In May I wrote a long guide on this page about how to rank in 2026. Google crawled it in August and decided not to put it in its index. Search Console calls that "Crawled - currently not indexed".
Fair enough. It was a general how-to on a topic that big SEO companies already cover with far more data than I have. It quoted other people's numbers and didn't add much of my own. Google's own guide to helpful content asks whether a page is "mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value". Mine was.
So I've replaced it with something only I can write. In September 2026 I did a proper audit of my own site, gbitautomation.com.au, the same way I'd do one for a paying customer. This is what I found, what I did about it, and where things stand.
One thing up front. These are starting numbers. Most of the fixes went live in the last week or two. I don't know yet what they'll do, and I'm not going to guess.
Search Console had one week of data
The first thing I did was open Google Search Console and ask for the last three months. It gave me eight days. The property had only been verified on 15 September, so that's where the data started.
Across those eight days the site had 112 impressions and no clicks. That's the honest starting point.
If you're setting up Search Console for the first time, do it early, even before you think you need it. It's free and you can't go back and get the months you missed. If you've already got it, my 60 minute Search Console audit walks through what to look at.
No backlinks worth counting
In Ahrefs the site had a Domain Rating of 0. One other website linked to it, and that was a scraper site that copies content from all over the place. So in practice, nobody was linking to us.
That's normal for a small business site that hasn't done any outreach, but it matters. Links from other sites are one of the ways Google works out whether you're worth showing. The plan is to start with the basics, like getting the business listed properly in the main Australian directories with the same name, address and phone number everywhere. That's slow, boring work and it won't move anything overnight.
The homepage said things I couldn't prove
This one stung a bit. My homepage had a trust bar and a results section with figures on it. Things like hours saved per week and a return on investment multiple. When I went looking for where those numbers came from, I couldn't back them up.
They came out, from the homepage and everywhere else on the site they'd been copied to, including the meta descriptions and the files I publish for AI tools to read. The SEO services page also quoted a percentage I couldn't find a source for. Gone too.
The only number left is the Google rating, 5.0 from four reviews, because anyone can click through and check it.
If your site has numbers on it, ask yourself where each one came from. If the answer is "the template" or "I think it's about right", take it off. It's one of the easiest trust problems to fix.
Two Google Business Profiles, and the one with reviews wasn't verified
I found two Google listings for GBIT Automation.
The first had my four reviews and was pinned in Perth, but it sat under a different Google account and had never been verified. Its category was IT support, the hours were wrong, and the description was old.
The second was the one I'd been keeping up to date, with the right categories and hours. But it had no reviews, and because the service area was set to the whole of Australia, Google had dropped its pin somewhere in South Australia.
So the listing with the reviews couldn't be edited properly, and the listing with the right details had nothing going for it.
What I've done: I've asked Google to verify the listing with the reviews. Once that comes through I'll copy the right details across, set the service area to Perth's northern suburbs, and only then remove the empty one. Deleting the wrong one first would have been easy to get wrong. As I write this, the verification is still pending.
If you're not sure how many listings you have, search your business name on Google Maps from your phone and a laptop. I've put what I learned into a page on Google Business Profile help.
The category meant I wasn't in the running
Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity. Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone searched for.
The listing people could actually see was showing as a computer support business. For someone searching "seo agency", that's not a match. It didn't matter how close I was.
To see where I really stood, I ran a map check on 24 September. It's a grid of points from Burns Beach down to Wangara, checking what Google Maps shows at each one. I checked three searches: "seo agency", "seo joondalup" and "web designer". Across 24 points, GBIT wasn't in the top 20 for any of them.
Searching the business name, "gbit automation", from Burns Beach, it came up first. So Google knows the business exists. It just doesn't connect it with the work I do yet.
That map check is the baseline. I'll run the same grid again once the listing is verified and the category is fixed. If you want the longer version of why the map and the normal results are different, I wrote up local SEO vs SEO.
A keyword that looked easy and wasn't
When I was choosing keywords, "workflow automation" came up with a low difficulty score in the SEO tool. On paper it looked like something a small site could go after.
Then I searched it. Page one was large software companies and their product pages. A small Perth business with no links wasn't getting on that page, whatever the score said.
I dropped it. The keywords I kept are ones where the people searching are local and the results aren't all big brands, like SEO for tradies in Perth and SEO around Joondalup and the northern suburbs. Nobody searches "SEO Wangara", so I didn't build a page for it, and I didn't build a page for every suburb either.
The lesson is simple. A difficulty score is a guess. Look at the actual page one before you spend time on a keyword.
Parts of the site were blank until the scripts ran
The site used scroll animations, where sections fade in as you scroll down. The way they were built, those sections started out invisible in the page's HTML and only showed once the JavaScript loaded and ran.
Google can run JavaScript, but I didn't want to rely on it, and anyone on a slow connection would have seen empty space until it caught up.
I changed it so the content is there and visible in the HTML from the start. The animation now only runs on top, and it switches off for anyone who has reduced motion turned on in their phone or computer settings. The pages also got a bit lighter along the way.
9 of 20 pages weren't indexed
On 24 September I checked every page in the sitemap with Search Console's URL inspection. Google had 11 of the 20 in its index.
Of the other nine:
- Five Google didn't know about yet: the contact page and four new pages.
- Three were "Discovered - currently not indexed". Google knew they existed but hadn't crawled them.
- Two were "Crawled - currently not indexed". Google had read them and passed. One was this article.
For the pages Google hadn't found, I resubmitted the sitemap and asked for indexing in Search Console. That request has to be done by hand, one page at a time. I also set up IndexNow, which tells Bing when pages change.
For the two pages Google had read and passed on, asking again doesn't help. Google's page indexing help says a crawled but not indexed page "may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." The only real fix is to make the page worth indexing. That's why you're reading this version and not the old one.
Where things stand
Here's the honest summary as of late September 2026:
The site has about two weeks of Search Console data and no clicks yet. Domain Rating is 0. The Google listing with the reviews is waiting on verification. On the map, the business shows for its own name and not for the work. Eleven of twenty pages are indexed.
What's changed is that the site no longer claims anything I can't show, the pages load with their content visible, and the keywords I'm going after are ones a small local business has a real chance at. I've also got a measured starting point, so when I look again in a few months I'll be comparing real numbers, not a feeling.
I won't promise where it'll end up. Google doesn't let anyone pay for a better local ranking, and nobody outside Google controls where you land. What I can do is fix what's broken and keep checking.
If you run a small business in Perth's northern suburbs and you'd like the same kind of check on your own site and Google listing, have a look at how I do SEO or get in touch. I do the work myself, and I'll tell you what I find, including the bits that aren't flattering.
