, so I’m saying so. Looking again, the bigger issue is volume: at the 3–6% part 1 called decent, 80 impressions bring two to five clicks in 28 days, too few to split by page or by week.

There is no four-week chat number: GA4 recorded nothing from 22 September until the fix on 7 October, because of a tag-ID mistake on our side. Enquiries by source are the number that pays for anything, and I will report them from the next post, once there is a full month of clean data behind them.

So the case study ends without a win. That result isn’t why we changed direction; the conversations at the top of this post are. The query stays in the monthly numbers.

The starting line, 1 October 2026

On 1 October we checked where our Business Profile ranked on Google Maps for three searches, from 49 points in a 7×7 grid running from just south of Crace down to Woden. Each dot is our position from that spot: green would be top 3, yellow 4–10, orange 11–20, red outside the top 20. The pin is our location in Crace. Map data ©2026 Google.

Starting line, 1 October 2026: “seo agency”, average rank 20.6. Top 20 at three of the 49 points, all just south of Crace (6th, 17th, 19th).

Starting line, 1 October 2026: “web designer”, average rank 18.9. Top 20 at 15 of the 49 points, all north of the lake; best 5th.

Starting line, 1 October 2026: “digital marketing agency”, not in the top 20 at any of the 49 points.

Search Console, the top ten queries containing “seo”, for the 28 days it showed on 14 October 2026:

“seo agency” is the line to look at: 65 impressions, about two a day, at position 2.8 and no clicks. Same shape as the chatbot page in part 1: on page one and not clicked. My guess is a map pack or an AI answer; the main Search Console report doesn’t separate those. The grid’s 20.6 measures something else: our Maps position from 49 fixed points on one day. Search Console averages only the searches where our site appeared, over 28 days. “local seo canberra” sits at 81.2, and “seo canberra”, the phrase in September’s post title, isn’t on this list. At these volumes one search moves an average; I’ll say when a change is noise.

What we did in the first two weeks

• Site: audit fixes, including Canberra in six page titles that lacked it (11 Oct); a 13-page Korean version of the site (13–14 Oct).
• Business Profile and listings: six directory listings submitted and a Facebook Page set up (7–8 Oct); our appeal on a bundled category change refused, so categories now change one at a time (7 Oct); service areas set to 19, with the same list on the site (14 Oct).
• Content: posts on 160 Canberra trade websites we audited (8 Oct) and on the National AI Centre’s AI Directory, where we are listed after review (9 Oct).
• Measurement: the grids above (1 Oct); GA4 fixed (7 Oct); a local-SEO audit (11 Oct).

Most of the groundwork came before the starting line: duplicate web addresses merged (15 September), 23 page headings rewritten (20 September), and SEO and ads pages, profile categories and services (27 September).

Where we stand

On 27 September our local-SEO audit scored 60/100. On 11 October it scored 62/100: the site and schema parts were already near their ceiling, and the two points came from the listings and profile work above. What moved on Maps in that time: from our own suburb, Crace, we now rank first for “local seo”, “website designer gungahlin” and “ai chatbot”. What didn’t: “seo canberra” and “web designer canberra” still don’t show us anywhere, and reviews stayed at two.

What is in the way, as at 14 October 2026: only two Google reviews; showing them on this site waits on Google approving our access to its Business Profile API; and the GA4 hole above can’t be backfilled.

Why our own search is the slow one

“SEO agency” is one of the most crowded searches in any city, and Canberra is no exception. The agencies on page one have years of links, hundreds of pages and dozens of reviews, and nothing about that can be hurried. We have two reviews, a domain that is two months old and a Business Profile that was still “Website designer” until a few weeks ago. I expect our own climb to take months, and I will publish it whether it moves or not.

That is not the situation most local businesses are in, and I do not want our red dots to be read as what local SEO looks like.

What it looks like for a local business

On 1 October, the same day we measured our own starting line, we started local SEO for a Canberra bathroom renovator. Its starting point was worse than ours: unless someone searched its name, it was effectively invisible, and Google had two listings for it. Two weeks of Business Profile work, with the new website not even live yet, and it was in the top 20 at 26 of 49 points across Canberra for “bathroom renovator”, up from 10, and 4th at its home suburb for “bathroom renovation company”, up from not ranked at all.

That is the fast half of local SEO, and I have written it up as a guide, with the before-and-after maps: Local SEO in Canberra: you don’t have to wait six months. The slow half, reviews, links and the website, is where the months go.

How we’ll report it

Every month: the same three grids from the same 49 points, the same Search Console queries over the latest 28 days, and a dated list of what changed. If the month is flat, the post will say so.

Closing remarks

My view, two weeks in: most business owners who have paid for SEO can’t tell you what it did for them. Nobody showed them where they started, so nobody can show them what moved. Measuring the same few things the same way every month fixes that, and it is the only honest way to sell this work.

That is why I am publishing a page of mostly red dots for our own search, in the same week as a client’s grid that went from ten top-20 points to twenty-six. The two are not in conflict. One is a crowded city-wide search a new company has to earn slowly. The other is a local trade that Google simply wasn’t sure about. Knowing which one you are in is the first job, and anyone selling you a flat six-month wait hasn’t done it.

I don’t see this as leaving AI behind. When someone asks an AI assistant who does SEO in Canberra, that answer is a search result too, and getting quoted in it is part of the SEO job now.

Related reading

• SEO in Canberra
• Web development in Canberra
• Our plan for “SEO Canberra”
• The “AI chatbots Canberra” case study, part 1
• 160 Canberra trade websites, audited
• 캔버라 구글 SEO (in Korean)

Want your own starting line measured the same way? Tell me about your business.