SEO is more than keywords

A client sent us their SEO report a while back. Forty keywords tracked, twelve up, eight down, a green arrow next to “commercial plumbing Toowoomba”. The chart looked healthy.

Their Google listing said they closed at 4pm. They close at 5. Three directory sites still carried a phone number they’d stopped using two years earlier. The newest review was from 2023, and nobody had replied to the one-star sitting under it.

None of that appeared in the report, because the report measured the part that’s easy to measure.

A keyword is a question someone asked

That’s all a keyword is. Someone typed a phrase because they had a problem. “Commercial plumbing Toowoomba” isn’t a target, it’s a person standing in a flooded storeroom at 7am deciding who to ring.

Tracking the phrase tells you what they typed. It doesn’t tell you whether the page they landed on answered them, whether your listing looked alive, whether the reviews reassured them, or whether the number they called still works. You can hold position three for a year and lose every one of those people.

So the keyword list is a starting point for the work. A lot of the industry treats it as the work, because a spreadsheet of phrases is something you can put on an invoice. We’ve written before about the page-one promise and where SEO goes bad. This is the duller version of the same problem. Nobody is running a scam, the effort is just pointed at the wrong end of the job.

The page has to actually answer the thing

Most business pages are written to describe the business. “We deliver quality plumbing solutions to commercial clients across South East Queensland with a focus on reliability.” Nobody searched for that. It answers no question anyone has ever had.

Compare it to a page that says what you charge for an after-hours callout, how fast you can get to an industrial estate on a Sunday, what a backflow test involves, what a strata committee needs to approve before you start, and what happens when the job turns out to be worse than the quote. That page ranks better because it deserves to. It also closes work, which the ranking never did on its own.

Google’s own guidance on helpful content is blunter than most agency decks about this. Write for the person, demonstrate you’ve done the work, answer the question fully enough that they don’t need to open another tab. The mechanics of titles and headings matter, but they’re the packaging. The reason a page wins is that it’s the most useful thing on the results page for that question.

Which means content depth beats content volume. Twelve pages that each answer a question properly will out-earn sixty thin pages spun out to hit a monthly quota. The sixty thin pages are also the exact pattern that gets a site classed as low value, so you pay twice.

Your website is only part of what Google reads

People say “our SEO” and mean their website. Search doesn’t work that way, especially locally.

For a business with an address and a service area, the Google Business Profile does a lot of the heavy lifting. Category, service list, hours, photos, service area, the questions people ask on it, the posts, the reviews. It is the thing that appears in the map pack above the normal results, and it’s free, and most businesses fill it in once and never open it again.

Then there’s everything else with your name on it. Industry association listings. The local chamber directory. Your LinkedIn page. Facebook. A supplier’s “where to buy” page. An old franchise directory nobody has updated since 2019. Each of those is a small statement about who you are and how to reach you, and when they disagree with each other the search engine has to guess which version is true.

Getting them to agree is unglamorous work. It’s an afternoon with a spreadsheet, a list of every site that mentions your business, and a lot of small edits. It isn’t clever, and it’s usually worth more than another month of keyword tracking.

Reviews are doing two jobs

A review is a ranking input and it’s sales copy, and businesses tend to manage it as neither.

The ranking side is straightforward enough: volume, rating and recency all feed local results. The sales side matters more. Someone comparing three plumbers reads the two-star and three-star reviews first, because those are the ones that sound honest. What they’re looking for is how you responded.

A calm, specific reply to a bad review does more for you than the nine glowing ones above it. “You’re right, we quoted a two-hour window and turned up at four. We’ve changed how we handle Friday bookings and I’d like to sort the invoice out with you.” That reads like a business run by adults. No reply at all reads like nobody’s home.

Recency is the part people miss. Twenty-eight reviews with the newest from two years ago suggests a business that’s either coasting or gone. Six reviews spread across the last six months suggests one that’s still operating and still asking. Asking is the whole trick, and it works best as a habit attached to job completion rather than a campaign somebody runs in March.

Don’t buy them, don’t write them, don’t offer a discount for a five-star. Fake and incentivised reviews are misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law and the ACCC has gone after businesses for exactly this. It’s also obvious. Twelve reviews in one week, all first-time reviewers, all four sentences long, all mentioning the business name in full. Customers spot it faster than the platforms do.

Stale data is the cheapest thing to fix and the last thing anyone fixes

The pattern on most sites we’re asked to look at is depressingly consistent.

Hours that were right before the last roster change. A staff page with two people who left. A services list that includes something the business stopped offering in 2024 and excludes the thing it now makes most of its money from. Pricing from a previous financial year. A “latest news” section whose latest item is fourteen months old, which is worse than having no news section. Case studies with dead links to client sites that have since been rebuilt.

Then the structural version of the same rot. A site that was rebuilt without redirects, so every link anyone ever earned now lands on a 404. Sitemaps still listing pages that don’t exist. Structured data describing an address they moved out of. We’ve written a whole piece on rebuilding a site without torching your search results, because that one mistake undoes years of work in an afternoon.

None of this is hard. It’s just nobody’s job. That’s the actual problem, and it’s an ownership problem rather than an SEO problem. Somebody has to be responsible for the sentence “the information about us on the internet is currently true”, and in most businesses no one is.

AI answers make current information worth more

The other reason freshness has gone from housekeeping to something that costs you money: people are asking assistants instead of scrolling results.

When ChatGPT or Google’s AI overview answers “who does commercial plumbing in Toowoomba”, it’s pulling from pages, listings and reviews, and it’s summarising them into one paragraph the person will probably act on without clicking anything. If your hours are wrong, the wrong hours get quoted. If your services page doesn’t mention the work you actually want, you won’t be in the answer for it. If your best page is a 2021 post with a stale price in it, that price is what comes back.

You can’t optimise your way into an AI answer with keyword density. What helps is having pages that state facts plainly, in current language, with the details on the page rather than in an image or a PDF. Clear headings. Actual numbers. Dates on things. It’s the same discipline that makes a page good for a human in a hurry, which is not a coincidence.

Worth checking this week

• Open your Google Business Profile and read every field as though you were a customer. Hours, categories, services, service area, photos, the Q&A section.
• Search your business name and click through the first three pages. Note every site carrying your details, and fix the ones that are wrong.
• Look at your five most-visited pages in analytics and ask whether each one answers the question that brought someone there.
• Read your most recent negative review. Reply to it today.
• Check when you last asked a happy customer for a review, and put it in the job-completion process rather than the marketing plan.
• Skim your services page against what the business actually sells now.
• Run your site through a crawl tool and look for 404s, redirect chains and pages missing titles.

That list takes a couple of hours and no retainer.

The habit beats the campaign

The businesses that get found consistently aren’t running anything clever. They keep their details true, they write pages that answer questions properly, they ask for reviews and reply to them, and they fix things when they break. It’s maintenance, and it compounds, and it’s boring in the way that most things that work are boring.

If you want the technical foundation handled properly, that’s the part we do. We build websites and web platforms that load fast, publish clean markup and structured data, and stay easy for your team to keep current. If the site already exists and the problem is speed or search, see website rebuilds and performance, or the local version at web design in Toowoomba.

Send us the report you’re currently paying for, along with what your phone has been doing. We’ll tell you which parts are worth keeping and what to fix first.