Forky Stick trains forklift, crane, rigging and Standard 11 tickets out of Rockhampton. Google was reading a sitemap from February 2025.
Scott Hilton founded Forky Stick after attending four workplace fatalities. He had watched large training organisations sign off sixteen competencies in a day at ten dollars an assessment. He has sacked four trainers in six weeks for basic competency failures. He reviews website copy line by line against ASQA standards, and he had been pitched by web agencies for months, all by email, all ignored.
Tommy rang him. That is the entire origin of this engagement, and Scott said so out loud on the call.
The site itself was newer than the problem. In June 2025, before the rebuild, the old site averaged position 48.7, which is page five, and earned 289 clicks a month. Then the audit found the real issue, and it was not design.
You are the first person, out of all the people that have asked to do website design, you're the first person to ring.Scott Hilton, CEO and owner, November 2025
A website build first, then a technical SEO programme. The heaviest single day on this account closed nine tasks.
Scott asked for the compliance layer himself. It was not an upsell. Course pages surface the legal disclosures before a student can enrol.
Two days after launch a candidate signed up and completed two online refreshers without speaking to anyone. Five days later the site passed 400 clicks in a trailing 28 days. By 13 July that figure was past 450.
Pages were indexed, but Google was being fed three sitemaps and two of them were rubbish. Several key pages had not been recrawled since March.
The SEO plugin's local panel would not render on this build, a confirmed JavaScript bug rather than a licensing limit, so we implemented it in code instead of shipping a compromise.
We pulled every indexed URL, diffed it against the sitemap, and redirected the indexed-but-missing ones rather than guessing.
Tommy wanted to flip the whole-site URL restructure live that week. We held it. The redirect map was still a draft, the URLs would have moved twice inside a fortnight, and the scope quietly included navigation. Six gates have to clear first.
Non-brand terms only. Before is June to July 2025 on the old site, after is May to July 2026. Unit codes matter here: a licence candidate often searches the code their employer gave them.
Clicks are up 51% year on year, 289 in June 2025 against 436 in June 2026, and July 2026 was tracking at 448 across 26 days. Average position went from 48.7 to 14.1. Non-brand search accounts for 70% of clicks, which is the number that matters for a business trying to reach people who have never heard of it.
On the first rank-tracker baseline, 10 of 59 tracked keywords were already inside the top ten, with certificate 3 in rigging at first and three Rockhampton local terms in the top five.
A routine monthly call in July 2026 surfaced that the booking flow only worked for individuals paying upfront, while commercial clients booking several students at once needed an invoice. We scoped it on the call and shipped version one the next day.
Search Console and an AI answer, straight off the screen. The homepage course tiles used to run stock photography, including tea pickers on the agriculture and forestry tile. They now use Scott's own job-site photographs.
A bang up job.
Page four to page one, and a page speed score fixed from 37 to 100 in a day.
A brand new site with no history, taken from nothing to 277 clicks a month.
A full replatform that held its rankings through launch week.
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