Position 27 to 13, on an account where the clicks went down

There were two live URL structures for the same course categories. /engineering/ and /automotive/ on one side. /course-directory/engineering-courses/ and /course-directory/automotive-courses/ on the other. The navigation pointed at the course directory. The footer's own 301 confirmed the course directory had been the original migration target. The richer content lived there too. And the old flat URLs were still live, still indexed and still competing. The /engineering/ page looked like it was winning on clicks until we checked what those clicks were, and they turned out to be brand sitelinks.

Outsource Institute is a family business, roughly fifteen years in, delivering engineering, welding and automotive qualifications out of a real workshop at Salisbury in Brisbane and selling nationally. RTO 31560, CRICOS 03713J. Three Weld Australia awards in the footer. Neil Bennett, who sits on Weld Australia's Queensland committee and has been in the trade more than forty years, teaches there. Their international student revenue collapsed on visa processing slowdowns and has been shelved indefinitely, which pushed the business back onto the domestic market. Organic search stopped being a nice-to-have.

The search picture was flat rather than falling. Around 1,200 clicks a month through January to March 2026 against roughly 80,000 impressions, a click-through rate under 1.5%. Semrush counted 19 top-three rankings across the entire site, which for a fifteen-year-old RTO is thin. Authority score 22, against TAFE competitors sitting at 40 to 60 and above. PageSpeed 42, Core Web Vitals failing on 50 URLs at 4.5 seconds on mobile, unresolved since 2023.

Then the audit found the one that stops a trade RTO owner mid-sentence.

• Every engineering course page on the site was displaying the same course code, MEM31925. The course directory page showed MEM31922 for the Cert III Engineering Fabrication Trade. Course codes are an RTO's product identifiers and they are compliance adjacent.
• Cert III in Refrigeration had three internal links pointing at it. The homepage and six category pages held 74 to 81 each. Automotive course pages had seven or eight. Hydraulics had six.
• /micro-credentials/ returned a 404 while being linked 51 times from the main Courses menu.
• 33 internal links whose anchor text was the words “Learn more”, and 270 blank image link anchors.
• No schema anywhere. No Course, no CourseInstance, no FAQPage, no BreadcrumbList. The Organisation block carried a name, a url, and the 80 by 79 pixel site icon as its logo, while the real logo file was already sitting on the server.
• Three H1 tags on the homepage, 14 pages with none at all, 19 pages with no meta description.
• og:locale set to en_US on a .edu.au domain.
• The Google Business Profile website link carried a UTM typo, “outsouce”, which 404'd. Roughly 156 clicks lost across three months.
• The enquiry form read “Submit Course Enquriy” on multiple pages, with the message field capped at 180 characters.

Four months in, and the first three were audit, on-page repair and untangling the duplication. Joe cares about leads and enrolments, not traffic, so the strategy work started with his business rather than his keywords.

Non-brand terms only. Before is the June to August 2025 window, after is 1 May to 26 July 2026, both straight out of Search Console. Read these as ranking gains, because on this account that is what they currently are. “Air conditioning course” collected 7,939 impressions in the after window and three clicks.

Average position went from 27.4 in June 2025 to a band between 9.5 and 13.9 across 2026. Roughly halved. Ahrefs counted keywords inside the top ten going from 37 to 50 between May and 10 July 2026, and the top three from 10 to 12. The duplication is resolved: everything consolidates on /course-directory/CATEGORY-courses/, the old flat URLs 301 across, the footer redirect chain is gone and the stale URLs are out of the sitemap. The site has stopped competing with itself on its own best categories.

Two terms reached first place in June. Cert III mechanical fitter from position 16, and Diploma of Engineering Technical from 7, with hydraulic courses at second. The Diploma one was Joe's own decision, taken on the 1 May call: he chose to prioritise the Diploma over the Advanced Diploma because it is what actually sells and it is funded in more states. Tommy sent the win-share email at 10:42 on 3 July 2026. Joe replied inside eleven minutes.

Ahrefs site health read 96 on 11 July with errors down 20 and warnings down 26, which is timed consistently with the 8 July audit fixes landing. We cannot yet tie it to a specific change, so we are calling it a health score improvement rather than a result.