A website nobody finds is a brochure in a locked drawer. Yet "being on Google" is the part of owning a website that gets the most mystique and the least straight talk. Let's fix that — here's how customers actually end up on your site, in plain English, and what separates sites that get found from sites that don't.
How Google decides who shows up
When someone types "arborist North Canterbury" into Google, three questions get answered in a fraction of a second:
- Which pages are about this? Google has read (crawled) billions of pages and looks for ones whose titles, headings and text genuinely match the search.
- Which of those are good? Fast to load, readable on a phone, clearly structured, trustworthy.
- Which do other signals back up? Links from other sites, your Google Business Profile, reviews, how long the site's been around.
You can't control all of that. But the first two are largely decided by how well your website is built — before you've written a single blog post.
Speed: the ranking factor you can buy for $71 a year
Google measures how fast your pages load for real visitors — the metrics are called Core Web Vitals, and they feed directly into ranking. Two easy wins:
- Lean pages. A hand-built site ships only the code it needs. Builder sites ship the whole toolbox: megabytes of platform JavaScript for features you'll never use. Same design, five times the weight, slower score.
- Local hosting. A server in Auckland answers NZ visitors several times faster than one in the US. It's one of the cheapest ranking advantages available — I've written up why I host on NZ servers with the actual numbers.
Structure: the part visitors never see
Under the visible page there's a layer written purely for machines, and it does a lot of quiet lifting:
- Page titles and descriptions — the headline and snippet Google shows in results. Each page needs its own, matched to what people search. "Home" tells Google nothing; "Spa & Pool Maintenance Christchurch" ranks.
- Structured data — a standard format (schema.org) that tells Google this is a local business, here's the address, hours, services, prices. It's what makes results show rich details instead of plain blue links.
- A sitemap — literally a machine-readable list of your pages, so nothing gets missed.
- Real images with descriptions — done right, your photos can appear as thumbnails next to your search result. Done as decorative backgrounds (the builder default), Google can't see them at all.
- One page per topic. A dedicated page for each service can rank for its own searches. One long homepage trying to say everything usually ranks for nothing in particular.
None of this is exotic. It's carpentry — measured, cut and fitted once, working for you every day after. It's also exactly the layer that template builders do generically or not at all, which is a big part of why I don't build on them.
Content: write for the customer, not the algorithm
The best SEO advice is embarrassingly simple: put the words your customers search for on your pages, and answer the questions they actually have. What do you do, where, for whom, what does it cost, how do they get in touch?
That last one matters more than people think — publishing prices is rare in NZ trades and services, which is precisely why a page like how much does a website cost in NZ? works. Whatever your industry's version of that question is: answer it on your site before your competitors do.
Beyond your website: the Google Business Profile
For local searches, the map results at the top come from Google Business Profiles, not websites. It's free: claim yours, fill in hours and photos, and ask happy customers for reviews — those stars appear in the map pack and move the needle. Your profile and website reinforce each other; the profile links to the site, the site's structured data confirms the business details.
A five-minute check-up you can do today
- Google your business name — do you appear, and does the result text read like something you'd click?
- Google what you do plus your town ("roofer Kaiapoi") — who's on page one? That's the competition, and their websites are beatable.
- Open your site on your phone on mobile data — count the seconds. Visitors give you about three.
- Look at your browser tab titles — does each page have its own, or do they all say "Home"?
- Search
site:yourdomain.co.nz— that's every page Google has indexed. Missing pages = invisible pages.
If a few of those made you wince, that's normal — and fixable.
The short version
Getting found isn't a dark art. It's a fast, well-structured site, with real content matching real searches, backed by a Google Business Profile. Every website I build ships with all of it as standard — not as an "SEO package" upsell. If you'd like to know what that looks like for your business, the free quote form is five minutes, fixed price, no obligation.