Team Empathy · Prime Plumbing
What the work did,
and one parting gift.
A straight account of the engagement, and a free fix worth making whatever happens next
Sources: your Google Business Profile · Google Search Console · GA4 · Ahrefs · a live Google NZ rankings check · Assembled 2 September 2026
What the work did
3.6% → 62.1%
Share of the local map grid holding you in the top 3 for "plumber papamoa"
9 → 21
Calls per month from your Google profile, a 133% increase
9 → 22
Of 29 tracked keywords now ranking on Google
204
Backlinks built over the engagement
On "plumber papamoa" you now hold a top-10 position across the entire grid and a top-three position across 62% of it, from effectively nothing. The calls followed: 9 a month, then 11, then 16, then 21.
And what it did not do
You told us plainly that the phone was not ringing enough, and the numbers deserve the same plainness back.
- Only one keyword reached page one of the regular Google results. The map work succeeded; the website rankings largely did not follow it.
- Search clicks were down 41.2% in August against last August.
- Three of the tracked map terms went backwards over the engagement.
- Your domain authority is unchanged at 1.0 despite 204 links. That is the clearest evidence we have that volume link building was not working, and it is part of why we have now retired it across all our clients.
- The blog cadence stalled after May.
Set against a job worth around $314 with $160 to $180 of profit in it, we understand the maths did not work for you.
The parting gift
Your website is currently blocking AI crawlers, and it is free to fix. Your robots.txt file blocks GPTBot, Google-Extended and CCBot across the whole site. In practice that means ChatGPT and Google's AI systems are told not to read you, which is why you have had only 15 visits from AI assistants in sixteen months. Whoever manages your site can lift that in a few minutes, and given where search is heading it is worth doing regardless of who you work with.
Take that one with our compliments. The door is open if you want to pick anything back up later.