Local SEO & AI search · Case study
From invisible to shortlisted: a Perth NDIS SEO case study (2026)
Perth NDIS provider · WordPress site · 12-month local SEO and AI search retainer · Client name withheld under NDA
Published · Last updated
The business
Client profile
The CRM is named with the client's permission. Brand identifiers are redacted under NDA.
| Industry | NDIS disability support services |
|---|---|
| Market | Perth, Western Australia (north and south metro) |
| Platform | WordPress, custom theme, Lumary CRM |
| Starting authority | Low (31 referring domains) |
| Starting organic sessions | ~620 / month |
| Enquiries from organic at start | ~8 per month, mostly low-intent |
| Engagement | 12-month local SEO and AI search retainer |
The movement
At a glance
| Metric | Start | Month 12 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic sessions | ~620 | ~1,160 | +87% |
| Qualified enquiries from organic | ~8 / mo | ~13 / mo | +63% |
| Keywords in top 3 (Perth metro) | 4 | 38 | +850% |
| Suburb-level pages ranking top 5 | 0 | 14 | +14 pages |
| Google Business Profile actions | Baseline | ~2.4× baseline | +140% |
Enquiries are defined as form submissions or calls tagged to organic search in Lumary and GA4, excluding spam and job applications. The baseline is an average of the three months before the campaign.
Before the campaign
The stack we inherited
WordPress site with a custom theme, built by a previous agency and never updated for speed or schema.
One “Services” page covering support coordination, SIL, community access and plan management in a single 400-word block.
Eleven suburb pages that were near-duplicates of each other, swapping only the suburb name in the heading.
A blog with generic disability awareness posts that ranked for nothing commercial.
NDIS price guide PDFs uploaded as media files, ranking for a handful of long-tail queries but sending traffic to a download, not an enquiry.
A Google Business Profile with the wrong primary category (“Disability services” instead of “Disability support service”) and no service-area setup.
Almost no local citations. The NAP details were inconsistent across three directories.
Less, but stronger
What we removed or replaced
The biggest gains came from consolidation and deletion, not from publishing more.
- Replaced the single services page with eight service-specific pages, each written around the language participants and support coordinators actually use: “support coordination Perth,” “SIL provider Perth,” “community access Perth,” “plan management Perth.”
- Consolidated eleven duplicate suburb pages into four genuine location pages for the catchments the provider could actually serve: Joondalup, Morley, Armadale and Rockingham. The other seven were 301-redirected to the closest relevant service page.
- Removed the price guide PDFs from the index and rebuilt the content as a crawlable HTML page with clear headings and a direct answer to the most common question: “How much does an NDIS support worker cost in Perth?”
- Deleted 23 blog posts that had no search demand and no internal links. The remaining four were rewritten around service intent.
- Rebuilt the Google Business Profile with the correct primary category, defined service areas for the four catchments, and a review request workflow the client could run themselves.
- Fixed the NAP across the three directories and built six new citations in WA-specific and disability-sector directories.
Shared delivery
How we worked with their team
- Fortnightly 45-minute call with the service manager, who owned approvals and clinical accuracy.
- The provider’s existing WordPress developer handled theme and plugin changes. We wrote the specs and the acceptance criteria; they implemented. We did not have staging or production access.
- All participant-facing copy was reviewed by the service manager before publication, because NDIS content has to be accurate about what is funded and what is not.
- We owned the audit, keyword mapping, page architecture, content briefs, schema, Google Business Profile optimisation, citation cleanup and reporting.
- A shared spreadsheet tracked every URL, its status, its target query and its internal links. The client could see exactly what was live and what was waiting on the developer.
The commercial context
The starting point
A registered NDIS provider operating across Perth’s north and south metro corridors. The organisation had a strong local reputation and steady word-of-mouth referrals, but almost no organic visibility. When a support coordinator searched “SIL provider Armadale” or a family searched “support worker Rockingham,” the provider did not appear in the top three pages.
The site had traffic, but it was the wrong traffic. Most sessions landed on blog posts about disability awareness or on price guide PDFs, neither of which produced an enquiry. The eight monthly enquiries that did arrive were mostly from people outside the service area or asking about services the provider did not offer.
Perth’s NDIS market is less crowded than the eastern capitals, but it is not empty. Lower provider density means rankings are achievable faster, but only if the pages match the suburb-level and service-level queries people actually type. A generic “disability support Perth” page competes with every provider in the city; a page for “SIL provider Armadale” competes with a handful.
Twelve months of work
What we did
- Months 1-2
Audit, cleanup and page architecture.
Reviewed the existing pages, the Google Business Profile, citations and the CRM enquiry sources. Identified which pages had impressions but no clicks, and which had clicks but no enquiries. Mapped 34 target queries across four service lines and four catchments. Removed the duplicate suburb pages and the dead blog posts. Fixed the Google Business Profile category and service areas.
- Months 2-4
Service pages and location pages.
Built eight service pages and four genuine location pages. Each service page answered three things in the first screen: what the service is, who it is for, and how to start. Each location page named the suburbs served, the services available in that catchment, and the nearest office. Internal links connected services to locations and locations to services, so a reader in Armadale looking for SIL could move to the SIL page without going back to the homepage.
- Months 3-6
Content that support coordinators actually use.
