Skyward Digital
Skyward Digital Getting found in Auckland
For anybody who drives to the job Every figure here includes GST

Auckland is not one place to be found in.

Ask where you rank in Auckland and the honest answer is that the question has no single answer. A map result is assembled around the person searching, and the distance between them and you is one of the three things Google says decides it. So a plumber in Massey has one result in Massey, a different one in Henderson, and a worse one in Howick, all at the same moment on the same afternoon. He checks from his own kitchen, sees himself first, and concludes he is doing fine — from the one spot on earth where he was always going to win. This page is what actually decides it, how to check it properly, and how to choose the two or three areas worth writing about instead of the forty that are not.

What decides it Skip to the six checks
Service areas a profile holdsTwenty, at most
Suburbs in AucklandRather more than twenty
What a ranking can be bought forNothing. It cannot
If you would rather just ask022 584 0585
01 / WHAT DECIDES IT

Five things worth
knowing before you
spend a dollar
on being found.

None of this is a trade secret. Google publishes most of it in its own help pages, and the rest follows from it by ordinary reasoning. It is simply never put in front of the person paying, because the version that gets sold is a number going up. Read these five and you will be able to judge anybody's proposal, including ours, and you will know which half of the problem is worth spending money on.

01
The one everything follows from

The result is built around the searcher, not around you

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and that distance means how far each business is from the customer who is searching. Not from the centre of town, and not from your yard. From wherever the phone happens to be when the person picks it up.

What it meansYou do not have a position in Auckland. You have a different position in every street in it, and they can differ enormously between two suburbs a fifteen-minute drive apart. What it costs to get wrongAny report showing one number for "your Auckland ranking" is describing a place, and usually the place that flatters the report.
02
The check nearly everybody does

Your own search is the least reliable one available to you

You are standing at your own address, on a phone signed into your own account, looking for a business you have looked for before. Three separate reasons for the answer to come back kinder than it is. It is the equivalent of checking whether your van is visible by standing next to it.

What it meansThe check is not useless, it is just answering a different question — whether you appear at all, rather than whether you appear where the work is. What it costs to get wrongMonths of comfort. This is the single most common reason a business with a real problem in its best suburb never finds out it has one.
03
The part nobody explains

Your profile has a pin, even when it has no address

If you travel to customers, Google says you should hide your address, and that is the right setting for most trades and every mobile service. Hidden is not the same as absent. The profile is still anchored somewhere, and the distance half of the calculation still runs off that anchor.

What it meansWhere you are based matters even when nobody can see where you are based, which is why a business at one end of the city has to work harder at the other end of it. What it costs to get wrongChasing the wrong half. If the gap is distance, no amount of writing closes it, and somebody selling you writing should say so.
04
The half that is actually work

Two of the three are yours to improve, and one is not

Distance you cannot change without moving. Relevance is whether your profile and your pages plainly say you do this particular job. Popularity is whether you are known — reviews, mentions, a site that other things point at. Those last two are ordinary work with an ordinary amount of effort behind them.

What it meansThe honest plan is to be unambiguous about the jobs you want and the places you go, and to keep collecting reviews. There is no fourth lever being withheld from you. What it costs to get wrongMoney spent on the immovable half, which is the most expensive mistake available here and the easiest one to sell somebody.
05
In Google's own words

There is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking

That sentence is on Google's own help page about improving local ranking. It rules out the entire category of offer that begins with a guaranteed position, and it is worth having in your head before the next call from somebody who has noticed your business is not first in Manukau.

What it meansAdvertising will buy you a slot marked as advertising. Nothing buys you the map result, and nobody can be paid to move it. What it costs to get wrongThe money, and then the suspicion that follows it. This is the offer that turns owners off the whole subject for years, and fairly.

If you take one thing from this section, take the first row. Nearly every argument about local search dissolves once both people accept that the result is built around the person searching rather than around the business. It explains why two competitors can both be telling the truth about being first, why a report can be accurate and worthless at the same time, and why the next section is about checking from somewhere other than where you are standing now.

02 / CHECK IT PROPERLY

Six things to find out
before anybody quotes
you for being
found in Auckland.

Half an hour, no cost, and nothing said to anybody. Do them before you take a call about this, because every one of them turns a conversation you cannot judge into one you can. Write the six answers on the back of something and keep it.

Check one

Search for yourself from somewhere you are not

Next time you are parked up at a job on the other side of the city, search for what you do while you are sitting there. Do it in a private window so your own history is out of it. That result is the one a stranger in that suburb gets, and it is the only honest read you can take. Do it in three different suburbs over a fortnight and you have a map rather than an opinion.

