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Employment Law Handbook

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SEO Audit & Performance Review

Employment Law Handbook

A full-funnel search audit of employmentlawhandbook.com.au, combining first-party Google Search Console data with a live technical and on-page crawl.

Prepared for Employment Law Handbook By ven. Reporting window 26 Feb – 26 May 2026 Issued 29 May 2026
01 / Executive summary

The story in one line

The site is technically healthy and rankings have improved sharply, but it sits well below where it was a year ago. The last 90 days show a strong recovery (clicks up a third quarter on quarter) off a base that fell roughly 46% year on year. The job now is to convert hard-won ranking gains into clicks, and to recover the lost traffic ceiling.

Clicks (90 days)
4,737
▲ 33.4% vs prior 90 days
▼ 45.7% year on year
Impressions (90 days)
359k
▲ 33.7% vs prior 90 days
▼ 30.8% year on year
Average CTR
1.32%
▬ Flat vs prior quarter
▼ from 1.68% a year ago
Avg. position
~15
▲ improved from ~17.5
▲ from ~38 a year ago

The core tension: average position has more than halved year on year (~38 → ~15) yet clicks fell ~46% over the same period. That pattern points to a content / platform change that shed high-traffic URLs, not a ranking-quality problem. Recovery is underway, and the fastest gains now are CTR fixes on pages already ranking in positions 5 to 12.

02 / Search performance

Trend: recovering, not yet recovered

Clicks and impressions across three comparable 90-day windows. The quarter-on-quarter trend is clearly up, but both metrics remain materially below the same period last year.

8,717
519k
Last year
(Feb–May 25)
3,552
269k
Prior quarter
(Nov 25–Feb 26)
4,737
359k
This quarter
(Feb–May 26)
Clicks Impressions Series scaled independently; values labelled on each bar.

Device split

Desktop drives 62% of clicks; mobile 37%. Notably, mobile ranks far better (avg pos ~8.9) than desktop (~19.2), so desktop is accumulating many low-ranking, deep-page impressions that drag the blended average and CTR down.

Geography

Australia accounts for 95.7% of clicks (4,532). The US generates 38.8k impressions but just 50 clicks (0.13% CTR), inflating impression counts and depressing blended CTR without adding value.

Brand search

The site ranks only #4 for its own brand term "employment law handbook" despite 45% CTR on that query. A brand-led homepage title and structured data should lift this toward #1.

03 / Page-level opportunity

Where the clicks are, and where they should be

These pages already attract large impression volumes but sit in positions 7 to 15 with low click-through. Each is a "striking distance" page: a title, intro and internal-link refresh can move it onto page one and unlock meaningful traffic without new content.

Page Impressions Clicks CTR Avg pos Priority
/chapters/rostering/ 26,9671200.44%8.8 Highest
/bulletin/can-personal-leave-be-used-for-medical-appointments/ 20,5652801.36%7.3 Highest
/untitled-2/ bad slug 7,884680.86%8.0 Highest
/bulletin/8-things-support-persons-can-and-cant-do/ 4,442892.00%9.0 High
/bulletin/who-is-the-primary-carer (parental leave)/ 3,046351.15%12.4 High
/chapters/secondments/ 3,625340.94%12.1 High
/question-and-answer/carers-leave-after-childbirth/ 3,7961223.21%6.5 High
/chapters/transfer-of-employment/ 721172.36%15.7 High

Quick maths: the rostering chapter alone draws ~27k impressions at 0.44% CTR. Lifting it from position ~8.8 to the top of page one (a realistic 4 to 6% CTR for that slot) would take it from ~120 clicks to 1,000+ clicks per quarter, from a single page.

04 / Technical health

Foundations are solid

The technical base is in good shape. The site runs on Ghost 6.42 behind a Fastly/Varnish CDN, is mobile-first indexed, and serves fast. No critical crawl or indexation blockers were found.

What's working Pass

• Homepage indexed: "Submitted and indexed", crawled as mobile, last crawl 28 May 2026.
• Canonicals correct and self-referencing; Google canonical matches user canonical.
• HTTPS enforced; clean robots.txt (only /ghost/, /email/ and API paths blocked).
• Fast delivery: TTFB ~105ms, ~40KB homepage HTML, edge-cached.
• Healthy footprint: ~1,877 indexable URLs (1,826 posts + 51 pages) across 4 sitemaps.

What needs attention Fix

• Homepage <title> is brand-only ("Employment Law Handbook") with no keywords.
Meta description is just 46 characters ("Understand and apply Australian employment law") versus a ~155-char budget.
• A live page at /untitled-2/ ranks on ~7.9k impressions with a placeholder slug.
• Footer reads "© 2012–2022 Tanda", a stale freshness/trust signal in 2026.
• Nav links "Ask AI Beta" to an external dev domain (gaiden-demo.fly.dev).

05 / Prioritised findings

Ranked by impact ÷ effort

01

Optimise titles & meta on striking-distance pages High impact

The biggest, fastest win. Pages ranking in positions 7 to 12 with sub-2% CTR (rostering, personal leave, support persons, primary carer) need keyword-led titles and compelling meta descriptions. This lifts CTR immediately and signals relevance, which can in turn nudge rankings.

02

Rewrite the homepage title & description High impact

Move from brand-only to a keyword-led title, e.g. "Employment Law Handbook | Australia's Plain-English Employment Law Guide", with a full meta description. Add Organisation / WebSite structured data to win the brand SERP and sitelinks, and reclaim the #1 brand position.

03

Fix the /untitled-2/ URL Medium

A page pulling ~7.9k impressions sits on a placeholder slug. Rename to a descriptive, keyword-rich URL and 301-redirect the old path. Audit for other default slugs left over from the Ghost migration.

04

Investigate the year-on-year traffic loss High impact

Clicks are down ~46% YoY while positions improved markedly. This signature usually means high-traffic URLs were lost or not redirected during a migration. Pull the top pages from 12 months ago, identify what dropped out, and restore or redirect them to recover the traffic ceiling.

05

Tidy utility pages & the AI Beta link Low

Login / sign-in pages are appearing in results; consider noindex for thin utility URLs. Move "Ask AI Beta" onto a branded subdomain or path rather than an external fly.dev demo domain, which is a trust and continuity risk.

06

Refresh trust & freshness signals Low

Update the footer copyright year, confirm author bio pages (14 indexed) carry E-E-A-T signals (credentials, profiles), and ensure each chapter / bulletin shows a visible "last updated" date given the legal subject matter.

06 / Action plan

90-day roadmap

Weeks 1–2 · Quick wins

Capture the CTR already on the table

  • Rewrite titles & meta on the top 10 striking-distance pages.
  • Rewrite homepage title & description; add WebSite + Organisation schema.
  • Rename /untitled-2/ and 301-redirect; scan for other placeholder slugs.
Weeks 3–6 · Recovery

Diagnose and reverse the YoY decline

  • Compare top pages and queries against the same window last year.
  • Map lost URLs; restore content or apply 301 redirects.
  • Strengthen internal links from high-authority pages into striking-distance targets.
Weeks 7–12 · Growth

Build on the recovered base

  • Expand the rostering, secondments and leave clusters with related Q&As.
  • Add "last updated" dates and author E-E-A-T signals site-wide.
  • Set up monthly GSC monitoring of position 5–15 movers to keep the pipeline full.