Garden MC: Rebuilding a Garden Crew’s Search Foundations
A Melbourne garden maintenance crew with a hand-built website that covered 14 suburbs. We rebuilt its search foundations: a page for every suburb it actually works in, twenty long-form guides, a lighter homepage and analytics that records what visitors do.
- Industry
- Garden maintenance and landscaping
- Location
- Melbourne, Victoria
- Engagement
- August 2026 to now
- Website
- gardenmc.com.au
Who did this work. This project was delivered by our team for a client of OptiTide, our Australian sister agency. MultiTasker LLC was formed in August 2026; the people are the same, and the contract was with OptiTide.
At a Glance
What Changed, Measured
35 → 160
Pages in the Sitemap
Every one returns 200, with a unique title and description.
14 → 119
Suburb Pages
Postcodes checked against Australia Post locality data.
20
New Long-Form Guides
About 37,800 words, written for this site rather than adapted from a template.
8.2 → 5.7 MB
Homepage Download
WebP images served to browsers that accept them.
Checked on the live site on 15 September 2026. Before figures are our own measurements at the start of the work.
The Starting Point
What We Found
Garden MC mows lawns, trims hedges, cleans up gardens and removes green waste across Melbourne’s north and west. Its website was hand-built in PHP rather than WordPress, which is a good start: it was fast to change and had no plugins to fight. When the SEO engagement began in August 2026 we audited every page before touching one.
- 35 pages in total: five service pages, 14 suburb pages and eight articles, plus pricing, FAQ, gallery and legal pages.
- The business had grown to 118 suburbs; the website described 14 of them.
- None of the eight articles was indexed by Google.
- The five most important pages — the homepage, three service pages and the gallery — had no meta description of their own.
- The homepage downloaded 8.23 MB before a visitor could use it.
- Google Tag Manager was installed, but it held only advertising tags. No analytics property was recording visits at all.
Indexing
Why Google Would Not Index the Articles
Each article declared its canonical address — the version Google should index — without the .php on the end. The server had no rule to serve that form, so every canonical address returned 404. The site was telling Google that the real copy of each article did not exist.
We fixed it both ways: the canonical tags now name the address that actually loads, and a rewrite rule scoped to the blog serves the shorter form too, so an old link to either still works.
Local Pages
A Page for Every Suburb It Actually Works In
Suburb pages went from 14 to 119, covering the whole service area. The generator that builds them reads a single data file, so the next suburb is one line rather than a new page to copy.
Two decisions matter more than the count. Every postcode was resolved against the Australia Post locality data rather than typed in from memory, and the pages use plain geography instead of council names, because the council column in that same dataset is wrong for much of Melbourne. And each page links to the suburbs in its own region and to that region’s long-form guide — not to all 118 others, which is how a set of local pages turns into a link farm.
The per-suburb copy runs to about 11,500 words, and we checked that no introduction or local note is repeated anywhere in the set. One name on the service list, Upfield, deliberately has no page: it is a railway terminus inside Campbellfield, not a suburb.
Content
Twenty Guides Written for Melbourne Gardens
Eleven regional guides, each between about 1,700 and 2,150 words, cover the expanded service area. They are not one page per suburb with the name swapped: each has its own subject, tied to what is actually different about that part of Melbourne — builder’s fill over clay in the new estates of the northern growth corridor, courtyards with no side access in the inner north, fruit-tree pruning in the big backyards further out, reactive clay soils in the west.
Nine service and cost guides then filled the gaps the keyword research showed: garden clean ups, end-of-lease clean ups, synthetic turf, commercial grounds and green waste, two topics the original build plan had named and nobody had written, and a seasonal spring lawn guide. Every price in them comes from the business’s own pricing page; where the business quotes per job, the guide says so.
Each guide carries article, breadcrumb, service and FAQ structured data, and links to the service pages and back to the regions it covers.
Speed
A Homepage a Third Lighter, Without Rewriting It
The homepage images were already compressed hard; re-encoding them saved about ten percent. The waste was in their pixel dimensions. We generated WebP versions at a sensible size and had the server hand them to any browser that accepts WebP, so no page and no template had to change — background images and images built in PHP loops included.
The hero image now loads first and the rest lazily. The hero video we measured and left alone: it is 640 by 360 at a low bitrate already, and re-encoding it to newer formats at the same quality made the file larger, not smaller.
We also moved 87 MB of phone photos in a format no browser can display, which nothing linked to, out of the web root — moved, not deleted.
The Details
The Things Most Audits Miss
On a laptop-width screen the main menu needed 1,216 pixels inside a 960-pixel container: the FAQ and Blog links sat off the edge of the screen, and nobody had noticed because the page hid its own overflow. The menu now fits on one row at every width, and the suburb pages light up the right menu item.
- Old shop addresses from the previous website now answer 410 Gone instead of 404, so search engines drop them.
- A sitemap generator builds the sitemap from the pages that actually exist, with real last-modified dates.
- New and changed pages are submitted through IndexNow, which reaches Bing and several other engines. It does not reach Google, and we do not claim it does.
- The inquiry form — the business’s revenue — was re-tested after every server change.
Measurement
Analytics That Records What Visitors Do
Google Analytics 4 went live on every page on 7 September 2026. We confirmed it in a real browser by watching the page-view and engagement events arrive, rather than trusting that the code was present. Phone, email and WhatsApp taps are recorded as separate events.
Two choices keep the numbers honest. The existing Google Ads tags stay in Tag Manager and analytics runs separately, so a visit is never counted twice. And a tap on a phone number is reported as a tap — not as a phone call, which nobody can see from a website.
An Email Signature That Works from a Phone
The owner runs the business from the Outlook app on a phone, which only allows a plain-text signature. So the branded signature — built in the same colors and type as the website’s own emails — is added by the mail server on the way out, for that one mailbox. The inquiry-form address is excluded on purpose, and the form was re-tested after the change.
Not Measured Yet
Search traffic and rankings. Google Analytics went live on 7 September 2026, which is not yet long enough for an honest before-and-after. We will add it here when it is.
How These Figures Were Checked
Every number on this page was measured on the live website on 15 September 2026, with a real browser where it matters. Before figures are our own measurements from the start of the work. The screenshots are of public pages anyone can visit.
Tell Us What Is Broken.
We Will Tell You What It Costs.
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Or stop quoting it one job at a time — MultiTasker One puts everything we do on one monthly plan from $1,450 a month.
Or email hello@multitasker.llc