The site looked fine. Nobody could find it.
Brisbane Smart Vending puts vending machines into workplaces, gyms, warehouses and other sites around Greater Brisbane, at no cost to the host. The business supplies the machine, keeps it stocked and runs the sales.
When the owner came to me, the business had a Wix site that was expensive to keep running and practically invisible on Google. It had no contact details, none of the behind-the-scenes business information Google reads, and nothing about the individual suburbs where customers actually search, from the CBD out to Ipswich and Logan. The owner needed enquiries from those suburbs, and needed them soon.
A working demo before any commitment
I don't like asking a business owner to pay for a promise. So in May I built a free demo, and the owner could put it side by side with the Wix site before deciding anything.
The full rebuild followed in June: a page for each service, a simple form to request a site visit, and one master list of pages that feeds both the menu and the list of pages Google is given. That way, a page can't quietly go missing from either.
54 suburb pages, each written for its area
People don't just search for "vending machines". They search for "vending machines Eight Mile Plains". The competitors who were showing up had pages for exactly that.
So today, 54 suburb landing pages went live. They aren't copy-and-paste clones with the suburb name swapped in. Each one draws on one of ten area "voices" plus a hand-written line for that suburb, has its own title and description for Google, and links to the suburbs nearby. If the suburb list ever drifts out of step with the service-area page, the site won't publish an update until it's fixed.
Show a machine, don't be one
The design I launched in June turned the whole site into an interactive vending machine. It was fun, but the owner wanted a site that shows a vending machine rather than being one. That's a fair call, so earlier this month I rebuilt the look as a clean, conventional site with an illustrated machine at the top of the home page.
The important part: the words, the page addresses and all the behind-the-scenes Google work stayed exactly the same, so none of the search groundwork was lost in the redesign.
Old links that still go somewhere
I've also verified the site in Google Search Console, Google's free tool for seeing how a site appears in search. It showed three old Wix addresses Google still had on file, so I pointed each one at its closest new page. Anyone with an old link or bookmark now lands somewhere useful instead of a dead end.
An owner dashboard, so there's no need to ask me
The site now has a private owner dashboard from my site template. It shows where visitors come from, which pages they read, the enquiries that come in and whether the site is up. There's also a board where the owner can request work from me, or approve it.
What I'm not telling you (yet)
I'm not going to quote ranking or enquiry numbers here. Those belong to the client, and I'll only share them with the owner's OK. What I can say is that the groundwork is in place: a clean, fast site, a page for every suburb that matters, and Google able to understand all of it.
If your customers search by suburb, your website needs a page for each suburb they search.
You can read the full Brisbane Smart Vending case study, see how I build websites for Brisbane small businesses, or how I approach SEO and local search. If you're paying a monthly fee for a site like that, compare it with what a fixed-price website costs. If your website looks fine but doesn't bring in enquiries, tell me where you work and I'll take an honest look.