Wrote four practical guides: how to choose an NDIS provider in Perth, what to ask a SIL provider before signing, how plan management works in WA, and how to change providers without losing funding. These were not blog posts for traffic. They were pages designed to be linked to, cited and forwarded by support coordinators. Two of them now rank in the top three for their target queries.
- Months 5-9
Local authority and citations.
Rebuilt the citation profile, corrected the NAP inconsistencies, and secured six relevant listings in WA disability and community service directories. Ran a structured review request process through the CRM, which lifted the Google Business Profile from 11 reviews to 29 over five months. The review velocity was steady, not spiked, which matters for local pack stability.
- Months 6-12
AI search readiness and iteration.
Restructured the service and location pages for answer extraction: question-based headings, direct answers in the first two sentences, FAQ schema on every service page, and clear entity signals (organisation name, service type, location, registration status). AI referrals were tracked separately in GA4 and reported as their own channel.
Tools used: Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, GA4, Lumary, Google Business Profile.
The measured outcome
The results
| Metric | Start | Month 6 | Month 12 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic sessions | ~620 | ~840 | ~1,160 |
| Qualified enquiries from organic | ~8 / mo | ~10 / mo | ~13 / mo |
| Keywords in top 3 (Perth metro) | 4 | 17 | 38 |
| Suburb-level pages ranking top 5 | 0 | 6 | 14 |
| Google Business Profile actions | Baseline | 1.6× | 2.4× |
| AI referral sessions / month | <5 | ~18 | ~47 |
Growth was not linear. Months 1-3 were flat to slightly down, because the consolidations removed pages that were generating low-value traffic. The first ranking movement appeared in month 4. Enquiries followed rankings by roughly six to eight weeks, which is normal for a high-consideration service where families and coordinators research before making contact.
The traffic number (+87%) is smaller than you will see in some NDIS case studies. That is deliberate. Most of the pages removed were attracting traffic that never converted. The campaign traded volume for intent, and the enquiry number is the one that matters.
Why it moved
What drove it
The largest contributor was the service-page rebuild. The old single services page could not rank for support coordination, SIL, community access and plan management at the same time. Splitting it into eight pages gave each service its own target, its own internal links and its own conversion path.
The second contributor was the suburb-level location pages. Perth’s NDIS search behaviour is heavily suburb-specific. A page for “SIL provider Armadale” converted at a materially higher rate than the old generic “disability support Perth” page, because the person searching it had already decided what they needed and where.
The third contributor was the Google Business Profile and citation work. For local NDIS queries, the map pack is often the first click. Correcting the category and building review velocity moved the provider into the top three for several catchment-level searches.
Content and AI search readiness contributed a smaller share of direct traffic but improved query coverage and produced the AI referral growth shown above. We do not split the result into clean percentages across these four drivers, because they interact, but the order of impact is as listed.
Read the result in context
What this case study doesn't show
This is one provider, not an average. Across retained clients with 12+ months of engagement, our company-wide average organic traffic growth is +30 – 57% over 12 months. This provider sits at the upper end because the starting point was low and the service-area consolidation removed a lot of dead weight.
The starting baseline was small. ~620 monthly sessions and ~8 enquiries per month is a modest base. A provider already receiving 40 enquiries a month will see smaller percentage gains and should expect a different scope: more content depth, more competitive service terms, and a longer runway.
Perth search demand is not static. Across local service categories, Perth search volume fell sharply in 2026 as AI Overviews absorbed more queries. NDIS searches are need-driven and less exposed to that shift than, say, “plumber Perth,” but the broader demand environment is softer than it was in 2025. The +87% traffic figure was achieved in a falling market, which makes the enquiry growth more meaningful, not less.
AI referrals are still a small channel. ~47 sessions per month is real, and it grew from almost nothing, but it is not what produced the enquiry increase. The enquiries came from organic search, reported separately.
The map pack did a lot of work that this table does not capture. Google Business Profile actions are a proxy. Some of the enquiry growth came from people who called directly from the profile without visiting the website, and those calls are tracked in Lumary but not in GA4 sessions.
Your starting point matters
What this might mean for you
If you are a Perth NDIS provider with a website that tries to cover every service on one page and every suburb with near-duplicate location pages, the consolidation playbook is likely to apply. The first three months may look flat or negative, because you are removing pages that generate traffic but not enquiries. The ranking and enquiry movement tends to arrive around month four and compound from there.
If you already have separate service pages and a functioning Google Business Profile, the opportunity is probably narrower and more competitive. Expect to compete on content depth, review velocity and support-coordinator resources rather than on basic page structure. The numbers will be smaller and the timeline longer.
If you need enquiries within 60 days, SEO is the wrong channel for that timeline. The first three months of this campaign were flat. Paid search can fill the gap while the organic work matures, but it is a different budget and a different conversation.
The honest answer is that the scope depends on how many services you offer, how many catchments you can genuinely serve, and whether your Google Business Profile is set up correctly. That is what the audit is for.
Your next step
Want to see how this might look for your service?
Every provider starts from a different footprint. If you would like to see the detail behind this campaign, including the pages removed, the queries targeted and the enquiry tracking setup, we are happy to walk you through it on a call with brand identifiers removed. We can also connect you with the provider under NDA if that is useful.