A Brisbane River charter boat, a website full of shortcuts, and what happened when we spent the first month cleaning up.
The Baroness is a classic 1972 motor vessel that cruises the Brisbane River for weddings, parties, corporate functions, memorials and Moreton Bay day trips. Baroness Classic Charters joined us in September 2026 on our Starter SEO package. They came to us after years of paying for SEO elsewhere without the results to show for it.
One of the most common questions we get from new clients is: what do you actually do in the first month? For The Baroness, the honest answer is that we didn’t build anything new. We spent month one cleaning up. Those clean-up changes alone moved the needle more than we expected.
A Website That Had Been Worked On, Not Looked After
The Baroness website was originally duplicated from the owners’ sister business, a luxury boat charter company on the Gold Coast. That’s a reasonable way to get a second site up quickly. The problem is what happened next: in the two-plus years since, nobody went back to finish the job.
When we started our audit, we couldn’t open a single page without finding something wrong:
- Links pointing to the wrong business. The homepage listed The Baroness’s services (weddings, bucks parties, hens parties and more). Those links didn’t go to The Baroness’s service pages. They went to the matching pages on the Gold Coast website. Because the two sites look so similar, a visitor would likely never notice they’d left. That’s potential Brisbane bookings quietly sent to a different business, and the Baroness pages losing the internal links that tell Google they matter.
- The wrong city. Meta descriptions and body copy still referred to the Gold Coast and even Sydney.
- Keyword stuffing. At the bottom of the contact page, under the enquiry form, sat a block of about 16 keyword phrases (“Party Boat Cruise Hire”, “Boat Charters BRISBANE”, “Memorial Cruise Yacht Hire” and so on), all formatted as headings and in a rainbow of colours. They didn’t link anywhere or help anyone. They were there purely for search engines, and Google has penalised that tactic for well over a decade.
- Pages built for keywords, not people. Rather than improving existing pages, new pages had been added to target slightly different search terms. That left several pages competing with each other for the same searches.
- The basics, missed. Excessive keyword repetition, missing meta descriptions and messy heading structures throughout.
We’ve seen plenty of neglected websites, where an agency charges a monthly fee and does very little. This was different. It wasn’t so much neglect as poor workmanship: SEO done in ways that were outdated at best, and actively holding the site back at worst.
Month One: Clean-Up Before Growth
The Starter package gives us a set number of SEO hours each month, and we put September’s hours into foundations. Any new content or keyword work would have been built on top of the mess. So that waited.
Here’s what month one looked like:
- A full human SEO audit. We worked through every page of the site by hand, two or three pages at a time, rather than relying only on an automated crawl. We logged every error, inconsistency and missed opportunity.
- Fixed the broken internal links. The homepage service links now point to The Baroness’s own pages, so visitors (and Google) stay on the right website.
- Removed the keyword stuffing, including the block of headings on the contact page and the over-repeated phrases across the site.
- Corrected the location errors. Every leftover Gold Coast and Sydney reference in meta descriptions and page copy was found and fixed.
- Tidied the on-page basics. We rewrote title tags and headings, added intro copy to thin pages like the gallery and contact page, and trimmed homepage copy that was competing with the party cruise page.
- Asked the client a lot of questions. The audit turned up more than 25 questions about pricing, packages, logistics and policies where the site was unclear or contradicted itself. Those answers will become the FAQs and page content we write next.
- Optimised their Google Business Profile.
None of this is glamorous. It’s the work most SEO proposals skip straight past, because it’s hard to sell “we fixed what was broken”. But you can’t build rankings on a foundation that’s working against you.
The Results After One Month
We compared September 2026 (our first month) with August 2026 (the month before we started). Here’s what changed in Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
| Metric | August 2026 | September 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks from Google search | 219 | 319 | +46% |
| Average search position | 17.9 | 15.0 | 2.9 places higher |
| Click-through rate | 2.3% | 3.7% | +1.4 points |
| Search impressions | 9,483 | 8,668 | −9% |
| Organic search sessions (GA4) | 115 | 311 | +170% |
Comparison: 1–31 August 2026 vs 1–30 September 2026. Sources: Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4.
Comparison: 1-31 August 2026 vs 1-30 September 2026. Sources: Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4.
The headline number is clicks: 46% more people clicked through to the website from Google in our first month. The average search position improved by almost three places. The homepage moved from position 16.2 to 13.2, and the party cruise page climbed from 30.1 to 22.3.
One number went down, and we think it tells a good story. Impressions fell 9% while clicks rose 46%. Fewer people saw the site in search, but far more of those who did chose to click. That’s what you’d expect when you strip out pages and phrases that were chasing irrelevant searches, and the pages left behind become more relevant to what people are looking for.
To be fair to the numbers: part of that lift came from more people searching for The Baroness by name. On-page clean-up alone doesn’t fully explain it. But the rankings and click-through improvements on non-branded pages are where we can see the clean-up working.
As for enquiries, we’re not reporting them yet. The Baroness didn’t have reliable conversion tracking set up when they came to us, and we’d rather tell you that than show you a number we can’t stand behind. Proper tracking is next on the list.
“I can thoroughly recommend [BeKonstructive]. Bek is fantastic and has picked up so many website and social media issues that 3 other large SEO market leaders did not even spot! Our [social media] posts are now amazing and cohesive! Thank you Bek and team!”
The Baroness Classic Charters, shared on Instagram
Bad SEO Isn’t Harmless
It’s easy to assume that if SEO isn’t working, the worst case is you’ve wasted some money. The Baroness shows the real cost is often higher. Bad SEO can actively hold you back: links that send visitors to the wrong business, keyword stuffing that signals low quality to Google, and duplicate pages that compete with each other instead of ranking.
The flip side is the good news. Because the problems were so fundamental, simply undoing them produced results in the first month, before we’d written a single new page.
If you’re paying for SEO and can’t see what’s being done, it’s worth asking. A good agency should be able to show you exactly what they changed on your website, and why.
What Comes Next
With the foundations fixed, month two shifts from repair to growth. That means setting up proper conversion tracking, keyword research and mapping for each cruise type, and new content and FAQs built from the client’s answers to our audit questions.
We’ll be watching to see how far solid foundations take The Baroness from here.
Not sure what your current SEO provider is actually doing? We start every engagement with a human audit and a plain-English plan, so you always know what we’re changing and why. Find out how our Brisbane SEO services work, or compare our SEO packages.