Check two

Count the service areas on your profile

Open the profile and look at the list. Google allows up to twenty, which sounds generous until you remember how many suburbs Auckland has. It means the list is a choosing exercise, not a form to fill in, and most profiles either have one entry saying Auckland or have twenty entries chosen by nobody in particular.

Check three

Measure your real boundary against the published one

Google's guidance is that the boundary of your whole service area should not be more than about two hours' driving from where you are based. From most of Auckland that reaches well past Whangārei and Hamilton, so the rule almost never binds here. Which means the boundary that matters is entirely your own: the drive you will genuinely do on a wet Friday, not the one you would do for a dream job.

Check four

Read your last twenty invoices and write down the suburbs

This is the one that changes minds. The areas you have actually been paid to work in are rarely the areas you would have listed from memory, and they are almost never spread evenly. Most businesses find two or three suburbs carrying the bulk of it and a long tail of ones that each happened once and cost a fortune in driving.

Check five

Check whether your address is shown or hidden

If customers never come to you, Google's own guidance is that the address should be hidden and the service areas shown instead. On a profile set up in a hurry it is often still showing a home address, which is worth fixing tonight for reasons that have nothing to do with search.

Check six

Count the pages on your site that say something about a place

Not pages that mention a suburb in a list at the bottom. Pages that say something about working there which a competitor could not copy and paste — the kinds of houses, the access, the parking, the jobs that come up. For most sites the honest count is nought, and that is the gap this page is really about.

Six answers and the shape of the problem is usually obvious. If check one comes back fine everywhere you actually work, there is nothing here to buy and you should go and do something else with the afternoon. If it comes back fine at home and poorly in the suburb that pays your mortgage, that is the useful result, and section 04 is how to choose what to do about it — which begins by cutting the list down rather than adding to it.

03 / WHAT WE WILL NOT DO

Four things that get
sold in this market,
and why we are not
going to sell them.

Every one of these is offered somewhere in Auckland this week, and every one of them is easier to sell than what we do. Three of them can cost you the listing outright. The fourth just costs you the money.

We will not

Promise you a position

Not first in Ponsonby, not top three in Manukau, not by March. Google's own help page says outright that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and even if there were, the result changes with where the searcher is standing, so the promise would have to name a street corner to mean anything.

What we will say instead: what we are going to do, why we think it is the right order to do it in, and what we will be able to show you afterwards. Under the Fair Trading Act a claim needs reasonable grounds at the time it is made, and for a ranking promise nobody has any.

We will not

Build you forty suburb pages

The version where one page is written and the place name is swapped forty times. It is the cheapest thing in this trade to produce, it is why the whole idea of a suburb page has a bad name, and a customer who lands on one can tell inside a sentence. It also leaves you with forty pages to keep true when your prices change.

What we will say instead: pick the two or three areas that genuinely carry your work and write those properly, with the jobs, the access and the travel terms that are actually true of them. Section 04 is the order to do it in, and it starts by cutting the list.

We will not

Put a pin somewhere you do not have premises

A second listing at a mate's garage in Albany, a mailbox address, a virtual office, a hot desk you have never sat at. Google's guidelines are explicit: a PO box or a remote mailbox is not acceptable, a rented mailing address you do not operate from is not eligible, and a co-working space needs signage, staff and customers during opening hours.

Why it matters more than it looks: the penalty is the listing, and the listing is where the reviews live. Years of reviews are the one asset on this page that cannot be re-bought at any price, and risking them for a second pin is a bad trade at any odds.

We will not

Put a suburb in your business name

This is the awkward one, because it does appear to help and half your competitors have done it. Google does not permit unnecessary information in a business name, and says it can cost a profile its listing. The name on the profile is meant to be the name on the van, the invoices and the sign, and nothing else.

The exception that is not one: if the suburb is genuinely part of your registered trading name and always has been, it is your name and it stays. Adding one because it seems to work is a different act, and it is the kind of thing that gets noticed by a competitor rather than by an algorithm.

All four of those are published rules rather than our opinion, and they are worth reading yourself before you take advice from anybody, us included — Google's guidelines for representing a business and its page on improving local ranking are both public and both short. What the $395 profile setup actually involves is set out field by field, including the service areas, and it is the same nine fields whether we do it or you do.

04 / CHOOSING THE TWO OR THREE

How to decide which
areas are worth a page,
in the order that
keeps you honest.

The instinct is to start with a list of everywhere you would like to work and write something about each. That is the version that fails, and it fails for a reason worth understanding: a page about a place you barely go cannot contain anything true that a competitor could not also write. So the order below starts by taking places off the list, and the writing does not begin until step four.

  1. Step 1

    Start from the invoices, not from the map

    Twenty jobs, twenty suburbs, written down in the order they happened. This takes ten minutes and it is the only part of the exercise nobody can do for you. What comes out is usually two or three names carrying most of the work and a scatter of one-offs behind them.

