SEO service
Technical SEO Agency for Sites That Just Lost Their Traffic (and Sites About To)
Three weeks after the new site went live, organic traffic is down 60% and the enquiry form has gone quiet. The developer says nothing's broken. The old agency says give it time. Nobody can tell you which pages you lost, because nobody listed them before launch.
That's the first reason people ring a technical SEO agency. The second is better: a rebuild or platform change is coming next quarter, you've been told to sort the SEO side first, and you'd rather not spend Christmas rebuilding rankings you already had.
Same skill, both jobs. One is just cheaper.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
What technical SEO actually covers
Technical SEO decides whether Google can find, read and trust your pages. Content and links do nothing if the plumbing's broken.
Crawling and indexing
Most sites we see have 20% to 60% of their URLs outside the index, earning nothing, for a reason nobody checked.
Site architecture and internal linking
Pages buried five clicks deep look unimportant, so they're treated that way. Money pages belong two clicks from home.
Core Web Vitals
How fast the page becomes usable on a mid-range Android, not on your office fibre.
JavaScript rendering
If service copy loads after the page does, Google may index a heading and a spinner.
Structured data
Puts your reviews, prices and hours into the search result, so it earns more clicks.
Canonicalisation and duplicate content
Six URLs showing one page split the signals six ways, so none rank.
XML sitemaps
The list you hand Google of what you want indexed. Ours are accurate, which is rarer than it should be.
Log file analysis
Past a few thousand URLs, server logs show where Googlebot actually goes. Usually filtered pages nobody searches.
International setup
Selling into New Zealand, hreflang picks which version a buyer sees. Backwards, it hides AU pages from Australians.
What actually breaks in practice
Advanced technical SEO sounds exotic. The faults are boring, and expensive.
- Staging went live with
noindexstill on it. The site drops out of Google inside a week. Seen it three times this year. robots.txtblocking/assets/, so Google can't fetch the CSS and judges an unstyled skeleton.- A rebuild that changed every URL with no redirect map. Ranking pages 404, and eight years of authority is gone rather than moved.
- Redirect chains five hops deep, usually three site changes stacked up. Every hop leaks a little and slows mobile a lot.
- Content injected by JavaScript after load, so Google indexes the navigation and nothing else.
- One canonical copied into the global template, pointing every page at the homepage. The site now has one page.
- Hreflang backwards, with the AU pages declaring the UK version as the original.
- Pagination that orphans page two onward, so on a 400 product catalogue only 24 products get crawled.
Any one wipes out a year of content work, and none show up in a rank tracker until the damage is done.
Month by month
What the first year usually looks like, and when you can leave
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- Technical and local foundations
- Google Business Profile movement
- Organic rankings
- Compounding
- You can leave
Month 1
Setup-heavy. Crawl issues, tracking, the Google Business Profile, and the pages that earn money first. We do not dress month one up as results.
Typical timing, not a guarantee. Thirty days notice applies in any month, with no exit fee and no clawback.
SEO migration services: the part almost nobody plans for
A migration is any change to where your pages live or what they're called. A domain change, a platform change (WordPress to Shopify, Squarespace to Webflow), a URL restructure, an HTTP to HTTPS move, two sites consolidated into one, and the one nobody counts: a design rebuild that changes templates and internal links while the URLs stay put.
Most go wrong for a dull reason. The SEO conversation starts after the launch date is locked in, and the builders are measured on shipping, not on keeping rankings.
The process
Six to eight weeks out
Full crawl and benchmark of the live site, plus a keyword and traffic baseline by page so we can prove what moved. A complete URL inventory from the crawl, Search Console, analytics and logs, since each source knows pages the others forgot.
Two to three weeks out
The redirect map, old URL to new, one to one wherever a real equivalent exists, tested on staging rather than assumed. We check staging for indexing directives, blocked resources, canonicals, rendering, structured data and sitemap accuracy.
Launch day, first hour
Confirm
noindexis off androbots.txtis right, spot-check 50 redirects, check analytics and conversion tracking fire, submit the sitemap, render the homepage as Googlebot. Most catastrophic migrations got that way because nobody looked for six days.After launch
Days 1 to 30 we watch crawl errors, index coverage and 404 logs daily, fixing redirects as traffic finds the gaps. By day 60 rankings should be recovering, by day 90 at or above baseline. Expect a dip regardless: 10% to 20% for two to four weeks is normal. A 50% drop still there at week four is not, and that's when to worry.
Migration rescue
If you've already launched and it's gone wrong, the first 48 hours matter more than everything after. Fastest wins: restore indexing directives, un-block whatever
robots.txtis hiding, rebuild the redirect map from archived crawls and Search Console data.Nearly all of it comes back if the old URL list can be reconstructed and the pages have equivalents. Harder: pages deleted with nothing to redirect to, and sites six months on where Google has dropped the old URLs. Week one, a four to six week repair. Month six, closer to a rebuild.
