SEO for New Zealand trade and local businesses.
When someone searches for what you do, you are either on the first page or you are invisible. We get New Zealand trade and local businesses into the search results that produce work, and we measure it in calls and quote requests, not traffic charts.
Open now
Example search results. Not live data.
Three places customers find you. We work on all of them.
Most SEO only chases the blue links. Customers actually pick from the map pack, the organic results and, increasingly, AI answers. Showing up in all three is how one business ends up with a full calendar while the next one wonders where the calls went.
The map pack
The three map results under the search bar take the biggest share of local clicks. Your Google Business Profile, reviews and local signals decide whether you're in them.
The organic results
The classic blue links. Pages built around the exact jobs you do and the places you do them, on a fast site Google trusts, climb here and stay there.
AI answers
More people now ask Google's AI overview or ChatGPT who to call. We structure your site so those answers can read it, quote it and recommend you.
No dark arts. Just the work, done properly.
SEO is not a secret trick. It is a set of jobs most businesses never get around to. We do them, keep doing them, and show you what changed each month.
Keyword and demand research
We pull real search volumes for your services and towns from Google's own data, not guesses. If nobody is searching for it, we tell you before you pay for it.
Service and location pages
A proper page for each service you sell and each area you cover, written around how people actually search. No thin, copy-paste town pages that Google ignores.
Google Business Profile
Set up, verified and optimised: services, photos, posts and the details Google cross-checks. For local businesses this is the single biggest ranking lever.
Reviews that keep coming
Happy customers rarely review unprompted. We build the ask into your follow-up so your rating and review count keep climbing month after month.
Technical and site speed
Speed, mobile experience, crawlability and clean structure. Every site we build is made to pass Google's speed and mobile checks, and we can fix yours if it doesn't.
Reporting without the spin
Rankings and traffic, but mostly the calls and enquiries search actually produced. If something isn't moving, we say so rather than burying it in a dashboard.
If your customers are within an hour's drive, local SEO is the whole game.
A plumber in Napier does not need to rank in Invercargill. What matters is the map pack when someone two suburbs away searches at 7am with a burst pipe. That is a different job from national SEO, and it is won on different things.
- A Google Business Profile that is actually filled in, not half set up in 2019
- Reviews arriving steadily, because recency counts as well as rating
- Real pages for the towns you serve, not one page with the town name swapped
- Consistent name, address and phone across the directories Google cross-checks
Every town searches differently
Napier and Hastings are twenty minutes apart and behave like separate countries in search. Auckland is a dozen markets pretending to be one. An Invercargill plan and a Ponsonby plan have almost nothing in common.
So we research the city before we write a word of it. The pages below are that research, published: what the results actually look like where you are, who is holding them, and whether the volume justifies the work.
Find your cityThe local search picture, city by city.
We work New Zealand wide. Each of these pages sets out what we found when we researched that market: how contested it is, which searches are worth chasing, and where the quickest wins are. If your town is not here, ask and we will look at it.
Businesses we have made easier to find.
Numbers our clients can verify in their own accounts. No invented case studies.
We built their website four years ago with conversion and local SEO in mind. It now sits on page 1 for plumbers napier and, with a small ads budget on top, brought in 543 tracked enquiries in a year.
Read the case studyThey came to us with a five page site that barely ranked and brought in next to no leads. We rebuilt it search-ready and ran Google, Facebook and Instagram alongside. Now customers book months in advance.
Read the case studySEO is the long game. If you need leads this month, say so.
Plenty of agencies will happily sell you SEO as the fix for a quiet month, because it is slow to judge and easy to invoice. We will not. SEO compounds and pays off for years, but it takes months to build. If your phone needs to ring now, we will tell you to put the first dollars intoGoogle Ads and let SEO build underneath it. Both together is how the businesses that own page one got there.
Get my free leads auditA small team, deliberately.
We look after 49 businesses at the moment and we keep it that way on purpose, because search work goes backwards the second it becomes a template. No lock-in contracts and no notice period: cancel any time and your plan ends at the end of the month you've paid for.
Straight answers on SEO.
Local SEO usually shows movement in 2 to 3 months and meaningful results in 6 to 12. That is the straight answer any agency should give you. If you need leads this month, Google Ads is the right tool while your SEO builds underneath, and we run both.
Ours is $497 +GST a month, priced the same as one ad campaign. It stands on its own or alongside your website and ads, and your free leads audit works out which towns and services to go after first. Ad spend, if you run ads, is separate, billed at cost and never marked up. For comparison, SEO retainers in NZ typically run from a few hundred to several thousand a month.
No, and nobody genuinely can, because Google does not sell rankings to anyone. What we can show you is exactly what we are doing, what is moving, and what it is costing per enquiry, every month, with no lock-in contract if we are not delivering.
Local SEO targets searches tied to a place, where the map pack and your Google Business Profile decide most of the outcome. Broader SEO targets searches without a location attached and is won mostly on pages and authority. Trade and local businesses live on the first one, so that is where we start.
Trades and home services are our specialty, but the same system works for any New Zealand local service business that lives on local search. If we do not think we are the right fit, we will say so on the leads audit call.
Ads stop the moment you stop paying. SEO compounds: the same searches that cost you per click start arriving free, and businesses showing in the map pack, the organic results and the ads at once win a disproportionate share of the calls.
No. We are based in Hawke's Bay and Auckland and a good share of our clients are local to one or the other, but we work with businesses right across New Zealand. Search work does not require us to be in the same town as you.
Get your free leads audit
We'll show you where you rank right now, what's holding you back, and what it would take to own the searches that bring you work.
Search looks different for every trade.
What people type, and what they are worth when they call, changes a lot by trade. These pages go into the detail for each one.
Own the searches that bring you work.
Get your free leads audit. We'll show you exactly where you sit in search today, and what it takes to move up. No jargon, no obligation.
Free leads audit · NZ team · No lock-in contracts