SEO service
WordPress SEO Services That Fix What the Plugin Can't
Your Yoast dashboard is a wall of green lights and you rank for nothing. It's the most common conversation we have. WordPress SEO services sold as "install the plugin, fill in the boxes" were never going to move a site with structural problems underneath.
Three in four Australian SME sites we audit run WordPress. Same pattern most times: a page builder, twelve plugins, hosting bought on price in 2019, and a mobile PageSpeed score in the thirties.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
What Yoast and RankMath genuinely do, and what they can't
They maintain your sitemaps, handle canonicals, output clean Organisation and Article schema, give you per-page robots control, and the premium versions redirect automatically when you change a slug. Worth the licence on a site edited weekly.
What they can't do is decide which pages should exist. The green light says your keyword is in the H1 and your meta is 152 characters. It says nothing about whether a plumber in Frankston searches that phrase, whether you have a page for the suburb sending you the most work, or whether anyone credible links to you.
Page builders, plugins and where your speed went
The page builder tax
Elementor, WPBakery and Divi work the same way: nested divs to make layout draggable. An Elementor page renders 2,500 to 4,000 DOM nodes where a block theme renders 700 to 1,000, plus 200KB to 400KB of CSS and JavaScript loaded regardless. On a mid-range Android over regional 4G, that's 1.5 to 2.5 seconds of extra Largest Contentful Paint.
A rebuild in a lighter stack (GeneratePress, Kadence, or blocks) is worth it when you're redesigning anyway, or when the site is forty pages. It isn't with 300 pages of ranking content, or when the builder is the only way your team can edit the site without ringing a developer.
The plugin audit
Query Monitor tells you which plugin eats your server time, per page load, in milliseconds. Usual offenders: related-posts plugins, sliders, chat widgets pulling 300KB of script, and uncached API calls.
Then check every plugin's last-updated date. Anything untouched for two years is both a speed problem and a security liability. Abandoned plugins are the most common way Australian small business sites get compromised, and injected pharma pages cost rankings fast.
Hosting and the Pacific Ocean
Sydney to a US west coast data centre is 150 to 180 milliseconds round trip, east coast about 220. On cheap US shared hosting serving Parramatta we measure time to first byte of 900 milliseconds to 1.6 seconds. The same site on a Sydney-region host returns 200 to 400. Add Cloudflare or Bunny with full page caching and the Sydney edge serves cached HTML in 40 to 90 milliseconds.
Core Web Vitals, honestly
The stack that works: page and object caching, WebP or AVIF images at display size, critical CSS inlined and the rest deferred, lazy loading below the fold with the LCP image excluded. That takes a builder site from 34 to between 65 and 85 on mobile.
A builder site will rarely beat a static build, and it doesn't need to. Clear the thresholds, then spend the rest on content.
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.
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.
WooCommerce SEO is a separate job
WooCommerce generates URLs at a rate Shopify never will, which is the advantage and the problem.
Start with base slugs. The default /product-category/ and /shop/ prefixes add a meaningless segment to every URL. You can strip the category base in Permalink settings, and on a new store you should. On a store with rankings, that's a redirect project, not a checkbox.
Then layered navigation. Every filter combination produces a crawlable ?filter_colour=blue&filter_size=large URL, and four attributes can generate tens of thousands. Index the one or two matching real search demand, built as proper category pages, and block the rest in robots.txt with canonicals back to the parent.
Out-of-stock needs a policy before you need one. Discontinued: 301 to the nearest replacement. Back in three weeks: keep the page live, show the return date, offer alternatives. Never bulk-delete seasonal stock in April and rebuild it in September. Shopify makes these calls for you, crudely but consistently. WooCommerce makes you decide. More in our ecommerce SEO work.
If you're on Wix or Squarespace
Wix SEO has improved more than its reputation suggests: editable titles and meta, robots and canonical control, structured data, 301 redirects. For a five-page services site in Belmont it's fine, and switching platforms won't fix your rankings.
The ceiling is real. No log file access, limited server-side control, awkward hreflang, and any store with faceted navigation runs out of room. Squarespace is the same with tighter URLs.
Migrating is a project: content export, URL mapping, redirects, template rebuild, post-launch monitoring. We quote $3,500 to $8,000 by size. That's technical SEO work, not a click.
What we change, and what goes to your developer
Most clients already have someone who built the site, and we don't replace them. We write specifications: the exact file, the exact change, why it matters, how to verify it. Your developer then bills two hours instead of five.
Where you'd rather we did it, give us staging and an editor account. Plugin config, redirects, schema and archives we handle. Theme templates and checkout go to your developer.
What this costs
Retainers start at $990 a month for a single-location business, $1,990 for Growth (five pages a month, three articles, four links, technical fixes) and $3,490 for Authority. No lock-in, 30 days notice.
For the technical picture first, a WordPress audit is $1,500: plugin load profiling, crawl waste, Core Web Vitals and a prioritised fix list. WooCommerce audits are $2,500, migration planning $1,200. Full detail on the SEO pricing page.
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 questionIs Yoast enough on its own?
For sitemaps, canonicals and basic schema, yes, and the premium redirect manager is useful. It won't tell you which pages to build, it can't earn a link, and it has no opinion on your architecture. Perfect Yoast settings do not make a site rank.
Do we need to rebuild our site?
Usually no. About one in six sites we audit genuinely needs it, almost always an abandoned theme or broken URLs. A rebuild clears technical debt and six months of momentum with it, so we only suggest one when the numbers support it.
Is WordPress bad for SEO?
No, it's neutral. You get control over every technical element that matters, which means you can break all of them too. Sites that do well had someone make deliberate calls on archives, permalinks, plugins and hosting. The rest are running defaults.
Which plugins do you recommend?
RankMath or Yoast, either is fine. LiteSpeed Cache if your host runs LiteSpeed, otherwise FlyingPress or WP Rocket. ShortPixel for images, Query Monitor for diagnostics, Redirection if you aren't paying for Yoast Premium. Five plugins, not twelve.
Our site is slow. Is that why we don't rank?
Probably not the main reason, and we'd rather say so than sell you a speed package. Speed breaks ties between close pages and hits conversion harder than ranking. On page four, your problem is relevance or links. A 4 second TTFB does limit crawling, though.
Can you work with our web developer?
Yes, and we prefer it. They know the build, we know what needs changing, and we send specs with file paths and expected outcomes, not vague requests. Some of our best results came from a developer catching what we'd missed.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Start with a free WordPress mini-audit
Four fields: your website, your main competitor, the suburbs you service, an email. Someone senior spends 30 to 45 minutes in your actual site and sends back three findings, one quick win you can action yourself, and one thing that needs proper help. Two business days, no automated PDF, no sales call. If it's useful we'll talk about an audit or a retainer. If not, you keep the quick win.
- 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.
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.
Great service, great communicator, patient, kind, helpful, and knowledgeable. Arbaz delivered a solid report that listed all the issues we face with our site, and answered all our questions. Happy!
I hired Arbaz to build links for our company website. He did well in his job. He manually outreached the website administrators and got us do-follow high DR/DA backlinks from the real website with high organic traffic, as we demanded. We noticed a great increase in our website domain authority due to the links Arbaz built for our website. He delivered on his commitments and was a pleasure to communicate with. I am extremely pleased with the outcome and will certainly work with Arbaz again.
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