Duckboard Detailing
Mobile car detailing, solo · Melbourne, Australia · 6-month engagement
A solo mobile detailer outranked Melbourne's car washes across 30 suburbs
No storefront, no website, one person and one van. We treated local search like a finish: strip it back, correct it, protect it — then watch the results bead.
Headline
Map-pack top 3
in 30 suburbs
The beading test
Results that sit on the surface
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
The challenge
A van, not a forecourt
Service-area businesses without a storefront struggle in the map pack, and the owner had no website beyond a social page.
Map-pack ranking leans on proximity to a pin. A mobile detailer has no pin customers can visit, so the car washes on every main road won by default. To compete across 30 suburbs, Duckboard needed every other signal — relevance, prominence, proof — to be polished to a mirror.
Paint inspection · audit findings
Bare metal
Website
No website at all: a social page was the only destination, so Google had nothing to crawl, no service pages to rank and no booking path to measure.
Oxidation
Google Business Profile
Profile listed as a storefront with a home address shown, one category (“Car wash”), no service area, no services, 4 photos and no posts in 14 months.
Water spots
Reviews
6 reviews, the newest 9 months old. Competing car washes averaged 310 reviews and a fresh one every 2 days.
Swirl marks
Citations
Three different phone numbers and two business names across 11 directories, splitting the entity Google could see.
Clear-coat fade
Content
Zero proof of work indexed: hundreds of before/after photos lived only in stories that expired after 24 hours.
Etching
Tracking
Bookings arrived by DM, call and text with no attribution, so nobody could tell which suburbs actually paid.
The strategy
Four stages of a proper detail, applied to local search
Built on our Local plan, executed in the same order a detailer works a panel — nothing gets protected before it is clean.
01 Decontaminate
Google Business Profile
Rebuilt the profile as a service-area business: address hidden, 30 suburbs set as the service area, primary category “Car detailing service” with mobile and ceramic secondaries, 14 priced services, booking link and weekly posts from the job sheet.
14 services listed
02 Correct
Service-area pages
A fast static site with one page per suburb cluster: real streets and parking notes, travel-fee rules, water and power self-sufficiency explained, LocalBusiness and Service schema, and a two-tap booking form.
9 cluster pages · 1.1s LCP
03 Protect
Before/after galleries
Every job became a permanent, geotagged gallery entry with a 50/50 slider, the vehicle, the package and the suburb. Galleries feed the suburb pages and the profile photo stream, so proof compounds instead of expiring.
212 galleries published
04 Maintain
Review velocity
A text sent 2 hours after the final wipe-down, with the gallery link and a one-tap review URL. A follow-up after 3 days, never more. Every review answered within 24 hours, naming the service, never the customer.
≈ 5 new reviews / week
6 months, panel by panel
The timeline
- Month 12/30 top 3
Strip and inspect
Profile rebuilt as a service-area business, NAP cleaned across 11 directories, call and form tracking live.
- Month 27/30 top 3
First coat
Site launched with the first 4 suburb-cluster pages and schema; review request texts switched on.
- Month 313/30 top 3
Gallery cure
Before/after gallery system live; 60 back-catalogue jobs published with suburb tags.
- Month 419/30 top 3
Layering
Remaining 5 cluster pages, ceramic-coating guide, profile Q&A seeded from real customer questions.
- Month 525/30 top 3
Beading
Review count passes 90; map-pack top 3 reached in the inner-east suburbs furthest from the base.
- Month 630/30 top 3
Full gloss
All 30 suburbs in the top 3; booking mix shifts to ceramic and paint-correction packages.
Results
Map-pack top 3 in 30 suburbs
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
End of month 6
30 / 30 suburbs
51 bookings · 147 reviews · A$310 avg ticket
- Brightontop 3 since month 1
- Elwoodtop 3 since month 1
- Hamptontop 3 since month 2
- Sandringhamtop 3 since month 2
- St Kildatop 3 since month 2
- Caulfieldtop 3 since month 2
- Bentleightop 3 since month 2
- Black Rocktop 3 since month 3
- Beaumaristop 3 since month 3
- Malverntop 3 since month 3
- Carnegietop 3 since month 3
- Murrumbeenatop 3 since month 3
- Glen Iristop 3 since month 3
- Moorabbintop 3 since month 4
- Cheltenhamtop 3 since month 4
- Mentonetop 3 since month 4
- Ashburtontop 3 since month 4
- Camberwelltop 3 since month 4
- Oakleightop 3 since month 4
- Hawthorntop 3 since month 5
- Kewtop 3 since month 5
- Mordialloctop 3 since month 5
- Burwoodtop 3 since month 5
- Mount Waverleytop 3 since month 5
- Surrey Hillstop 3 since month 5
- Glen Waverleytop 3 since month 6
- Balwyntop 3 since month 6
- Box Hilltop 3 since month 6
- Doncastertop 3 since month 6
- Richmondtop 3 since month 6
Galleries sold the higher-value work: ceramic coating and paint correction rose from 1 in 9 bookings to 1 in 3, lifting the modelled average ticket.
- 1Bayside Hand Car Wash★ 4.3 (412) · Car wash · 1.2 km
- 2Sparkle Express Wash★ 4.1 (288) · Car wash · 2.0 km
- 3Southside Auto Spa★ 4.4 (230) · Car wash · 2.6 km
- 1Duckboard Detailing★ 5.0 (147) · Mobile detailing · Comes to you
- 2Bayside Hand Car Wash★ 4.3 (419) · Car wash · 1.2 km
- 3Southside Auto Spa★ 4.4 (236) · Car wash · 2.6 km
| Keyword | Volume / mo | Month 0 | Month 6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| mobile car detailing brighton | 590 | not ranked | #1 |
| car detailing near me (bayside) | 2,400 | 18 | #2 |
| ceramic coating melbourne | 1,300 | not ranked | #6 |
| mobile detailer glen iris | 170 | not ranked | #1 |
| car interior cleaning hawthorn | 260 | 41 | #3 |
| paint correction south east melbourne | 210 | not ranked | #2 |
| mobile car wash box hill | 320 | 33 | #3 |
| car detailing doncaster | 390 | not ranked | #2 |
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
6 months · 4 tactics · Asia-Pacific
Get a plan like this
A service-area business with no shopfront can still own the map. We will tell you honestly what is achievable in your suburbs.