HomeHostWhat The Search Console Data Actually Shows
You asked us in May whether HomeHost had lost ground. We now have twelve months of your Search Console data in front of us, and the answer is clearer, and more specific, than either of us expected. This review sets out exactly what has happened, why it is happening, and what we would do about it.
Nick Rowe
CEO & Co-Founder / Saigon Digital
“Saigon Digital transformed how Ski.com shows up online. Beyond rebuilding our platform, they helped us rethink our entire search and AI visibility strategy. We saw a significant uplift in organic traffic, our content started appearing in AI-generated recommendations, and the quality of inbound leads improved dramatically. They understand where digital is heading and how to turn it into real commercial results.”
The Headline
Twelve months of Search Console data, read straight
Average position has worsened every month since March.
This is the single most important chart in this document. It is your site-wide average position in Google, month by month, taken directly from your Search Console. Lower is better. Between October 2025 and March 2026 HomeHost climbed from position 33 to position 15, which was real, hard-won progress. Since March, every single month has gone backwards.
Site-wide average position, Google Search Console. August is partial data to 23 Aug. Longer bar means worse ranking.
To be fair about it
Two things your current agency has genuinely fixed. The H1 on your homepage is back to “Airbnb Management Sydney”, correcting the change we flagged on 26 May. And your sitemap now contains all your commercial pages, where in May it was missing 23 of them. Both were real problems and both are resolved. We are not going to pretend otherwise. The issue is that neither fix has arrested the decline, and the data shows why.
The Rankings You Lost
Your highest-value commercial queries, tracked across four windows
Every head term has collapsed, including the one you built the business on.
These are pulled individually from Search Console with an exact-match filter, not sampled from a top-100 list, so nothing here is an artefact of how the data was cut. Each cell shows average position and the number of impressions behind it.
| Query | Nov–Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | May (pre-H1) | Now | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| airbnb management sydney | 10.6 | 9.8 | 17.3 | 49.7 | −39.1 |
| best sydney airbnb management company | 7.8 | 15.6 | 23.7 | 26.7 | −18.9 |
| best sydney airbnb managers | 7.0 | 8.1 | 14.0 | 29.0 | −22.0 |
| airbnb manager sydney | 9.6 | 9.8 | 16.2 | 31.0 | −21.4 |
| airbnb property management australia | 11.1 | 14.8 | 21.2 | 39.8 | −28.7 |
| sydney property management | — | 50.2 | 53.5 | 70.1 | −19.9 |
The one that matters most
In November 2025, “airbnb management sydney” sat at position 10.6 on 1,630 impressions. Today it sits at position 49.7 on 1,665 impressions. Google is showing you to almost exactly the same number of people. You have simply stopped being anywhere near the top of what they see. This is the query you told us you were number one for, and it is the single highest-converting term in the Sydney short-term rental category.
One point of honesty, because it matters for what you do next. The slide did not begin in May. It began around November 2025 and has been running since. The H1 change on 26 May accelerated it, but it was not the origin. Anyone who tells you a single fix will reverse this has not looked at twelve months of the data.
The Page Strategy
What the last three months of work actually produced
Nearly double the pages. Nine more clicks. Half the click-through rate.
The dominant activity on your site has been building suburb landing pages. Here is what that produced, measured directly.
| March 2026 | Last 31 days | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Location pages live | 19 | 33 | +74% |
| Impressions to those pages | 2,222 | 13,608 | +512% |
| Clicks from those pages | 4 | 13 | +9 |
| Click-through rate | 0.18% | 0.10% | nearly halved |
| Clicks from all other pages | 265 | 157 | −41% |
The trade that was made
Fourteen new location pages were added. They contributed nine additional clicks. Over the same window, the rest of the site, including your homepage and your core service pages, lost one hundred and eight. That is not a rounding error or seasonality. It is the shape of a site whose authority is being spread thinner across more pages rather than concentrated where it converts.
The Root Cause
Why the fixes have not worked
You are competing against yourself, on your own domain.
A new URL structure was rolled out for the suburb pages without retiring the old one. The result is that multiple live, indexable pages on homehost.com.au now target the same search term. Each one declares itself the authoritative version. Google has to choose, the ranking signals split, and no single page is strong enough to win.
| Bondi is targeted by three separate live URLs | Impressions | Clicks | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| /airbnb-management/bondi | 461 | 3 | 14.3 |
| /airbnb-management-locations/bondi | 224 | 0 | 15.9 |
| /bondi-airbnb-management | 21 | 0 | 43.7 |
Bondi is not an isolated case. Eight suburbs currently run duplicate competing URLs: Bondi, Darlinghurst, Pyrmont, Balmain, Coogee, Potts Point, Newtown and Palm Beach. On top of that, eight URLs listed in your sitemap are redirects rather than live pages, which tells Google to crawl addresses that no longer serve content.
The clearest single symptom
Your dedicated head-term page, /airbnb-management-sydney, took 4,313 impressions and zero clicks in the last 31 days, sitting at position 59.6. Meanwhile your homepage ranks around position 24 for the same term. Two pages, one keyword, neither winning. That is the entire problem in one line.