Compare the models
What you are actually buying, laid side by side
Three ways people have bought SEO before they ring us, and the way we sell it.
SERPDrive
$990, $1,990 or $3,490 a month
- Who does the work
- The senior who scoped it. No account manager, no junior handover, contactable 1pm to 6pm AEST.
- What the report shows
- The deliverables listed for your tier, every month, with the work shown and an honest read of the numbers when they are not moving.
- When it goes wrong
- At the three month mark we go through the data honestly. If the volume in your niche is too thin, we say so rather than roll you into another quarter.
- The contract
- None. Thirty days notice in writing, any month, no exit fee and no clawback. You keep everything.
Core Web Vitals, without the sales pitch
Lab data is the simulated test Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights give you. Field data is what happened to real people on real phones over 28 days, and it's what Google uses. The two disagree constantly, and field data is what counts.
A perfect 100 is not the goal. Passing the field thresholds for most visits is, and past that you're buying a tiebreaker. These separate two roughly equal results. They won't lift a page that doesn't deserve to rank, and any agency selling speed as the reason you're invisible is selling the easiest thing to measure.
The ticket list your developer gets
Technical work usually needs someone else's hands, so our job is to make theirs easy. You get a prioritised ticket list in developer language, the file or template named where we can name it, each item scored by impact and effort so cheap wins go first. We ask for Search Console, analytics and staging. Not your server, CMS admin or registrar unless a job needs it. And we'll talk to your dev team directly instead of making you relay questions.
What this costs
| Work | Price (AUD) |
|---|---|
| Migration plan, redirect map and launch oversight | $3,500 to $8,000 by site size |
| One-off technical SEO audit | $1,500 |
| Ongoing technical fixes | Included in Growth ($1,990/mo) and Authority ($3,490/mo) |
| Consulting | $250/hour |
The rest is on the SEO pricing page. No lock-in, 30 days notice.
Run the sum
How many enquiries a month each tier has to bring in
The only sum that matters, and it changes completely with what you sell. Move these to your own numbers.
Each enquiry is worth about $420 at that rate. That is revenue, not margin, so apply your own margin.
Local
$990 a month · One service area
3 enquiries a month to break even
GrowthMost common
$1,990 a month · Multi-suburb or service
5 enquiries a month to break even
Authority
$3,490 a month · Competitive metro
9 enquiries a month to break even
Fees are the published monthly prices, in Australian dollars, ex GST. If the number for Authority is not realistic for your business, Authority is the wrong buy, and we will say so.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionOur traffic dropped after a rebuild. Can it be recovered?
Usually. If the old URLs can be reconstructed and the content still exists somewhere, most sites we take on are back to baseline in four to eight weeks. Slower where pages were deleted outright. Nobody honest promises 100% back.
How long before a migration should we talk?
Six to eight weeks out, not the week before. That leaves time to benchmark, build the redirect map and test it on staging while there's room to change things. We take launch-week jobs, but that's triage, not planning.
Can our developer do this?
Some can. Ask one question: can they show you a redirect map from a previous migration. If yes, you may only need us to review the plan. A blank look is your answer. Shipping a working site is a different job to keeping rankings.
Do you need access to our server?
No. Search Console, analytics and staging access cover most of it. On bigger sites we'd like the server log files, which your host can export for you. We don't need a login to read them.
Is a perfect PageSpeed score worth chasing?
No. Get the field data past the thresholds and stop. Going from 78 to 100 in Lighthouse burns developer hours and changes nothing a customer or Google notices.
We already launched and it went wrong. What now?
Send us the site today. Within a day you'll know whether it's an indexing problem, a redirect problem or something else, and what the repair takes. If it's a five minute fix, we'll say so and you can hand it straight to your dev.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Get someone to look at it properly
Send your website, your main competitor, your service area and your email. A senior person spends 30 to 45 minutes on it by hand and comes back inside two business days with three real findings: one you can fix yourself, one that needs help. No automated PDF, no obligation.
Mid-crisis, put "urgent" in the message. Post-launch drops get looked at same day where we can, and you'll get the read before we talk money. We're contactable 1pm to 6pm AEST.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
We had an amazing work experience with Arbaz in the past, so we decided to rehire him for the SEO dofollow link building for our other websites. He delivered excellent results and met our expectations. He is a highly skilled and reliable SEO expert. We will definitely hire him again for our future projects. Thank you for your hard work and dedication. 👍
Working with Arbaz has been an absolute pleasure. His expertise in managing our off-page strategy is evident in the tangible results and increased visibility we've achieved. Arbaz is professional, diligent, and consistently goes above and beyond our expectations. He not only understands our goals but also offers insights that add tremendous value to our strategy. I appreciate his proactive approach and clear communication. We feel fortunate to have him as a part of our team and I highly recommend him to anyone looking for top-tier off-page strategy services.
Arbaz was incredibly helpful and dependable. His expertise in SEO is evident, and he did an outstanding job restoring many of our websites. I highly recommend working with him.
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