The short version. We are new to selling SEO work, and we do not rank for “SEO Canberra”. The agencies that do have had years to earn it. Rather than pretend otherwise, we are going to publish the climb — monthly, with the Search Console numbers, including the months where nothing moves.
The part most agencies leave out
If you search “SEO Canberra” today, you will not find us. That is worth saying out loud on our own blog, because it is the first thing a careful buyer checks and the thing our industry is worst at admitting.
The established agencies in this city have been at it for years. Years of links from local news, sponsorships, directories and suppliers. Years of reviews on a Google Business Profile that has been in the same place under the same name the whole time. Hundreds of pages, most of them quietly earning the trust that makes the rest of them rank. None of that is a trick and none of it can be bought in a hurry — it is time, and they have it and we do not.
This website went live in August 2026 on a domain that did not exist before then. A new domain has no history for Google to weigh, so for the first stretch you are not competing on merit, you are competing on age. Any agency that tells a new business it can be top of a competitive head term in eight weeks is either selling something or has not looked.
So here is our position: we would rather show you the work than claim the result. This post starts a section of the blog called Ranking journey, where we publish what we are doing to rank our own site, what it does to the numbers, and what it fails to do.
What six weeks actually did
We did not start with “SEO Canberra”. We started with one narrow phrase we had a real chance at — “ai chatbots canberra” — because a new site’s only realistic opening is the query where the competition is thinnest and the intent is sharpest.
In the first weeks of September, Search Console showed impressions for that query going from 9 to 57, and average position from 12 to 6.7. Page one, in a fortnight, on a six-week-old domain. And the click-through rate was zero per cent. Not low — zero. We wrote that up in full, with the baseline table and every change we made, in part 1 of the case study.
Being on page one and getting no clicks is a specific, fixable problem, and it is a different problem from ranking. It means the title and description we were showing people were not worth clicking. So on 15 September we reworked the product page: the title and H1 written in the words people actually search, a description with both the local and the commercial hook, published pricing, an FAQ answering the six questions buyers really ask, and the live demo moved above the fold instead of hidden behind a floating button.
Within a week, our homepage was ranking first on Google for “ai chatbots canberra”, and we were being cited in Google’s AI Overview for both that query and “canberra ai integrator”. That second one matters more than it looks: AI answers are increasingly where the research stage happens, and being the source an answer engine quotes is not the same job as being the blue link it sits above.
One more thing from those six weeks, because it is the least glamorous and probably the most useful. Bing had zero pages of ours indexed. Not ranked badly — absent. Its sitemap read had failed, so as far as Bing was concerned the site was not there. We resubmitted and pushed our URLs through IndexNow, and it started indexing. Nothing about that is clever. It is the kind of thing that sits broken for a year on a site nobody checks, while the owner pays a monthly retainer for “SEO”.
The method, on us and on clients
The work we are about to do on ourselves is the work we do for a client. It comes down to five things.
Treat organic, Google Maps and AI answers as three different systems. Classic organic results, the Maps pack, and what an AI assistant says when someone asks it a question are fed by overlapping but genuinely different inputs. Maps runs on proximity, categories, reviews and a consistent business listing. AI answers favour pages that state a fact plainly enough to be quoted. Organic runs on the whole site’s standing. A plan that only addresses one of the three leaves the other two to chance.
Say what you do and where you do it, on every page. Not “solutions for modern business” — the service and the place, in the title, the H1 and the first paragraph. Most of the local-ranking problems we see are not exotic. The page never actually said what it was for, or never said where.
Structured data with real prices only. Machine-readable markup is how a page tells a search engine what it is. We put an offer in the markup only when the page already shows the same figure to a human reader. A price in the markup that is not on the page is a claim nobody can check, and both the engines and the customers eventually check.
One NAP, and links you actually earned. The business name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear. Then links from real places — suppliers, local organisations, people who have a reason to mention you. Slow, unglamorous, and the part that separates a site that ranks for its own name from one that ranks for its market.
Write against real queries, and judge it at four weeks. Search Console tells you what people typed to reach you, including the questions you have not answered yet. That is the brief for the next page. And nothing is judged on a four-day result: search does not move in a straight line, and week-one numbers are noise dressed up as a report.
What we will publish, and when
Once a month, in this Ranking journey section: a post with Search Console screenshots, the queries that moved, the ones that did not, what we changed and what we think it did. Wins and misses both. If a month is flat, the post will say the month was flat — a published record that only contains good news is not a record.
Part 2 of the chatbots case study comes first, with the four-week numbers on that 0% CTR. After that, the same treatment for the phrases we are not visible on yet, “SEO Canberra” among them.
The offer, briefly
We have put the service behind this on its own page: SEO in Canberra. Two things about how it is sold, because they are the parts people ask about first.
It is billed at $100 an hour, and quoted in hours up front — you see how many hours a month the work is and what they go on, rather than a round retainer number with a report attached. And every page we build carries our Lighthouse SEO 100 guarantee: if a page we deliver scores under 100 on Lighthouse SEO, we fix it free until it does. Performance, Accessibility and Best Practices are shipped at 90+ with the report in front of you, not guaranteed, because those depend partly on what a brand arrives with.
What we will not do is promise you a position. Nobody controls the ranking of a page they do not own the algorithm for, and we would rather be the agency that says so than the one that is technically correct in the small print.
If you want this done on your site — or you just want a straight read on where your technical baseline actually sits before you commit to anything — get in touch. And if you would rather watch us prove it on our own site first, that is exactly what this section is for.