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Same business, same trade, same city. What changed is that people looking for a roofer in their suburb started finding him instead of the bloke two suburbs over. Leads up 69% year on year, 16% more jobs actually booked, and a 9% conversion rate on the traffic coming in.
Here is what that work actually is, minus the jargon. Your Google Business Profile gets built properly so you turn up in the map pack when someone nearby searches. Every service you sell gets its own page, so Google knows what you do instead of guessing. Every call and form gets tracked, so you can see which search produced which job and stop paying for the ones that produce nothing. None of it is exotic. Most of your competitors have simply never had it done. If you are in a trade, there is a deeper page on SEO for tradies.
We have been doing exactly that for Brisbane service businesses for more than eleven years, and the average client stays past four. Not because of a contract, because there is not one.
Real Australian volumes, pulled August 2026 from Google’s own keyword data. Eight of the trades we work with, and what Brisbane types when it needs one of them.
Now the part most agencies will not put in front of you. Every line above is the “brisbane” version of the search. The “near me” version is far bigger. About 49,500 people a month type “plumber near me” against 4,400 for “plumber brisbane”. “Electrician near me” runs about 40,500 against 1,900. Roughly eleven times the demand, sitting in a search that names no suburb at all.
That bigger half is decided in the map pack, not on your website, and for most service businesses it is the fastest thing on the board to fix. So put it to whoever you are about to hire: which of these two are you chasing for me, and what are you doing about my Google Business Profile? An agency that only quotes you the “brisbane” terms is bidding for the smaller half and charging you for the whole job. If you want the longer version of how that work gets built, it is on our Brisbane SEO page.
Both will sit in the same meeting, use the same words and quote a similar number. The difference shows up in month two, and by then you have signed.
The work goes to a white-label supplier the moment you sign. Nobody at the company you hired has opened your website. The reporting is generated, the content is templated, and the person you liked in the meeting was in sales.
Someone with a name is responsible for your results and you can get them on the phone. The plan starts from your services and your suburbs. When a month goes badly you hear it from them before you spot it yourself.
Ask all seven on the first call. The answers matter less than whether they can answer at all, quickly, without retreating into a deck.
The fastest way to find out what you are actually buying is to ask who touches the account, then ask for proof from a business like yours.
A named person you can meet, or an offshore team they name openly and manage themselves. Walk if you get "our team" and nothing more.
Real figures, including the months that went sideways. A logo wall and a testimonial about how nice they are is not an answer.
Anyone who has run campaigns for years can name a risk in one sentence. Anyone who says nothing can go wrong will not tell you when it does.
Vague first months are where budgets go quiet. Both of these should be answerable before you have signed anything.
Specific and boring: profile rebuilt, tracking installed, crawl faults fixed, service pages mapped. Not "onboarding and strategy".
Calls, forms and booked jobs, tracked from day one. Rankings on their own are the wrong scoreboard for a service business.
These two get left to the end and matter most. Ask them before you sign, because afterwards you are asking a favour.
A short list with reasons, including the ones they talk you out of. Every suburb in the metro area, priced per page, is a red flag.
You keep everything, because it was in your name already. Anything vaguer than that is the answer.
Not one of these is rare. All three are still being sold in Brisbane this month.
Nobody outside Google controls the results, so nobody can guarantee a place in them. What usually gets guaranteed is page one for a term nobody searches. Ask which term. The answer is normally your own business name.
We show you what has happened for businesses shaped like yours, then report monthly against it. Including the months where the numbers are ugly, because those are the ones that tell you whether anyone is watching.
Ten keywords, twenty, fifty. Keywords are not a unit of work and they are not a unit of value. One search that books a bathroom renovation beats forty that book nothing. Pricing by keyword count means nobody has looked at your business yet.
What it costs moves with how many services you want found, how many suburbs you genuinely want work from, and how much repair the site and the profile need first. We look before we quote.
A report that climbs every month while the phone stays quiet is measuring the wrong thing. If calls and form fills are not in it, they are not being managed, and nobody can tell you which search produced which customer.
Call tracking and lead quality reviewed monthly. Keywords that do not produce enquiries come off the plan. Rankings are how, leads are why.
SEO does take time. That fact also gets used as cover for a lot of very quiet quarters. Hold any agency, us included, to this.
