SEO for a New Website in a Competitive Niche

How a 30-hour SEO engagement helped a Brisbane workplace psychology consultancy build its search presence from the ground up – with results that kept growing after the project wrapped up.

#1 Google ranking, ‘peer support program’

+87% increase in Google organic sessions

+738% growth in monthly search impressions

138% more keywords ranking in Google

The situation: a beautiful website that Google couldn’t find

Sam Sellwood, a registered psychologist and the founder of Head Strong Workplaces, had invested significantly in her online presence. She’d rebuilt her website from scratch on a new theme, refreshed her brand, and written every word herself to make it feel authentic. The result was a site that genuinely sounded like her – warm, direct, and just the right amount of irreverent.

The problem was that SEO hadn’t been part of the brief when the site was built. The pages were well-written, but they were keyword-thin. The site structure was technically sound, but Google had almost nothing to work with in terms of search signals. Head Strong Workplaces was sitting at a Semrush domain ranking of roughly 3.7 million in Australia – meaning thousands of sites in the same industry had stronger organic presence.

For a solo practitioner working in a genuinely niche but competitive space – psychosocial risk management, workplace peer support programs, leadership development for mental health – organic search visibility wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the difference between being found by an HR manager actively searching for help, and relying entirely on referrals.

Sam was awarded a Brisbane City Council Lord Mayor’s Women in Business Grant through the Brisbane Business Hub and chose to invest it in fixing this gap.

Learn more about our SEO services here.

What we actually did (30 hours, 3 months)

The diagnosis was clear from the outset: this wasn’t a technical problem or a structural problem. It was a content depth problem. The pages existed. The URL architecture was logical. But Google had almost no keyword signals to work with, and the site had virtually zero off-site authority. The work needed to happen in three areas.

Keyword research & strategy

We started by mapping every page on the site to a keyword theme, then conducting full search volume and difficulty research across the Australian market. Sam’s niche required careful navigation – terms like “peer support” are dominated by clinical mental health services, while the workplace-specific variants had almost no recorded search volume but also almost no competition. We built a priority keyword list across all five core service areas and loaded the highest-value terms into Semrush’s position tracking tool to establish a baseline.

High-impact on-page content (two batches)

We rewrote or significantly expanded the content on five priority pages: Home, Psychosocial Risk Management, Leadership Development, Mental Health First Aid, Workplace Training, and Peer Support Programs. The brief for each page was to naturalise high-priority keywords into headings and body copy, add FAQ sections to capture “People Also Ask” search intent, and strengthen the E-E-A-T signals (experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness) that both Google and AI search tools use to evaluate credibility.

Sam’s voice was preserved throughout. The goal was never to make the site sound like an SEO document – it was to make it findable without making it feel written by someone other than Sam.

Technical & off-page foundations

Alongside the content work, we audited and resolved technical site health issues, improving the Semrush site health score from 90% to 94%. We strengthened internal linking across all priority pages, resubmitted the XML sitemap to Google Search Console to accelerate indexing, completed a full Google Business Profile audit with category and service recommendations, and assessed the site’s approach to local Brisbane search signals.

The results

Reporting period: March 20 – June 30 2026 (active project period), with post-project data through August 2026.

Search impressions: the compound curve

The chart below tells the clearest version of this story. At project kickoff, the site was generating around 85-115 Google search impressions per day. By the time the project wrapped in late June, daily impressions had roughly doubled. What’s more striking is what happened after the project ended: impressions kept climbing without any additional work, reaching 260-298 per day by late August 2026.

This is the compounding nature of SEO. The content was indexed. The rankings kept improving. The visibility kept growing.

Organic traffic growth

Google organic sessions increased by 87% comparing the project period to the equivalent pre-project window. Bing organic sessions also grew. Notably, the project period also saw the first recorded referral traffic from AI tools – sessions from ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and even Claude – aligning directly with the AI search visibility goal Sam had articulated from the very first meeting.

Keyword rankings

At project start, the site was tracking 13 keywords in Google’s search results. By the end of the project, that had grown to 31 – a 138% increase in search footprint. Of the ten keywords actively tracked in Semrush across the project period, nine improved in position.

The table below shows where the highest-priority keywords sit as of August 2026, compared to their starting position in March:

The post-project compound effect

One of the most useful things we can demonstrate for any SEO client is what happens after the active work stops. For Head Strong Workplaces, the answer is: the results keep improving.

The chart below shows daily impressions across the full window from project start through late August. The inflection point in late May – when the first batch of content had been live for the 4-6 weeks Google typically needs to process and rank new content – is visible in the data. The second batch of content (loaded in June) produced a second step-change in July and August, again without any additional work required on our end.

Why this matters if you’re thinking about SEO for your business

The starting point matters less than you think

Head Strong Workplaces had almost no organic presence when this project began. That’s not unusual for a service business that grew through referrals and never prioritised search visibility. The lesson here isn’t that you need to have been doing SEO for years before you see results – it’s that a focused, strategic engagement on the right foundations can build a solid search footprint from scratch.

Content depth is the lever for a well-built site

Sam’s website was technically healthy. The structure was good. The problem was simply that Google didn’t have enough to work with. Once we gave it keyword-rich, semantically deep content – with FAQ sections, proper heading hierarchies, and internal linking – the rankings followed. This is a pattern we see repeatedly with businesses that have invested in their website design but not in the SEO foundations underneath it.

AI search visibility is already real

One of Sam’s stated goals from the kickoff meeting was to be found not just in Google, but in AI search tools. By mid-project, the site was showing up in Google AI Overviews for “peer support program” searches. By the end of the project, the GA4 data was recording referral sessions from ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, and Claude. These are small numbers, but they represent something new for a business that had zero AI referral traffic before the project started.

Grants can fund real digital infrastructure

This project was funded through the Brisbane City Council Lord Mayor’s Women in Business Grant, administered through the Brisbane Business Hub. For Sam, the grant made it financially viable to invest in the kind of foundational SEO work that compounds over time. If you’re a Brisbane-based small business owner and haven’t explored what grants might be available for marketing investment, it’s worth looking into. We’ve helped several clients navigate the application process.

If you’re a service-based business in Brisbane with a website you’re proud of but aren’t finding in search, get in touch. We’d love to show you what’s possible.