Where things stand
You signed on 25 August and paid up front. Today's call starts the clock: your six month term runs 10 September 2026 to 10 March 2027, and your first monthly report lands a month from today.
45 / 100
your AEO score today, from the August strategy report
80 / 100
AI-Ready, the standard we build you to
$257,019
the mid case: new won-deal value a year at 20% category share
1
thing still blocking us: Search Console access
The one number worth opening on. Over the last 30 days your organic search brought 3,602 sessions and $37,439 through the Shopify checkout, while paid search brought 10,068 sessions and $47,525. Organic is 19% of your sessions but 39% of your tracked revenue, which works out at $10.39 a checkout visit against $4.72. It is the channel nobody has been feeding, and that gap is the whole engagement.
Those checkout figures are Shopify only, so they exclude the quoted side of the business entirely. Because the Source column in your CRM is empty, we cannot yet say how the quote value splits between organic and paid. Wiring that up is the first workstream, and it is what turns this comparison into a number you can bank.
What we need to get done today
- Search Console access, screen shared, before we do anything else. Blocking It has been outstanding since 21 August and it is the only thing genuinely holding up the build. Everything else can run without it; the baseline cannot.
- The three domain decision. Decide Which domain is the business long term, what happens to dcpatios.com.au, and what happens to the kits test site. Nothing we build compounds properly until this is settled.
- Hand over the two pieces of homework and agree who does which. Assign
- Agree how we work: the Slack channel, who signs off content, and how often you want to hear from us.
The access position
| What | Status | Note |
|---|
| Google Analytics, Online Patios | Granted | Property 308091515, data flowing |
| Google Analytics, D&C Patios | Granted | Property 417766372 |
| Shopify collaborator | Granted | online-patios.myshopify.com, approved 24 August |
| Pipeline CRM export | Received | FY25 to FY27, from Angela. This is the commercial ground truth |
| Google Search Console | Not granted | The blocker. Without it every ranking figure stays an external estimate rather than a measured fact, and we cannot split branded from non branded demand or baseline properly |
| Google Merchant Center | To ask | So the Shopping product data lines up with organic |
| Google Business Profile | To ask | Who owns it, and is it still pointed at the install business |
Search Console is a five minute job on the call: search.google.com/search-console, then Settings, Users and permissions, Add user, teamempathyaccess@gmail.com, Full. If the properties are not in your account they will be under whoever built the sites, and we can chase that together.
Your homework, and why it is only two things
Two documents, both designed to be done by talking rather than typing. Open each PDF in Claude or ChatGPT, say "Run the interview", and answer out loud. Roughly 30 to 45 minutes each. You can split them between you.
| Document | Best owner | What it settles |
|---|
| Entity Pack | Glenn, with Angela on the paperwork | The facts that let Google and the AI assistants be certain who you are: the domain decision, the locked company name and description, licences and engineering standards, delivery area, the product identifiers, and the red lines we must never cross in content |
| Brand Kit | Angela | The voice, the audiences, the product lines, the competitors and the writing rules. This becomes the source of truth every article and keyword plan is grounded in |
The single most valuable answer in either document. Your own website makes six statements about your experience, using four different numbers, and that is on onlinepatios.com.au alone. About Us says over 25 years in outdoor construction and more than 35 years in the building industry, its badge says over 30+, its heading says over 30, and the founder story says over 27 years for Glenn personally. Your FAQs page then says over 35 years of experience in outdoor construction, the identical phrase to About Us with a different number. Until you settle one, we publish no year and no company age anywhere, because an inconsistent fact is worse than a missing one when an assistant is deciding whether to trust you. The entity pack asks for the founding year of Online Patios Pty Ltd separately from the install business, plus the one experience claim we use everywhere.
What we already know
Pre filled from your three websites, your structured data, the August strategy build and your Pipeline CRM export, so the call can be spent on what we could not work out on our own. Known is on the record. Ask is a question for today.
1 · The business Known
Feeds → entity layer · schema · brand profile
What it is
Online Patios Pty Ltd, ABN 75 667 469 365. An Australian ecommerce supplier of DIY patio, carport, pergola and gable kits, sold at wholesale prices and delivered Australia wide. Head office 3/33 Expansion Street, Molendinar, Queensland 4214.
The people
Glenn Shefford owns the business and holds the Google access. Angela Symonds runs marketing and operations, and is the name customers thank in your own review replies, signed "Angela & the Online Patios Team".
Two phone numbers, two digits apart
Online Patios is 1300 156 381. D&C Patios is 1300 133 381. We have made this a hard writing rule so the two never get blurred in anything we publish.
Titles and public naming
Ask Glenn is named on About Us, in the founder story, along with his YouTube channel. What is missing is everything an assistant looks for after that: no author byline on any article, no bio, no Person schema, and Angela is named nowhere despite being the name customers thank in your own review replies. Do you both want to be named, with what titles, and who should content be attributed to?
2 · The commercial shape Known
Feeds → the money model · reporting
The numbers
FY25 A$1.12M of won value, FY26 A$2.41M (up 116%), and July FY27 running at A$264,714 in the month.
The thing that trips up every analysis
72% of FY26 won value came through office quotes rather than the Shopify checkout ($1,745,582 of $2,411,237). Any figure taken from Shopify alone understates the business by roughly three quarters, so every number we report is built on the Pipeline CRM plus Shopify together, never Shopify alone.
What a visit is worth
Across the matched March to June window, A$1,124,074 of won value against 100,820 sessions. That is A$11.15 of won deal value per session, measured from your own numbers rather than assumed.
