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. GA4 revenue counts website checkout only; your phone and quote jobs land on top of every dollar figure here.
The terms that pay the bills belong to you. At the July report, 27 of your 35 tracked keywords sat in Google's top 3, with ten at number 1: skip bin hire auckland, bin hire auckland, skip bin hire manukau, bins for hire auckland and the rest of the commercial set. That dominance was built over four years and has now been defended through a delivery pause, two Google core updates and the softest market in years.
And it converts to money. Over the last 12 months, organic search put $353,906 through your website checkout, roughly $29,500 a month against a $1,000 a month plan. Since GA4 revenue tracking went live in July 2023 the organic total is $904,970, which is 80% of everything your website has tracked in revenue. GA4
| Period | Organic revenue tracked (GA4) | Organic purchases |
|---|---|---|
| Since July 2023 (tracking start) | $904,970 | 2,344 |
| Last 12 months (Sep 2025 to Aug 2026) | $353,906 | 883 |
| Of which non-branded (estimated) | ~$263,711 | Method: each month's non-branded share of Search Console clicks applied to that month's organic revenue |
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 7 now, and green waste disposal auckland climbed from 20 a year ago to 6 today. When something slips, we have the levers to pull it back.
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. This matters double in the AI era, because those question-answering pages are exactly what ChatGPT and Google's AI cite. Search Console
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: the rankings machine did not break. Most of the commercial head terms are still top 3, and the whole-site average position is actually far better than a year ago (10 to 12 now vs about 19 last winter, averaged across every search you appear for). 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, and organic still out-earned everything. Paid is covering ground that organic, at your ranking strength, wins 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, and August recorded your first tracked purchase from an AI assistant referral. 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 one push from the top | skip bin hire (position 4), skip bins auckland (5), skip bins (5): high-volume terms sitting just below the top 3 |
| A curated llms.txt | The current auto-generated file shows AI crawlers only a handful of URLs from 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 changing how authority gets built: winding down monthly volume link building (your base of 1,743 links is built) and putting that effort into extra article refreshes and new answer content instead, at no change to your plan |