  2. Step 2

    Cross off the places you would rather not go

    The far side of the bridge on a Friday. The forty minutes each way for a job worth ninety dollars. Be honest about it, because an area page works and the enquiries arrive, and an enquiry you did not want is worse than no enquiry at all. Half the value of getting this right is the calls it stops.

  3. Step 3

    Rank what is left by what you could say about it

    Not by size and not by how much you would like the work. By whether you could fill a page with things that are true of working there — the housing stock, the access, the parking, the jobs that keep coming up, the photographs you already have. If you cannot get past two sentences, it is not ready to be a page.

  4. Step 4

    Write the top one properly, and only that one

    One area, written the way you would explain it to a new apprentice, with your own photographs from work you have done nearby and your travel and callout terms stated plainly. It should be obvious to a reader that you have been there. Then stop, and leave the rest of the list alone for a while.

  5. Step 5

    Make the profile agree with the page

    Set the service areas on the Google profile to the places you have just committed to, rather than to everywhere. The site and the listing saying different things is a common and entirely avoidable muddle, and this is the step that costs nothing and gets skipped most often.

  6. Step 6

    Link it to the job it belongs under

    An area page hanging off the bottom of a site with nothing pointing at it is stranded. It belongs linked from the service page it relates to, in a sentence rather than a menu. Then wait a few months, see what the enquiries look like, and only then decide whether to write the second one.

  7. All forty

    Everywhere at once, written in an afternoon

    The failure mode this whole section exists to prevent. Forty pages produced by swapping a name, none of them containing a fact a competitor could not have written, and a set that has to be corrected in forty places the first time a price changes. It is the cheapest thing to produce here and the only approach on this page we would refuse outright.

05 / OURS

What we would do,
in the order we
would do it,
and what it costs.

Most people reading this page need the second row and nothing else, and we would tell you that on the phone. The rest is here because the question of which areas to write about only becomes worth paying for once the profile is right and there is a page for each thing you sell.

Telling you where you actually stand

Send us your business name and the three suburbs that matter most to you and we will do check one from each of them and tell you what came back. It takes us twenty minutes and it is not the opening of a sales process. Sometimes the answer is that nothing here is worth spending money on, and that is a real answer rather than a polite one.

Freeand not a foot in the door

Google Business Profile setup

The one most readers of this page need. Claimed, verified and in your name, with the primary category set against what your area actually searches, the service areas chosen rather than guessed, the address hidden if you travel to customers, hours, photos and a review link. Nine fields, one day, and you keep it whether or not you ever build a site with us.

$395one-off

A page for each thing you sell

The work that comes before area pages and matters more. Up to eight pages, a page per service, written around what people in your part of Auckland actually type. This is the tier most people should be looking at, and it is the one that makes an area page worth adding later rather than instead.

$3,450Standard, up to 8 pages

Service pages and area pages together

The only tier that includes suburb pages, because it is the only one where they make sense — service pages and area pages built as one structure, with the local search work, the assistant for twelve months and three months of care included. Worth it when the areas are genuinely different markets rather than different names.

$5,950Lead Engine

Keeping it warm afterwards

Writing that answers what people are searching for, profile posts, replies to reviews, and the area pages kept true as your patch changes. This is the part that decides whether any of the above still works in March, and it is the part most often skipped.

from $249per month

Doing all of it yourself

Everything on this page is yours to do, and most of it is free. The six checks, the invoice exercise, the service areas, the review habit. If you would rather spend the evenings than the money, that is a perfectly good decision and the page was written to be usable that way.

$0the second door, always open

Every figure on this page includes GST and nothing is added at the end. The founding price takes $500 off any website, for the first ten clients, in exchange for three things written into the job: an honest Google review, a testimonial we can use, and permission to publish the build as a case study. It is a trade rather than a discount, and we do not discount off-menu. Full pricing, tier by tier, and how to read anybody's quote.

06 / STRAIGHT UP

The awkward
questions about
our own position.

Most of this page tells me to go and do it myself. It does, and that is deliberate rather than clever. The six checks cost nothing, the invoice exercise cannot be done by anybody but you, and the service areas take twenty minutes in a profile you already own. If you do all of that and never ring us, the page has done what it was written to do. We would rather be the people who told you than the people who charged you for the twenty minutes.

How much difference would two or three area pages actually make? We do not know, and we are not going to put a figure on it. It depends on your trade, your patch, how many people are already doing what you do there and what your reviews look like, and we have no way to know any of that in advance. What we can say is what the people who do this for a living consistently report: a page for each thing you sell is the single change with the clearest effect, and area pages come after it rather than instead of it.

