What it costs, how long it takes, what local SEO actually involves, and how AI search is changing what you should build.
It has stopped being one discipline. There are at least four, and confusing them is why so many engagements disappoint: technical SEO (can machines crawl, render and index your site), content and topical coverage (do you answer what people search), local SEO (do you appear in the map pack for your area), and increasingly answer optimisation (does an AI assistant cite you when someone asks it your question).
A business may need all four or only one. Being sold a bundle regardless is the most common way SEO budget is wasted.
Meaningful movement typically takes three to six months, and competitive commercial terms often take longer. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is describing either a term nobody searches or a tactic that will cost you later. The flip side is worth saying too: the results don't stop when you stop paying, which is the entire argument for doing it.
For a business serving a physical area, the map pack often produces more enquiries than the organic results below it, and it responds to a different set of signals — the Google Business Profile itself, proximity, review volume and recency, category selection, and consistency of your name, address and phone number across the web. A business can rank well organically and be invisible in the map pack, or the reverse. They need to be worked on separately.
More searches now end with an answer rather than a click, and the pages quoted in those answers aren't always the ones that used to rank. The response isn't panic — it's structure. Answer real questions directly and near the top of the page. Mark up your content so machines can read it unambiguously. Keep a consistent identity across the web so systems can recognise you as an entity. These are the same disciplines good SEO always required, applied with more precision.
This is the least contested opportunity in New Zealand search right now, mostly because very few agencies are selling it and very few businesses have budgeted for it.
Not by rankings. Ranking reports are the easiest thing in this industry to make look good — track enough terms and some of them will always be rising. Judge it on qualified organic enquiries and on revenue, segmented so branded searches (people who already knew you) are separated from non-branded ones (demand you actually created). An agency unwilling to separate those two is showing you their own marketing, not your results.
Genuine SEO in a competitive New Zealand market is a few thousand dollars a month, because it's skilled labour and there's no way to do it cheaply that also works. Below roughly $1,000 a month you are usually buying automated reports and a small amount of content. See our SEO service for how we scope and price it.
Book a free discovery session. We'll audit what you're running, tell you what's leaking budget, and show you what we'd do differently — no obligation.