Before any work starts, every account goes into your name: Google Business Profile with owner access, website and hosting logins, Analytics and Search Console as your property, and the ads account and billing if you run one. It takes an afternoon, and it is the thing most agencies leave until you ask.
Google Business Profile rebuilt properly, reviews running on a system rather than on your memory, call and form tracking live, and the technical faults from the audit fixed and re-checked rather than just listed. For most local service businesses the map pack moves first, and it often moves inside this window.
A page for every service you sell, each one indexed, and a full month of tracked enquiries to look at. Top positions on your hardest searches are not due yet, and anyone promising them is guessing. If the audit, the dashboard and the page list cannot all be produced on request, that tells you what has been happening.
Everyone else answers this with "it depends on your goals". Here is the version that helps you.
Nobody publishes a number because the work genuinely differs from one business to the next. What moves it is the number of services you want found, the number of suburbs you actually want work from, and how much repair your site and Google profile need before any of it can start. A single-trade business working one patch of Brisbane needs less than a multi-trade outfit covering the southeast.
Which still leaves you holding two proposals that look nothing alike, so compare them on this instead. Ask what sits inside the retainer versus billed on top, because content, links and technical work land in different places depending on who wrote the quote. Ask how many hours it buys and who does them, because a cheap retainer that buys three hours of a junior is not cheap. Ask what happens in a month where nothing moves. Then ask for the first ninety days in writing, because deliverables you can list are deliverables you can check.
We look before we quote, and looking takes an afternoon rather than a paid discovery phase. Send us the site and you will have a number and a first ninety days on the call after that. If the honest answer is that you should spend the money on Google Ads for six months first, you will get that too.
Fast answers, clear decisions.
Spend, leads and trends at a glance.
Your data, your accounts.
Budget goes to what converts.
4+ years average client retention.
Specialists across each platform.
It moves with three things: how many services you want found, how many suburbs you want work from, and what condition your website and Google profile are in when we pick them up. A single-trade business working one patch of Brisbane needs less than a multi-trade outfit covering the southeast. Rather than quote a range that means nothing for your situation, we look first and give you a real number on the first call.
It comes down to whether people search for what you sell, and for trades and local services they very much do. Those searches end in a phone call rather than a browse. What decides whether it is worth it is whether the agency measures the calls. Plenty report rankings and traffic and look successful by their own scoreboard while your bookings sit flat.
Ask the seven questions above on the first call and watch for specificity. Good agencies answer quickly with names, dates and deliverables. Weak ones answer with process words. Ask what could go wrong with your campaign, and treat the vagueness of the answer as the signal.
Ask this on every call and compare the answers, because the range you get back tells you who has done it before. Realistically: a few months before positions shift in a way you would notice, and closer to a year before search carries a serious share of your enquiries. The map pack tends to move first. If someone quotes you weeks, ask which term they mean, then ask how many people type it.
No. Nobody can, because nobody outside Google controls the results. What you can reasonably ask any agency for is the evidence: what has happened for businesses shaped like yours, and how your own campaign tracks against it monthly, including the months where the numbers are ugly. We send those months too.
Ask any agency this and watch whether they steer you toward whatever they happen to sell. The honest answer is that the order depends on your cash position. Ads buy speed and stop the day you stop paying. Search is slower and keeps producing afterwards. If your pipeline is dry right now, ads first is usually the right call.
You keep them. Your Google Business Profile, your website and hosting, your Analytics and Search Console property, your ads account and the content written for you are all in your name from week one. That is what makes a no lock-in agreement worth anything, because a monthly agreement is no use if leaving costs you everything you paid for.
It already has. AI Overviews answer plenty of questions before anyone clicks, and getting cited in them comes down to how a site is structured rather than any new trick. Ask a shortlisted agency whether they have had a client cited in an AI Overview and what they did to get it. Most cannot answer yet. For local service work the fundamentals hold either way, because when a hot water system dies on a Sunday a summary does not fix it and the map pack still shows.
Because Google is ranking their website, not their workmanship, and it has no way to tell the difference. Someone average with a quick site, a properly built profile and a page for each service will sit above a genuine tradesman running one homepage from 2016. Fixable, and it is most of the reason anyone hires us.
