01
Foundation
Whether the business exists properly online, and who actually owns it.
- —ABN, trading names, licences and insurance current
- —Domain ownership — who is the registrant, really
- —Business email on your own domain, not gmail
- —DNS control, and whether anyone has it written down
- —Email deliverability: SPF, DKIM, DMARC
- —Logo files that exist in usable formats
- —The ownership register: every account, who owns it, who can recover it
02
Website
The one asset you own outright, and everything else points at it.
- —Hosting, uptime, HTTPS, renewals nobody is tracking
- —Crawlability: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, actually indexed
- —Search Console: verification, coverage, URL Inspection, manual actions
- —Bing Webmaster Tools — free, ignored, and feeding AI answers
- —PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals, on mobile first
- —Redirects, canonicals, 404s and broken links
- —Structured data: LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ, Article
- —Does the homepage say what you do, for whom, where — above the fold
- —A clear next step on every single page
03
Google Business Profile
The highest-value free asset in local search, and usually half set up.
- —Claimed and verified by the business, not by an old agency
- —Primary category — the single biggest ranking lever there is
- —Service areas, hours, holiday hours, attributes
- —Photos that are real and recent
- —Booking link connected
- —Posts, and Q&A seeded with the questions you actually get
- —Reviews: how to ask, how to reply to every one, and the hard legal limits
04
Content and search visibility
Being findable for what customers actually type, not what you call it.
- —Query research from real customer language, including phone calls
- —Service pages that answer the question, one per service
- —Topic clusters: a pillar page with supporting articles
- —FAQs, on the page and in schema
- —AI search visibility: entity consistency, being quotable, llms.txt
- —Named authors, credentials, evidence and dates
- —A refresh rhythm, because old content decays
05
Off-site presence
Everywhere else the internet describes you, and whether it agrees.
- —NAP consistency — name, address, phone identical everywhere
- —Industry directories, associations, council and chamber listings
- —Backlinks earned through partnerships and local press, never bought
- —Supplier and partner cross-links
06
Social
One or two platforms done properly beats six done badly.
- —Which platforms actually matter for this business
- —Consistent handles, complete profiles, matching details
- —Content pillars, cadence, batching, repurposing one asset into many
- —Short video, currently the cheapest reach available
- —Local community groups, where most service work really comes from
- —Your email list — the only audience you own. Everything else is rented
07
Marketing
Free and organic first. Paid traffic into a broken funnel just costs more.
- —Search, referrals, partnerships, community, reactivation, email, content
- —Referrals made systematic instead of accidental
- —Reactivating past customers — the cheapest revenue in any business
- —Only then: Google Ads on search intent, then everything else
- —What a lead costs versus what a customer is worth
08
Conversion
Turning attention into booked, paid work.
- —The enquiry-to-booking journey, mapped end to end and timed
- —Missed calls — the biggest silent leak, and nobody measures it
- —After-hours and on-the-tools capture
- —Response time, because minutes decide who wins the job
- —Online booking that works on a phone
- —Quotes: speed, clarity, follow-up
- —Reminders, no-show handling, deposits and terms
09
Structure
How the business runs when the owner is not in the room.
- —Working IN the business versus ON it — an honest time audit
- —Roles on a chart, even when one person holds all of them
- —SOPs for anything done more than twice
- —One source of truth for customer and job data
- —Shared inbox with triage, ownership and response rules
- —Tool inventory, then rationalisation — what overlaps, what is paid for and unused
- —Knowledge out of the owner’s head and written down
- —Capacity: can you deliver the work the marketing wins
10
Money, reporting and connections
Knowing the numbers weekly, not at tax time.
- —Xero or MYOB connected, with a chart of accounts that fits the business
- —Quote to invoice to payment, with automated reminders
- —Cash flow visibility, not just a P&L in October
- —API connections: Xero, Stripe, bank feeds, bookings, CRM
- —What is being retyped by a human because two systems do not talk
- —The three numbers you actually look at every week
11
AI
Where it genuinely helps, and where it makes things worse.
- —Safe: drafting, summarising, triage, research, transcription, first drafts
- —Unsafe: autonomous advice, clinical, legal, tax, anything unreviewed to a customer
- —Chatbots — when one helps, and when it costs you the enquiry
- —After-hours capture with explicit human escalation rules
- —Connecting an AI assistant to your own systems safely, in plain English
- —Staff AI policy, tool register, approval process
- —What data must never go near a model, and which free tools train on yours
- —A prompt library the business owns, not one in someone’s chat history
12
Compliance and risk
The rules that apply whether or not anyone told you.
- —Australian Consumer Law: claims, testimonials, and refund wording that is not enforceable
- —Privacy Act, the APPs, and notifiable data breaches
- —Ahpra service-advertising and TGA therapeutic-goods rules, with context, evidence and responsible review
- —Spam Act consent for email and SMS
- —Accessibility, cookie consent, terms and required disclosures
- —Can you leave a vendor with your data intact
13
Competition
Who you are actually up against, from evidence rather than assumption.
- —Who ranks for what customers search, not who you think competes
- —Their visibility footprint: profile, reviews, content, ads
- —What customers say in competitor reviews — free research almost nobody does
- —Where you can realistically win, and where not to fight
14
Measurement
Proving anything changed.
- —Baseline everything before touching it
- —Search Console: impressions, clicks, queries, pages
- —Profile insights: calls, directions, website clicks
- —Enquiries, not vanity traffic
- —Missed-call rate and conversion at each step
- —A monthly review against the baseline
15
Handover
You own it at the end. That is the point.
- —A named internal owner for every system
- —Training, live and recorded
- —SOPs, workflow maps and approved templates
- —Escalation rules and privacy boundaries
- —Success metrics agreed up front
- —A 30-day review after handover
- —Then your choice: run it yourself, have us coach your team, or keep us close