Pink Bins and Team Empathy have been at this together for a long time: the backlink log starts in August 2021 and the full engagement kicked off with the September 2022 foundations build. Here's the arc in one view.
Every number on this page traces to a named source: Search Console and GA4 pulled 2 September 2026, your SEO Work sheet, our monthly reports, and Ahrefs. The +411% figure is from the published case study at teamempathy.co.nz/work/pink-bins.
In July 2025 the site's average Google ranking position was 19.5. By July 2026 it was 10.7, and it has held in single digits to low teens for eleven straight months, through a delivery pause, two Google core updates in March 2026, and a soft market. Search Console
| Month | Average Google ranking position |
|---|---|
| July 2025 | 19.5 |
| December 2025 | 8.9 |
| July 2026 | 10.7 |
| August 2026 | 11.6 |
At the July report, 27 of your 35 tracked keywords sat in Google's top 3, with ten at number 1, including the terms that pay the bills: skip bin hire auckland, bins for hire auckland, skip bin hire manukau. And the recovery stories show the engine responds when we point it at a problem: portaloo hire went from position 26 in February 2026 to position 2 by April.
Since February 2026, 27 articles have gone through the content refresh programme (23 live, with the last four with Jay for upload at the July report), and the sheet logs what happened to each one:
| Article | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| How Much Recycling Actually Gets Recycled In NZ? | 23 clicks / month (Apr 2026) | 60 clicks / month (May 2026) |
| What is Recycling? | Average position 29.3 (Dec 2025) | Position 6.7 (Mar 2026) |
| Lithium Batteries disposal guide | 0 clicks at position 16.7 (Dec 2025) | 11 clicks / month at position ~7 (Jun 2026) |
| Flexi bags guide | 16 clicks / month | 32 clicks / month |
The blog now carries real commercial weight: 9 of your 15 most-clicked pages on Google are blog and guide pages, answering the price, logistics and disposal questions people actually search. Search Console
When GA4 revenue tracking was last reported in mid-2025, organic search delivered 62 bin orders and $26,301 of tracked revenue in June 2025 (up from $12,604 in May), then $25,014 in July, plus bag sales on top. Set against the monthly fee, organic has been carrying its cost many times over. Monthly reports
Organic clicks have fallen through 2026: from a January peak of 4,855 to 2,074 in August. The data makes one thing very clear: your rankings did not fall. Average position improved or held the entire way down. What fell was the number of searches (impressions down about a quarter on last year) and the share of searchers who click anything at all.
Three forces are doing that, and naming them matters because each has a different answer:
| Force | Evidence | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| A soft market | Category demand (impressions) down ~24% year on year; you've told us yourself how tough the market and the price competition has been | Hold rankings so you win a bigger share when demand returns (that part is working) |
| AI answers absorbing clicks | AI Overviews now appear on 9 of your 35 tracked search results pages; people get answers without clicking | Be the brand the AI answer cites, which is exactly the work programme below |
| The 2025 pause | SEO and link work paused July to December 2025; the momentum cost showed up with a lag | The relight engine has been rebuilding since December, and article-level results show it responding |
Meanwhile the demand is being bought instead: in August, paid channels drove over 10,800 sessions against 2,391 from organic. Paid is covering ground that organic, at your ranking strength, can win back at much better economics.
Pink Bins is unusually well positioned for AI search for a local services business. AI crawlers are fully welcomed on your site, the schema foundations we built are genuinely good, and you're already being cited: we've verified Pink Bins appearing across Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini, and your own agency partner independently tested prompts and screenshotted the same. AI assistants sent 368 visits over the last 16 months. Small, real, and now measured for the first time: it's the channel where the next four years get won.
The work sitting on the table, roughly in order of impact:
| Move | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Suburb service pages | There are no suburb pages at all today; "skip bin hire [suburb]" searches and AI answers have nothing local to cite |
| Money terms just off the top | skip bin hire auckland (position ~6), skip bin hire (~6), skip bins auckland (~9): thousands of impressions each, one push from the top 3 |
| A curated llms.txt | The current auto-generated file shows AI crawlers 4 pages of a 170-post site; a curated one hands them your best answers |
| Schema and sitemap cleanup | Product schema on the money pages needs repair, and ~400 junk URLs in the sitemap dilute what crawlers see |
| More content, not more links | We're winding down monthly link building across our client base: the evidence says content now moves the needle harder. You'll get extra article refreshes and new answer content in its place, at no change to your plan |