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Technical & on-page

This is the half nobody wants to pay for and every site needs. It is not a checklist of two hundred items — it is a short list of things that quietly stop pages ranking, and most trade sites have three or four of them.

Same day, written by a person, no obligation. We only use your details to send the audit. Or email louie@superseo.com.au.

The problem

Most technical audits are two hundred items long and useless.

Run a free tool over any trade site and it will return a wall of red. Missing alt text on a decorative divider. A heading level skipped in a footer. Render-blocking CSS on a page that loads in under a second anyway.

None of it is why the site is not ranking. It is noise that looks like work, and it is what most technical SEO invoices are made of.

The things that actually stop a page ranking are a much shorter list, and they are boring.

The real list

Five things that actually break trade sites.

Every one of these is a mistake we have made or caught on this site. That is not a confession, it is the point — they are easy to make and invisible until somebody looks.

A canonical pointing at a page that does not exist

A canonical tag tells Google which URL is the real one. Point it at a URL your CMS does not actually produce and you have told Google to ignore the page it is looking at, in favour of a 404. That is worse than having no canonical at all. Every canonical on this site is currently a prediction of a WordPress permalink, and every one gets checked against the live URL before launch.

Schema describing things that are not on the page

Structured data is an invitation to be shown richly in the results, and a claim you are making to Google. Mark up a star rating you do not have, an address you do not trade from, or a FAQ block that is not visible on the page, and you are one manual action away from losing the lot. The markup on this site carries no rating, no phone and no address, because none of those exist yet.

Two of your own pages fighting over one search

Build enough pages and eventually two of them target the same term. We found it here: “roof painting melbourne” was sitting on both the roofers page and the painters page. Google picks one, usually not the one you wanted, and both do worse than a single page would have. It is a mapping problem, not a content problem, and it needs a spreadsheet rather than a plugin.

One page carrying forty suburbs

The most common structural mistake on trade sites. A single page listing every suburb you cover ranks for none of them, because it is not about any of them. The fix is not more keywords on that page — it is the page being replaced by real ones, and knowing which suburbs actually justify a page before you write forty.

Markup that only looks fine

Browsers are forgiving. We found an unclosed div on our own homepage and an unclosed aside on a suburb page — both rendered correctly in Chrome and both would have been a real problem the moment the markup went through a templating engine. Every page on this site is now checked for tag balance before it ships.

On-page

Then the ordinary things, done properly.

Titles and descriptions

One page, one job. Written for the search it is meant to win and for the person deciding whether to tap, which are not always the same sentence.

Headings that describe the page

One h1 per page, and a heading structure a person could read as an outline. If the outline does not make sense, neither does the page.

Internal linking

Suburb pages that link to each other and up to the trade page. It is how authority moves around a site and it is almost always left to the navigation menu to do by accident.

Speed and mobile

Most people find a tradie on a phone, often outdoors, often on mobile data. Fixed by not loading things you do not need, which is cheaper than any optimisation plugin.

Indexability

Whether the pages can be crawled and are actually in the index. A surprising number of trade sites carry a noindex left over from a staging build.

Forms that submit

Worth checking before anything else. A site can rank beautifully and still take no enquiries, and it is more common than it sounds.

The rest of it

This is one of four, and they only work together.

A perfect profile on a broken site loses. A perfect site nobody links to loses more slowly.

Local SEO

The whole programme, month by month, and how the four fit together.

Google Business Profile

The map pack. Three spots, decided by your profile rather than your site.