Still outstanding from our May audit
| Finding | Status today | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage H1 demoted | Fixed | Restored to “Airbnb Management Sydney” |
| Commercial pages missing from sitemap | Fixed | 59 URLs now listed |
| robots.txt has no directive structure | Still open | Single Sitemap line, no AI crawler rules |
| Title tags over 60 characters | Partial | 9 pages still over, worst at 87 characters |
| Schema markup coverage | Partial | Service only. No LocalBusiness, Organization or FAQ |
| Zero blog content | Partial | 4 articles live. Hometime publishes around 12 a month |
| Duplicate competing suburb URLs | New problem | 8 suburbs affected, introduced since May |
What We Would Do
Consolidate first, then rebuild authority
Stop the bleeding, then compound.
The sequence matters more than the list. Consolidation has to come before any new content, or the new content dilutes further.
Stop competing against yourself
- Pick one canonical URL pattern for every suburb and 301 the rest into it
- Consolidate the three Bondi pages, then the other seven duplicated suburbs
- Resolve the homepage versus /airbnb-management-sydney conflict on the head term
- Strip the 8 redirecting URLs out of the sitemap
- Rewrite robots.txt with a proper directive structure and AI crawler rules
- Re-submit for indexing and begin daily SERP recovery tracking
Fix what the audit still lists as open
- Rewrite the 9 over-length titles and audit every meta description
- LocalBusiness, Organization and FAQ schema across all commercial pages
- Rebuild the internal linking so authority flows to pages that convert
- Core Web Vitals remediation, prioritised by commercial page value
- Consolidate the surviving suburb pages into genuinely useful local content
- Measurement dashboard live, baseline frozen against this document
Rebuild the head-term positions
- Content programme aimed at the six collapsed commercial queries
- Publishing cadence that closes the gap on Hometime
- AI citation tracking and building across your priority queries
- Digital PR and authority signals to support the consolidated pages
- Monthly scoreboard against the exact figures in this review
What we would expect, honestly
Consolidation signals typically reach the SERPs within 14 to 21 days. The head-term recovery lands over months two and three, because Google needs to reprocess the structure before it re-ranks it. Anyone promising faster than that on a site with this much internal competition is guessing. You will see the movement week by week in the reporting, so it is never a black-box wait.
Investment
Roughly half what we quoted in May, and here is exactly why
$4,000 to start. $2,500 a month from month two.
Year one comes to $31,500 USD. In May we quoted $60,500. Nothing has been removed from the scope, so the reasoning is set out in full below.
- Week 1 triage shipped to production
- Weeks 2–4 foundation work, in full
- Measurement dashboard live, baseline frozen
- Written shipping report every week
- Led by the senior SEO lead who ran both diagnostics
- Content programme against the collapsed queries
- Ongoing consolidation and technical maintenance
- AI citation building and tracking
- Monthly scoreboard against this review’s figures
- Invoiced week 3, paid start of the following month
- Rolling 30-day notice. No lock-in
Why we have discounted this, plainly
An unexplained discount usually means something has been quietly removed from the scope. Nothing has been removed here, so we would rather set out the actual reasoning than let you wonder.
We have made a falsifiable claim, and we want to be judged on it
This document does not say “your SEO needs work”. It says your suburb pages are competing with each other, names the eight affected, points at a head-term page pulling 4,313 impressions and zero clicks, and predicts that consolidating them moves the rankings within 14 to 21 days. That is a testable prediction with a deadline on it. If we are right, you will see it in your own Search Console inside three weeks without taking our word for anything. We would rather price this low enough that testing us is easy than spend three meetings arguing about a retainer you have no reason to trust yet.
You are not paying us to find the problem, because we already have
Most engagements spend the first month and a decent slice of the fee working out what is wrong. We have now done that twice on HomeHost, in May and again this month, both times at our own cost and before you were a client. That discovery work is done and paid for. This engagement starts at the fix rather than the diagnosis, and the price reflects that we are further along than a cold start would be.
You are already paying for search work while going backwards
That is a difficult position from which to ask anyone for a large upfront commitment, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Lowering the entry price lowers the cost of finding out whether we are actually better, which is the only question that matters to you right now. If we are not better, you will know inside a month, and you will have spent $4,000 finding out.
And to be straightforward about what we get out of it
Taking a site from position 24 back to the top of “airbnb management sydney” is a case study we would use for years. Being able to publish that result is worth real money to us. We would rather earn that story at a reduced fee than charge full rate and never get the chance to prove it.
What the discount is not
It is not a trial, a pilot, or a stripped-back version of the work. The triage and foundation scope above is delivered in full. It is not a junior team either. The same senior SEO lead who ran both diagnostics leads the account, with Webflow development and content support behind them, and you get a written shipping report every week showing exactly what went into production. What the lower price buys us is a fair hearing. What it buys you is a cheap way to find out whether we are right.
For context, a comparable senior in-house Webflow and SEO hire in Sydney lands around $10,000 to $12,000 AUD a month all-in, with 8 to 12 weeks of recruiting before they start.
We found this before you asked us to.
In May we ran a three-day diagnostic and told you about the H1 change before anyone else had noticed it. This review is the same discipline applied to twelve months of your own Search Console data. Every figure in this document is reproducible from your account, and we will walk through the queries live with you on a screen-share if you want to check any of it.
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Five consecutive months of decline is not a plateau, it is a trend. The consolidation work in week one is the highest-return thing that can be done to HomeHost right now, and it can start within 24 hours of access being handed over.
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Nick Rowe · CEO & Co-Founder, Saigon Digital