SEO microsites: trade × suburb

On Pro, Karven generates SEO microsites, landing pages that target long-tail searches like "concreting Marrickville" or "garage door installer Sandringham", branded to your business. They run on Karven's domain by default and route any leads to your inbox.

This isn't magic. It's a deliberate, scaled-up version of the local-SEO play that small businesses have been doing manually for years.

What a microsite is

A single page at karven.com.au/quote/<trade>/<suburb>, with:

• A H1 like "Concreting quotes in Marrickville".
• A one-paragraph intro about the trade and the area.
• A typical price band ("Most concreting jobs in this area run $X to $Y") sourced from Karven's price data.
• A "Get a quote" form that submits to you.
• Your business name, logo, phone, and licence number prominently displayed.
• 3-5 photos of your previous work (if you've uploaded a portfolio).
• Schema markup (LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage) that Google understands.

Each suburb page links to a hub page for the broader region, and the trade-specific pages link to a parent trade page. The internal linking structure is what makes Google take the network seriously.

What you have to do

On Pro, microsites are enabled by default. To make them effective:

1. Settings → Growth → Microsites → Service areas. Pick the suburbs you actually work in. Don't pick all of Sydney unless you actually drive across all of Sydney. Google penalises obvious geo-spam.
2. Settings → Growth → Microsites → Portfolio. Upload 8-15 photos of completed work, with one-line captions.
3. Settings → Growth → Microsites → Testimonials. Paste in 3-5 real customer quotes (with permission). Karven verifies these against your accepted-quote history to make sure they're plausibly real.
4. Settings → Growth → Microsites → Trades. Pick the trades you offer. Each generates its own page for each suburb you cover.

A typical concreter covering 30 suburbs ends up with 30 pages. A multi-trade builder covering 50 suburbs and 4 trades ends up with 200. Each page is a discrete search target.

How the leads come through

A customer searches "concreting Marrickville", lands on your microsite, fills the form. The form submission:

• Creates a quote request in your Karven inbox.
• Sends you an SMS and email notification.
• Records the source (which microsite, which search term if available via Google's UTM).

You reply within Karven, generate a quote, send it. The customer experience is identical to any other Karven quote, they don't know they came from a microsite.

Ranking expectations

Realistic:

• First 30 days: Google indexes the pages. You'll start appearing for very-long-tail searches (5+ word queries) that nobody else competes for.
• 30-90 days: You'll start appearing in the top 30 for medium-tail searches ("concreter Marrickville", "concreting quote Marrickville").
• 90-180 days: Top 10 for some, with effort.
• 180+ days: Top 3 for some, sustained.

Unrealistic:

• Outranking established competitors with thousand-page websites and 10 years of links in the first month.
• Magic. There is none.

What helps a lot:

• Genuine portfolio photos with location-specific captions.
• Real testimonials from real customers in that area.
• A handful of Google reviews mentioning the suburb name (this is huge, Karven's review push helps with this).
• Backlinks from local sources (Facebook groups, council suppliers, the trade body for your industry).

Custom domain

By default, microsites live at karven.com.au/quote/.... On Pro you can move them to a subdomain of your own site: e.g. quote.yourbusiness.com.au. Set the CNAME, paste the verification token, done.

Moving to your own domain has SEO upside (the link equity helps your main site too) but it does add a couple of days for Google to re-index after the move.

Content quality

Karven generates the page copy. It's deliberately not the spammy "Looking for the best concreter in Marrickville?" template that AI content farms churn out. It's plain, specific, and reads like a human wrote it because… mostly a human did, with templated geo-substitution.

If you want to write custom copy for a specific suburb (say, your home suburb where you have real local knowledge), you can override on that page. Custom-written pages tend to rank better than templated ones over the long run.

Conversion rate

For a mid-funnel landing page like this, expect 4-8% form submission rate from organic search traffic. That's competitive with industry benchmarks.

The single biggest lever on conversion is the photos. Three photos of finished work in the actual suburb outperforms ten generic ones every time.

What Google's looking for

A quick summary of the on-page factors Karven handles:

• Page title and H1 match the search query format.
• LocalBusiness schema with your real ABN, address, and phone.
• Service schema for the trade.
• FAQPage schema for common questions.
• Open Graph and Twitter cards for social sharing.
• Mobile-responsive layout (Google indexes mobile-first).
• Fast load (Karven pages score 95+ on Lighthouse).
• HTTPS (always on).
• A real human-readable URL.

What we don't do

• Buy backlinks. Don't do this.
• Generate fake reviews. Don't do this.
• Stuff keywords. Karven actively prevents this in the templated content.

If you're tempted by any of these, please don't. Google's punishment for caught violations is more painful than slow honest growth.

A common gotcha

Don't keep "all of Australia" as your service area thinking it'll cast a wide net. It doesn't. It dilutes everything, and the conversion rate on cross-state leads is near zero. Pick the suburbs you actually drive to and where your reputation is local.