Summary
Nine years of SEO for an air conditioning business, on a small budget
We ran the search engine optimisation for a family-run air conditioning and electrical business in South East Queensland from 2016. It sits in one of the most competitive local niches there is, where national brands, franchise networks and lead-generation middlemen all chase the same customers, most of them spending many times what a local family firm can.
On a modest budget of around two thousand dollars a month, we kept them winning on the first page of Google for nearly a decade. The number of other websites linking to the site grew from under 100 to more than 250, the rankings held through every season, and the phone kept ringing.
In 2025 the next generation took over the business and decided to try a fresh approach to the marketing. Our work on the account ended in August 2025. Within a few months the organic traffic they had relied on for years fell off a cliff, and nine months later it has still not recovered. This is the record of what that steady, unglamorous work was really holding up.
What We Did
Every dollar of a small budget went on the work that actually moves local rankings, and we ran the account as if the website were our own.
Link Building
Not many links, but the right ones. Over the engagement we took the site’s referring domains, the number of other websites linking to it, from under 100 to a little over 250. That is a deliberately modest number, and that is the point. We built for quality, not volume: a smaller set of relevant, trusted links that Google actually rewards will outrank a pile of cheap ones every time. That discipline, quality over quantity, is what let a small local business outrank far bigger and far better funded competitors. It is also, as the figures further down show, exactly what changed the moment we left.
Technical and On-Page SEO
We kept the site fast, crawlable and clearly structured, so Google could understand every service and every area served. The unglamorous maintenance that keeps a site earning, done every month for years.
Local Search
We aimed the content and local-search work squarely at the terms that turn into booked jobs across their service areas, so the site showed up at the moment a nearby customer was ready to call.
What Happened After They Switched Agencies
For nine years the site had a rhythm. Its traffic dipped in the quiet months and climbed back to a peak every December, the middle of the Queensland summer, when air conditioning demand is at its highest. It did that every single year, without fail. In the chart below the line turns pink where our work ended in August 2025. That December, normally the busiest month of the year, the recovery simply never came.
Measured against the same month a year earlier, so the seasonal swing cannot be blamed, the fall runs about 80 percent, and nine months on the site is still sitting near the floor it dropped to.
The numbers
- Estimated organic traffic down around 80 percent, and still on the floor nine months later.
- First-page Google rankings fell from about 228 to 82.
- Top-three rankings fell from about 90 to 27.
And it was not for lack of effort by the new team. Over the months that followed, more links were pointed at the site than we had built across the entire nine years, yet the site’s authority slipped and its traffic kept falling. It is the clearest proof of the point above: link volume was never what held this site up. Quality was, and so was the constant work around it.
Why It Matters Who Does Your SEO
It is easy to mistake reliable results for automatic ones. For nine years, this site’s steady rankings were not its natural state. They were the product of consistent, careful work, and of knowing which handful of things actually move the needle rather than simply filling a report.
That judgement is the hard part, and it takes time to earn. We have been doing this for more than 26 years. We are a small, senior team by design, which means the people who talk to you about the work are the people who do it, not a salesperson who hands you to a junior once the contract is signed. When we take a site on, we treat it as our own, and we stay with it.
Most of all, we genuinely love this work, and the businesses we do it for. If your search has been quietly reliable for years, that is worth protecting. And if you are not certain it is being looked after the way it should be, we would be glad to take a look.