Lead source attribution
Ask The Source column in the Pipeline CRM is empty, so no channel can currently be credited with a quote. Wiring that up is workstream one, and it is what turns "organic looks good" into "organic won us this much".
3 · The three domains Decide today
Feeds → the whole technical build
What exists
onlinepatios.com.au is the Shopify kit store where the revenue lives, Domain Rating 9. dcpatios.com.au is the original install business, now winding down, Domain Rating 13 with 531 referring domains built up over its life. dcpatiokits.com.au launched 20 August to test the quote calculator, Domain Rating 0.
Our recommendation
Consolidate onto onlinepatios.com.au. When the install business winds down, migrate dcpatios.com.au page by page with 301 redirects so all of that accumulated authority carries across rather than evaporating. Fold the calculator in after its test finishes. The one thing we would strongly advise against is migrating the established domain into the three week old one.
The sanctioned relationship wording
Your own FAQ page says "our sister company, D&C Patios". We are happy to use exactly that everywhere. Ask Confirm it, or give us the version you want.
Still trading?
Ask Is D&C Patios still taking install work today? This changes what we can say in the present tense.
4 · The website today Known
Feeds → technical workstream
The platform
Shopify, with over 6,000 component SKUs, around 31 static pages and 20 blog posts.
Genuinely ahead of the pack
Your store already carries a UCP and MCP setup, an agents.md, an llms.txt and an agentic discovery sitemap. Very few Australian stores of this size have any of that, and it is why your technical pillar scores 20 out of 25.
The drag
Those 6,000 component SKU pages are thin and near duplicate, and they dilute the crawl so the kit pages compete with their own parts. Consolidating them is one of the first technical jobs.
The test site is open to Google
Ask dcpatiokits.com.au has no noindex tag and its sitemap lists the calculator and quote pages. Since it runs a different markup, it can end up showing your higher priced quotes beside your Online Patios prices. A noindex while it is still a test is a five minute job for your developer.
5 · The market and where you sit Known
Feeds → content strategy · reporting
The category
Roughly 391,000 non branded searches a year across Australia for kits, carports, patios, roofing and the local terms, of which about 136,902 are winnable organic clicks.
Your share
About 3.2%. Every extra 1% is worth around $15,265 a year in won deals. The mid case, taking you to 20%, is +$257,019 a year.
Where your organic actually comes from
Nearly two thirds of your organic traffic lands on component part pages: beams, fascia brackets, gutters, roofing panels. That is spare part demand, not kit demand. The kit category sitting above it is what we are going after.
6 · Voice, proof and the customers Partly known
Feeds → brand kit · content
What customers actually praise
From your own 70 reviews, 91% five star, three things repeat: everything is in the box ("you don't have to buy any extra materials at all"), the team answers the hard questions on council approval and engineering drawings, and the insulated panels perform ("keep the heat out so well").
The story that is told once and then never used again
Your About Us page tells it in full: Glenn checks his brother-in-law's patio quote, finds it inflated, works out he can supply the same structure from his NSW branch for a fraction of it, and launches Online Patios off the back of that. It is a genuinely good origin story. The problem is that it lives on that one page, in a chatty voice, and never surfaces in your positioning, your homepage, your collection pages or your structured data. That story is what an assistant would quote if it could find it.
Ideal customer, in your words
Ask Who is the best customer you have had this year, and what made them easy? We have the demographic picture from the data, not the human one.
Competitors that actually worry you
Ask We track Apollo Patios and Fair Dinkum Builds from the data. Who else do you lose deals to, and on what?
7 · Ways of working Agree today
Feeds → delivery rhythm
Slack
Your shared channel is live and we sent you both an invite on 3 September. Neither has been accepted yet, and Slack Connect invites very often land in Promotions or spam, so it is worth searching your inbox for "Slack" while we are on the call. We can resend on the spot if it has genuinely gone missing.
Content sign off
Ask Who approves content, and how quickly can you turn it around? Anything touching spans, wind ratings, council approval or engineering certification needs a technical eye before it publishes, so we need to know whose.
Reporting
Your first monthly report lands a month from today, as a dated tab on this same page. Ask Do you want a monthly call alongside it, or a short video and a written summary?
Your time
About an hour a week during the foundations phase, then a quick weekly check in for the rest of the six months.
Who owes what
| Who | What | By when | Why it matters |
|---|
| Glenn | Search Console access for all three domains | On this call | The only genuine blocker. No measured baseline without it |
| Glenn | The three domain decision | This week | Everything we build compounds onto whichever domain you choose |
| Glenn | Entity Pack interview | Within two weeks | Settles the facts every piece of content is grounded in |
| Angela | Brand Kit interview | Within two weeks | Settles the voice, audiences and writing rules |
| Angela | Start filling the Source column in the Pipeline CRM | From now | Turns "organic looks good" into a number you can bank |
| Your developer | noindex on dcpatiokits.com.au while it is a test | This week | Stops the test pricing showing beside your real pricing |
| Team Empathy | Baseline, technical audit and the content roadmap | Once Search Console lands | Phase one of the six months |
| Glenn & Angela | Accept the Slack invite sent 3 September (check Promotions and spam) | Today | Where the day to day happens. Already sent, just not accepted yet |
Prepared by Team Empathy for the onboarding call of 10 September 2026. Figures from your Google Analytics (both properties), your Shopify store, your Pipeline CRM export and the August strategy build. Search volumes triangulated across Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush and Ahrefs. Ranking figures remain external estimates until Search Console access lands.