The invisible problems quietly stopping Google from ranking you — and how to check for them yourself.
Most Christchurch businesses assume they're not ranking because they need more content, or more links. Often the real reason is that Google physically can't crawl, render or trust the site properly. Here's what we find, over and over.
Almost always oversized images — a 4MB photo straight off a phone, scaled down in the browser. Local searches are urgent and mobile. If your page takes four seconds to show anything, you lost them before they saw your offer.
Drag-and-drop builders load enormous amounts of CSS and JavaScript to render a simple page. Easy to build, expensive to load, and Google notices.
Pages that exist but nothing links to them. Google finds them (maybe), but they inherit no authority, so they never rank. Every important page should be reachable from your homepage in two or three clicks.
A single "Services" page listing eight services will rank for none of them properly. Each service that matters to your revenue needs its own page.
"Home | Welcome" is not a title tag. Nor is the same title repeated on forty pages. This is free to fix and astonishingly common.
Schema markup tells Google unambiguously what your business is, where it operates, and what it offers. Most Christchurch sites have none.
The twenty-suburb-page trick, thin and templated. Actively harmful, not just useless.
A lot of Christchurch sites were rebuilt post-earthquake, sometimes more than once. Old URLs were left to 404, and all the authority they'd earned evaporated with them.
We have genuinely found businesses paying for SEO on sites that had a stray noindex tag or a hostile robots.txt left over from a staging environment. Everything else was pointless until that was fixed.
site:yourdomain.co.nz on Google. Fewer pages than expected means indexing problems.Want the full version? The free audit covers all of this.
A free, no-obligation SEO audit. We'll show you who's outranking you in Christchurch, exactly why, and whether they can realistically be displaced.