A full replatform, live overnight, and the rankings held

David Randall has thirty years in amusement device safety. He holds a mechanical engineering degree, he studied law, and he appears as an expert witness for ride operators and their insurers. Regulators refer work to him. One of them, in DRA's account, put it as “we don't have to look at that, you've got that one”. About 90% of revenue is engineering inspection work: annual and major inspections, design verification, registration, drone assisted inspection, asset management. The other 10% is WHS training as an RTO, and that is where most of the searchable volume sits.

The collapse has a simple cause. DRA's internal SEO person retired and then became incapacitated. Before that the business ran at roughly six enquiries a week and most of them turned into meetings. The site went from an enquiry engine to a brochure. Course dates were buried and unbookable, which was David's most repeated complaint across the first three calls, and it is the whole reason his spec for a course page was three items long.

The audit found the rest of it.

• robots.txt was disallowing /storage and blocking key pages.
• 57 internal URLs returned no response from the server at all. A speed problem was flagged across 301 URLs, again pointing at the server rather than the pages.
• Two live 5xx pages, one of them /safety-issues/. Six 404s still linked, including /mark-rattle-work-health-and-safety-consultant/, the bio page of the consultant who had left and written most of the blog.
• Every page on the site was tagged NewsArticle. The Organization entity was marked up as both Person and Organization, and near empty.
• 36 pages carried only one dofollow link, which is to say almost no external support anywhere.
• Four pages with no H1 at all, one page with several, 80 non-sequential H1s and 21 duplicate H2s.
• Lorem ipsum, placeholder testimonials, broken accordions and Americanised spelling, on a site selling engineering inspections to insurers.
• The blog was last updated in March 2024, mostly by an author who no longer worked there.
• GA4, GTM and Search Console: none of the three existed.

A nine month roadmap from December 2025, with a Divi to Bricks rebuild threaded through months four and five and launched in month six. The first job was not SEO at all.

Before is 21 April to 15 May 2026, after is 1 May to 26 July 2026. Those windows overlap, because 21 April is the first day Search Console holds anything for this property. Non-brand terms only. The last row had no before position at all, so it is a new entry.

The replatform held. That sounds modest right up until you have watched one go the other way. A full Divi to Bricks rebuild went live on 3 June 2026 on the same domain, and the first week after launch ran at 9.1 clicks a day against 9.0 in the last week of May, with average position improving through the same window. The report verdict was one word: HELD. The only blemish was a launch morning uptime blip that resolved in minutes.

Ahrefs technical health went from about 30 at kickoff to 63 in February and 93 by April, and held at 93 through two catch-ups. In the June rank tracker “codes of practice”, a 600 volume term, went from 18 to first, and “loto training” went from 8 to first. “Zip lines” had already reached page one back in March.

In the week of 3 July, days after conversion tracking went live, the team reported two higher value government leads: a Whitsundays sky-rail style project and Darwin Council. David reads government work as more reliable and more recurring than the mum-and-dad ride operators who make up most of this market. We are not attributing those two to search. GA4 had been live for one day and there is no source data on either of them.