How To Rank Your Brisbane Based Business On Google

Local keyword research, specific to Brisbane, is the process of finding keywords people in the area use to find the products or services you offer via Google.

What we have found is that over the last five years, people have become much more accurate with their searches and include many “geo identifiers” in their research.

This means more and more people are using “keyword + location” when searching for local companies in Brisbane on Google.

The problem we often encounter when analysing websites is that businesses use “national” terms to optimise their website just because the search volume is high.

Here is an example.

According to Google's Keyword Planner “electrician” gets 33,100 searches/per month.

The hyper-local specific suburb version of this keyword "electrician Logan" only gets 260 searches.

Looking at this data, it would make sense to target the higher-search-volume term; however, this would also mean competing against every other electrician in Australia and the majority of the traffic would not be relevant to the business as they can't service customers outside of Brisbane, let alone Logan.

That’s why, as part of our local keyword research services, we target keywords that are:

1. targeting areas that are relevant to the business, thus making it easier to rank.
2. targeting people that are most likely to call, thus making the traffic more valuable for the business.

SIDENOTE: Yes, we know Google has an algorithm to detect when users want information relating to a specific location, even if a national term is used, but as a starting point, we recommend targeting the geo-specific term and then expanding your focus on the national version once you start to drive traffic for the initial term.

On-page SEO for websites trying to rank in Brisbane is the process of optimising your meta tags, h-tags, images, and content around keywords people in the area use to try and find your business.

What we have found to work really well is ensuring the main keyword the website targets is at the front of your title tag and, if possible, also in the URL and throughout your headers and content.

Our approach to on-page optimisation involves first applying all the basics that we know work and are best practices, then fine-tuning the page over time to achieve top rankings.

Here’s proof of how well this works:

Success Story:

One of our clients who operates in Brisbane hit the No.1 spot for 4 out of 5 terms by following our on-page optimisation process.

Here's how we did this.

1. We created a specific page around Brisbane,
2. Added the location+keyword into the URL,
3. Added the location+keyword into the title tag
4. Made the content relevant for the target market in Brisbane.

As you can see in the screenshot above, it allowed us to achieve No.1 rankings for keywords that are driving thousands of visitors each month.

Mobile Optimisation is the process of optimising for various screen sizes and fast loading times.

Our testing shows that optimising a website for mobile search doesn’t mean the website ranks better for specific Brisbane-related terms, but rather that it ranks better across all terms for mobile search.

One factor contributing to this is Google’s announcement of mobile-first indexing for the whole web in 2020.

Here's why understanding this is important if you want to be found by your customers or clients in Brisbane:

We took a random sample of businesses operating in Brisbane and collected analytics data for a 12-month period from this sample.

We discovered that across the chosen sample, on average, 54% of traffic originated from mobile devices, and 42.98% of traffic was desktop traffic. (source: Websites That Sell in-house client study, 2024)

Important observations include:

1) Your Money Your Life (YMYL) type websites had a similar or lower amount of mobile traffic compared to desktop traffic.

eg. financial services-based website device stats:

eg. kitchen company device stats:

2) Retail websites had much higher levels of mobile traffic.

eg. eCommerce websites device stats:

3) Businesses where buying decisions didn’t have a major impact on someone's life had dramatically high mobile traffic.

eg. Hair salon website device stats:

eg. outdoor lights installation company website device stats:

Conclusions:

Considering these factors, we discovered that the biggest influencer on device usage is determined by industry type and how the purchase of the product or service influences one's life.

However, all things being equal, our research data shows that people in Brisbane slightly prefer using mobile devices when searching for businesses online.

Therefore we found that industry and the search intent of target keywords influenced how much mobile traffic a site received. However, all things being equal,  optimising for mobile is important as more people in Brisbane lean towards mobile search v's desktop search on Google.

Getting links from sites themed around Brisbane involves researching relevant websites and finding which ones would benefit from listing your business as a resource.

We have had great success getting local links from various Brisbane-themed websites such as:

https://businessinbrisbane.com.au/

https://www.wynnumcentral.com.au/where-to-shop/

https://brisbanesmallbusiness.com.au/

Those types of local links are readily available for most people.

As part of our link-building process, we go one step further.

We research opportunities to leverage our clients' existing relationships (e.g., suppliers, community groups, memberships) and find unique ways to add value to their websites, which in return earns the client a backlink.

These are the types of links only the best SEO companies in Brisbane know how to attain, and they’re what set a top-ranking website apart from one that’s further down the first page or, worse, somewhere on the second page.