Have you done this for anybody in Auckland? No. Skyward is new and has no clients yet, so nothing on this page is a story about somebody we helped — it is Google's published guidance, ordinary reasoning from it, and the way the decision actually gets made. We would rather tell you that than imply a decade of local campaigns we have not run. The first ten clients get $500 off for helping us fix the not-having-any problem, in exchange for a review, a testimonial and permission to publish the build.

Then why should I take this seriously? Judge it on whether it is checkable. Every claim about Google on this page is on Google's own help pages and you can read them in ten minutes. Every claim about your own business is something you can verify from your own invoices tonight. There is nothing on this page you have to take our word for, which is the only kind of argument a studio with no track record has any business making.

07 / QUESTIONS

Six we get asked
about this.

The general ones — payment, what we need from you, what happens if you say no — are answered at length on the homepage. These are the ones about being found in a particular part of a particular city.

I am first when I search. Why would I change anything?

Because you searched from your own address, which is the one place you were always going to do well. Try it from a job on the other side of the city, in a private window, and see whether the answer is the same. If it is, you are in good shape and there is genuinely nothing to buy here.

If it is not, the useful question is whether the suburbs where you do worse are ones you actually want work in. Sometimes they are not, and the honest answer is to leave it alone.

Should I just list every Auckland suburb as a service area?

You cannot — the limit is twenty — and even if you could it would not help. A service area tells Google where you are willing to go; it does not move you closer to anybody. The list is worth choosing carefully because it is what stops enquiries from the far side of the city as much as what starts them.

The version that does work is the ordinary one: name the places you genuinely take work in, make the website say the same thing, and leave the rest off.

My competitor has the suburb in his business name. Should I?

No, and section 03 sets out why at more length. Unnecessary information in a business name is against Google's published guidelines and can cost a profile its listing, which takes the reviews with it. If the suburb is genuinely part of your trading name and has been for years, that is your name and there is nothing to discuss.

Whether anything happens to your competitor is not something we can predict, and it is not a reason to take the same risk with years of your own reviews.

I work from home. Do I have to show my address?

No. If customers do not come to you, Google's guidance is that the address should be hidden and your service areas shown instead. That is the normal setting for trades and mobile services and it is the right one for almost everybody reading this. Your profile still works; the street address simply is not published.

It is worth checking rather than assuming, because a profile set up quickly often still has a home address showing, and that is the sort of thing you would rather find yourself.

How long before an area page does anything?

We do not know and nobody honestly does. It depends on the page, the patch, the competition and a dozen things none of us control. What we would say is to write one, link it properly, leave it alone for a few months and judge it on the enquiries rather than on a report — and to expect the profile and the reviews to be doing more of the work than the page is.

Anybody giving you a timeframe for a position is guessing with your money. We say the same thing about rankings everywhere else on this site.

I am not in Auckland. Is any of this useful?

All of it except the geography. The three factors, the twenty service areas, the two-hour boundary, the business-name rule and the invoice exercise work the same in Hamilton, Whangārei or Invercargill. Only the bridge and the seventy kilometres are ours.

We build for businesses anywhere in New Zealand and it is all done by phone, text and email, so where you are makes no difference to the work or the price. The coverage section on the homepage says the same thing in fewer words.

ALSO WRITTEN

Three places to
go from here.

One if the profile is the thing that needs sorting, one if you are not certain the profile is even in your name, and one if the real question is what a site would cost.

$395

The nine fields, and what each one does.

The listing that carries the pin, the service areas and the reviews. What gets set, in what order, what it does not buy, and why it is the first thing we would do for anybody.

 Whose is it

Five accounts, and who tends to hold each one.

The profile you have just been asked to open is one of them, and it is regularly under somebody else's account. Six checks you can do tonight without asking anybody.

 The number

What a website costs, and how to read a quote.

Two honest quotes can be four thousand dollars apart. The ten decisions that move the number, and eight questions to put to anybody who sends you one.
08 / START

Tell us three suburbs.
We will search from
each of them and
tell you what we see.

Not a report and not a proposal. We do check one from the three places you name, write down what came back, and send it to you — including, where it is the truth, that you are already doing fine in all three and there is nothing here worth your money. It takes us about twenty minutes and it costs nothing.

Phone or text022 584 0585 Emailjosh@skywarddigital.co.nz The five Auckland regionsOn the homepage

Josh reads these himself. There is no salesperson, no sequence of emails afterwards, and asking a question does not put you on a list.

We use these details only to reply to your enquiry and, if you go ahead, to run the job. We don't sell them, we don't add you to a mailing list, and you can ask us to delete them any time by emailing Josh. No spam, no obligation, no sales sequence. The full privacy statement says who else handles them and for how long.