Websites for excavation and earthmoving that keep working.
On 1 September 2026 we opened 58 Melbourne excavation and earthmoving websites, one after another. Ten of them would not open at all — expired, broken, or the domain simply gone — and every one was still the website link on a live Google Business Profile.
We checked, rather than guessed
We searched Google Maps for excavation and earthmoving contractors across eight areas of greater Melbourne — the city, the north, the outer south-east, the west, the east, the Mornington Peninsula and the Yarra Ranges. That returned 199 businesses. 149 had a website link on their Google listing. We then opened the first 58 of those websites in a normal browser, on 1 September 2026, and read what came back.
Ten of the 58 never loaded. Two were expired hosting pages that said so in the browser tab. One returned a database error. One returned “403 Forbidden”. One threw a security certificate warning that stops most people before they reach the site. One sat on a bot-check screen. Two loaded a completely blank page. And two domains no longer exist at all — the address does not resolve to anything.
Those ten businesses are still listed on Google. Someone searching for a digger this week will tap through to nothing.
Where they say they work
Homepage titles of the 48 Melbourne excavation & earthmoving sites that opened
Read from the live homepage of each site, 1 September 2026. Two of the 48 had no title at all, and are counted in the bottom row.
Ten of the 48 that opened had no meta description — that is the grey line of text under the blue link in Google’s results, and if you do not write it Google makes one up out of whatever it finds. Two had no page title either. Google’s own documentation is blunt about that one: make sure every page has a title, because it is “often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click.”
Our wider study of 2,444 Australian tradie websites across 14 trades found the same localisation gap everywhere, and nobody cleared 17%. Excavation, checked here for the first time, came in lower than all of them. The two studies were measured slightly differently — that one checked each business’s own recorded suburb, this one checked whether any suburb was named — so treat the comparison as a direction, not a decimal.
Which means the bar is low
An excavation website that actually loads, names the suburbs you work out of, says what size machines you run and gets someone to a phone number on a muddy phone screen is ahead of most of this market on day one. That is what we build, and you see the finished site before you pay anything.
Built for the suburbs you actually dig in
We are Melbourne based and we only take one excavation or earthmoving business per area, so we are never selling against our own clients. The suburbs you work out of matter to us as much as they do to you.
Two of the 48 sites we opened name a real suburb on the homepage, and both read like a person wrote them. Bobs Earthmoving leads with “Bobcat Hire in Box Hill”. Tata Excavations leads with “Commercial Digging Contractors in Campbellfield”. Neither is a fancy website. They just say where they are, which is more than 46 of their competitors manage.
Everyone else is fighting under “Excavation Melbourne” against operators from Werribee to Lilydale, or saying nothing about location at all. If most of your work comes out of Ringwood, Croydon and Bayswater, your homepage should say so.
Suburb pages work, but only with something real on them. DWK Earthworks in Wonga Park runs a genuine one at excavation-services-frankston, and it earns visits. Our banked research on three separate Melbourne trade markets keeps landing in the same place though: one strong page first, suburb pages second and selectively. A stack of near-identical suburb pages with the name swapped is the thing Google’s spam updates go after — and there was one as recently as 18 August 2026, according to Google’s own ranking status dashboard. We will not build you those.
Answer the access question before they ring
Nobody searches “excavation”. They search the job, and behind the job sits one question you get asked on every single call: will your machine fit down the side of my house? Almost none of the 48 sites we opened answer it anywhere on the homepage.
Two do, and it is no accident they stand out. Minifitdig Excavation puts it in the page title itself — “We Fit Where Others Can’t”. And Entire Excavations, out of the Yarra Valley, states “2–15 Tonne Excavator Fleet” on the homepage next to the phone number, so a builder can size the job before dialling. That second one is ours — more on it below.
- A page for each job you want more ofSite cuts & bulk excavation, driveways, trenching & drainage, rock walls & retaining, demolition clean-up — whichever fit your business
- Your machines and your access widths, in writingSizes, attachments and the narrowest gap you can get through. It answers the question and filters out the jobs you cannot take
- Your suburb in the homepage title46 of the 48 sites we opened do not do this. It is a fifteen-minute change
- A phone number that works with one thumbExcavation enquiries come from people standing on site, on a phone, often with gloves on
- Real photos of your own machines on real jobsStock photos of yellow diggers convince nobody who has hired a digger before
- A site that stays aliveWe host it, watch it and fix it. Ten of the 58 we opened had nobody doing that
Pricing is public: Essential is $199 a month, Growth is $299 a month, and the $3,000 setup fee is currently waived on the founding offer. All prices in Australian dollars. No lock-in, one excavation business per area. See what is in each plan, or read how we build websites for tradies generally.
The one we built
Entire Excavations, Yarra Valley
Earthmoving, rock supply and installation, rockwalls, basements, site cuts and driveways across the Yarra Valley and metropolitan Melbourne. Chris has been on the tools more than 20 years.
The same checklist on this page, applied to a real site:
- The title says where they actually work“Excavation & Earthmoving Yarra Valley & Melbourne” — not the metro term 46 of the 48 sites we opened are fighting over
- The machines are on the homepage“2–15 Tonne Excavator Fleet”, sitting next to the phone number, so a builder can size the job before ringing
- A page each for the jobs worth havingRock supply, site cuts and driveways get their own pages, plus a service areas page — rather than one page trying to do everything
- One name and one number, straight away“Call Chris” and a mobile, above the fold, on a phone, where an excavation enquiry actually happens
Their site went live in August 2026. It is too early to claim rankings or lead numbers and we are not going to pretend otherwise — what we can show you is the build.
Excavation website questions.
How much does an excavation or earthmoving website cost?
Our pricing is public: Essential is $199 a month and Growth is $299 a month in Australian dollars, with the $3,000 setup fee currently waived on the founding offer. You see the finished website before you pay anything, and there is no lock-in contract.
What did you find when you checked Melbourne excavation websites?
On 1 September 2026 we opened 58 Melbourne excavation and earthmoving websites listed on live Google Business Profiles. Ten would not open at all. Of the 48 that did open, only 2 named a specific suburb in the homepage title, 22 named no location at all, and 10 had no meta description.
What pages should an excavation website have?
Our recommendation is one strong homepage first, then a separate page for each job you want more of, such as site cuts, driveways, trenching and drainage, rock walls and retaining, and demolition clean-up. Customers search the job, not the word excavation. Add suburb pages only where you have real local substance to put on them.
Should my website say what size machines I run?
Yes. Access is the first thing a homeowner or builder needs to answer, and most excavation websites never mention it. Putting your machine sizes and the access widths you can get through on the page answers the question before someone has to ring and ask, and it filters out the jobs you cannot take.
Do you only work with excavation companies in Melbourne?
We are Melbourne based and focus on greater Melbourne, and we only take one excavation or earthmoving business per area so we are never competing against our own clients. If you are outside Melbourne, get in touch and we will tell you honestly whether we can help.
My website still works, so why does any of this matter?
Four of the ten broken sites we found had failed quietly. Two were expired hosting pages, one was a database error and one was a security warning, and nobody had noticed because the owner never types their own web address in. Your Google listing keeps sending people there either way, so a site that has quietly died costs you the same as no site at all.
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