Project Overview
Wollongong Tax Services is a local tax and accounting firm serving clients in Wollongong, Australia, through wollongongtaxservices.com.au. The site was handed over to Techesprit in October 2025 with almost no organic search presence to build on. The business was competing for visibility against established accountants and tax service providers in the area, without the website structure, technical foundation, or SEO strategy needed to consistently reach local searchers.
TechEsprit approached the project as both a WordPress development and WordPress SEO project, combining a custom website build with a search strategy designed around local visibility, service relevance, technical performance, and user intent.
The Challenge
For a local service business like a tax firm, visibility isn’t just about ranking; it’s about ranking for the right searches in the right physical area, at the moment someone nearby is actually looking for a tax professional.
When the project started in October 2025, the site had almost no foundation for that kind of visibility:
- Organic traffic (Semrush): 8
- Organic keywords: 36
- AI visibility: 0
- Search Console clicks: 44
- Search Console impressions: 1,290
A local business this early in its SEO journey typically has two compounding problems at once: the website isn’t optimized for the specific local and service-intent searches its customers use, and there is no established local search presence strong enough to compete with businesses already visible in Google.
The project therefore required more than content or keyword optimization alone. The website needed a stronger WordPress development foundation, while the SEO strategy needed to establish relevance for local tax and accounting searches.
The WordPress Development Work
The website was built entirely from scratch in WordPress rather than adapted from a generic business template or migrated from an existing platform. The development work focused on creating a professional, user-friendly website structure around the firm’s actual services while ensuring the technical foundation could support ongoing SEO growth.
Key development work included:
- Custom WordPress website development built around the firm’s services, target audience, and local market.
- A clear page structure designed to make important tax and accounting services easy for users and search engines to understand.
- Technical issues identified and resolved during development and optimization.
- Mobile optimization treated as a core requirement, particularly because many local service searches happen on mobile devices.
- Performance optimization using Google PageSpeed Insights, with attention to loading speed and Core Web Vitals.
- Website structure and on-page elements organized to provide a stronger foundation for ongoing WordPress SEO.
The objective was not simply to make the website look professional. The WordPress development work was designed to give the business a technically sound platform that could support its SEO strategy and convert organic visitors into enquiries.
The WordPress SEO Work
Once the website foundation was established, TechEsprit implemented a WordPress SEO strategy focused on increasing the site’s visibility for relevant local and service-intent searches.
The strategy combined local SEO, keyword research, competitor analysis, on-page optimization, technical SEO, content research, and website performance improvements.
Local SEO Strategy
Local SEO for a business like a tax firm works differently from SEO for a national or ecommerce brand. Rankings for local searches are influenced by relevance, location, prominence, and the business’s presence across Google’s local search ecosystem.
The strategy therefore focused on improving visibility for location-based searches in Wollongong while ensuring the website’s services and business information clearly matched the intent behind those searches.
The goal was to build visibility both in local organic results and in Google’s local search features rather than treating local SEO as a separate activity from the website’s overall SEO strategy.
Local Keyword Research
Rather than targeting generic terms such as “tax services,” keyword research focused on the specific searches a Wollongong resident or nearby business owner could use when looking for tax and accounting assistance.
This included combinations of:
- Service + location searches
- Local tax service searches
- Specific accounting and tax service searches
- Commercial-intent searches
- Questions and informational searches related to tax services
The research helped identify opportunities where the business could compete for relevant searches rather than focusing solely on broad keywords dominated by larger directories and established websites.
Google Business Profile Optimization
Google Business Profile was treated as an important part of the local SEO strategy because it can influence how a business appears in Google’s local search results and Maps.
The work included optimizing the profile’s business categories, service information, descriptions, and overall completeness so that the profile better represented the firm’s actual services and location.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis was used to understand which tax and accounting firms were already gaining visibility in Wollongong and what contributed to their search presence.
The analysis examined competitors’ keyword coverage, service pages, content, website structure, and local SEO signals to identify realistic opportunities for the business.
Rather than attempting to compete immediately for every high-volume keyword, the strategy prioritized relevant search opportunities where the website could build visibility over time.
On-Page Topic Research
The WordPress SEO strategy went beyond individual keywords.
Topic research examined the questions and concerns a prospective tax client may have before contacting a tax professional, including tax deadlines, specific services, documentation requirements, and other locally relevant topics.
These insights were used to improve the website’s topical coverage and create content around genuine user needs rather than producing pages simply to include target keywords.
Technical SEO and Issue Resolution
Technical SEO formed another important part of the WordPress SEO implementation.
Several technical and on-page issues were identified and resolved, including:
- Spammy and low-quality backlinks pointing to the domain were identified and disavowed where appropriate.
- Heading structures were optimized to improve the consistency and hierarchy of H1, H2, and H3 elements.
- A keyword gap analysis was performed against existing content to identify relevant local and service-intent topics that were not yet adequately covered.
- On-page content and page structures were refined based on the keyword and topic research.
- Technical and performance issues identified during the project were addressed to provide a stronger foundation for search visibility and user experience.
- Together, these activities formed a broader WordPress SEO strategy rather than treating SEO as simply adding keywords to existing pages.
The Results
Search Console Stats
October-March Search Console stats
AI Search Visibility
Wollongong Tax Services had zero presence in AI-generated search results at the start of the engagement: no visibility, no mentions, and no cited pages across ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, or Gemini. By March 2026, that had changed substantially:
- AI Visibility score: 0 to 24.
- Brand mentions across AI platforms: 0 to 3.
- Total cited pages: 0 to 33, broken down by platform as ChatGPT (2 mentions, 20 cited pages), Google AI Overview (0 mentions, 4 cited pages), Google AI Mode (1 mention, 17 cited pages), and Gemini (0 mentions, 11 cited pages).
Semrush’s March 2026 snapshot also shows an Authority Score of 8 (Semrush’s own scale, labeled “Low authority”) and a 10% traffic share for the domain, both worth tracking as the engagement continues, since a genuinely local, low-competition market like this one can move authority and traffic share meaningfully with sustained work.
Client Testimonial
