A Crane Hire Website Built To Rank
A full rebuild for a locally owned crane hire business in Cannon Valley, near Airlie Beach. Twenty five pages and a fleet that runs from 15 tonne Frannas to 80 tonne all-terrains. It scored a perfect 100 on every Google PageSpeed score on mobile. Website design and SEO by Ripple Effect Online.
The live site: whitsundaycranes.com.au ↗
A Local Crew With A Lot To Show
Whitsunday Crane Hire has been lifting across Airlie Beach, the Whitsunday Islands and the wider region since 2007. Owners Lofty and Casey Loft run a fleet of Franna pick-and-carry cranes, a truck crane, an all-terrain crane, a crane truck and scissor lifts, and they work everywhere from house blocks and marinas to mine sites out west.
They are triple ISO certified, CICA members and CraneSafe accredited, with genuine five star reviews. On paper, they should have been easy to find.
The Old Site Was Holding Them Back
I started with a Sonar Report, which looks at the business the way Google and AI assistants see it. It found five problems.
Slow And Dated
The website hadn't been updated in over a year, which reads to Google as unclear and possibly inactive.
No Structured Data
Google couldn't confirm the address, hours, services or service area.
Credentials Hidden
Their best credentials (ISO, CICA, CraneSafe) weren't shown anywhere a customer or Google would see them.
No Load Charts
There were no downloadable load charts, while the top result for "crane hire Airlie Beach" had them.
Broke On Updates
The old build broke after a routine WordPress update, so the site couldn't be safely maintained.
Crane Hire Isn't One Service.
A builder needing trusses lifted, a marina stepping a yacht mast and a mine planning a shutdown are searching for completely different things, and each crane answers a different question.
Get a QuoteEvery Crane Is A Different Product
Three Types Of Crane
Franna pick-and-carry cranes articulate and need no outriggers, so they are sold on tight access. The 55T is a truck crane and the 80T is an all-terrain, sold on reach and tip height. Each got its own page, specs and wording, and I kept the terms exact. The 55T is never called an all-terrain.
Load Charts Nobody Could Read
Manufacturer charts are long operator manuals. I rebuilt each one as a short, branded lift planning PDF for engineers and builders, cross-checked figure by figure against the original, and linked it from its crane page and a central Load Charts page.
Owned Versus Sourced
The business owns cranes from 15T to 80T but brings in 120T to 350T cranes for major projects. Those are listed separately and always worded as "sourced" or "on request", so nothing overstates the fleet.
Scissor Lifts Too
Wheeled and tracked lifts have different working heights indoors and outdoors and different platform loads. They got their own hire page and data sheets, because the audit showed people search for them separately.
Pages That Don't Compete
Six fleet pages and five service pages could easily fight each other in Google. Each one targets its own phrase, from "80 tonne crane hire Whitsundays" to "mining crane hire Bowen Basin", and links to the cranes that suit that job.
A Big Service Area
From Hamilton and Hayman islands to Bowen, and mine sites from Coppabella to Collinsville. Every page carries the full area in the copy and in the structured data, with no thin town pages.
How I Set Them Up To Rank
Structured Data On All 25 Pages
One connected business record with the address, hours, service area, owners, ISO certificates, CICA membership and socials. Product data for every crane, Service data for every service, plus FAQs, breadcrumbs and a step-by-step plan your lift guide.
One Page Per Crane And Service
Each with its own keyword-led title, description and H1, written in plain Australian English.
Trust Where It Counts
ISO, CICA and CraneSafe on every page, verifiable certificate links, owner bios and real customer testimonials word for word.
Content Customers Want
Downloadable load charts, a Plan Your Lift guide, a working near power lines section and FAQs answering the questions people ask before they call.
A Migration That Kept Rankings
I kept the www address Google already trusted, 301 redirected every old URL to its new page and forced one clean version of the domain.
Search Console On Day One
Google Search Console verified by DNS, a clean sitemap and robots.txt submitted, and the new pages sent for indexing on launch day.
Ready For AI Search
An llms.txt file summarising the business, fleet, services and documents, and a perfect Agentic Browsing score so AI assistants can read and use the site.
Built To Convert On Phones
A sticky Call and Quote bar, a cleaner mobile hero that shows the cranes properly, and their existing JotForm for quotes.
Fast From The First Line
The old site was slow to load on phones, which is where most crane hire calls start. Speed was a priority from the first line of code.
Lean Build
Each page is hand-coded in a single module instead of stacked page builder blocks, so there's far less code to download.
Images
Every photo converted to WebP and sized for the job, with responsive versions so phones get a smaller file than desktops.
The Hero Photo
My first launch-day test scored 91. The caching plugin was lazy-loading the main photo and logo for new visitors, so I excluded them and told the browser to load the hero first. Largest Contentful Paint dropped from 3.5s to 1.7s.
Accessibility
Fixed colour contrast across 25 pages, allowed pinch-zoom, added a main landmark and tidied the heading order. Accessibility went from 85 to 100.
Stability
Width and height on every image, so nothing jumps around as the page loads. Layout shift came in at 0.011.
100 Across The Board On Mobile
Tested on Google PageSpeed Insights on launch day, on the slowest setting Google uses: an emulated mid-range phone on throttled 4G.
The site went live on 5 November 2026. With the foundations in place, the next stage is a Projects page with real jobs (starting with the Big Mango lift in Bowen), photos and load charts for the sourced heavy cranes, and steady Google reviews. I'm tracking rankings for the main crane hire searches across the Whitsundays as Google reindexes the new pages.
Fast, Accessible And Easy For Google To Understand.
The three things a local trades website needs before it can rank. See it for yourself at whitsundaycranes.com.au.
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