Technical SEO, New Zealand

Hosting distance, CDNs and rural mobile connections

Many New Zealand sites are hosted outside the country, often in Australia, sometimes in the US or Europe. That can work well, but only if pages are cached close to visitors. When they are not, each request crosses the Tasman or the Pacific and back, and uncached pages such as search results, carts, booking forms and account areas feel slow regardless of how light the page is.

I check whether a CDN sits in front of the site and whether it has a point of presence in New Zealand or nearby, which page types it caches and what bypasses the cache. I also look at how quickly the server responds to crawlers, because a slow origin limits how much of a site gets crawled.

The mobile picture matters as much as hosting. Buyers outside Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch may browse on slower connections, and a page that feels fine in the city can struggle in a rural town. Core Web Vitals field data, where your site has enough traffic to report it, shows what real visitors experience; for smaller sites with limited field data, I use lab tests on throttled mobile profiles as a guide and say so. Fixes usually center on image sizing, font loading and removing scripts that do not earn their place. More on that diagnosis sits under Core Web Vitals consulting.

Macrons in fonts, slugs and sitemaps

The New Zealand SEO consulting page covers how to write te reo Māori place names on the page. The technical side is less visible but causes its own problems.

Fonts come first. Some web fonts, or subsets built to keep files small, do not include vowels with macrons. When a page contains ā or ō, the browser borrows the missing letters from a fallback font, so the word looks mismatched, or it waits and then swaps fonts, shifting the layout as the page settles. I test each font used in headings and body text for every macron vowel, in both cases, and recommend a subset that includes them.

URL slugs come second. Many CMS platforms generate slugs from page titles automatically. Some strip macrons to plain letters, some percent-encode them and some behave differently after an update. Problems arise when two versions of the same page resolve, or when redirects, canonicals and sitemaps disagree about which form is correct. I check how your CMS behaves, choose one form with you, make sure the other redirects to it and confirm that sitemaps, canonical tags and internal links all use it.

Search Console and analytics may display percent-encoded URLs in reports, which can make pages look duplicated when they are not. I set up a simple way to read those reports so your team is not misled.

Online stores, catalogs and Xero-linked inventory

New Zealand retailers and wholesalers commonly run Shopify or WooCommerce, with stock and products managed in an inventory app connected to Xero or MYOB, or in a fuller ERP. Each part can add technical issues.

On the storefront, the same product may be reachable through several collection paths, variant parameters may create extra URLs and tag filters can multiply thin pages. Most platforms handle part of this with canonical tags, but themes and apps sometimes override them. I check which URLs are indexed, whether canonicals point where they should and whether filters or sorting create combinations that are crawlable without any search demand.

On the feed side, I look at what happens when products are renamed, superseded or discontinued in the inventory system: whether URLs change, whether old pages redirect and whether out-of-stock items keep useful pages or turn into empty templates.

Product markup then needs to match the visible page. Prices shown to New Zealand consumers are normally GST-inclusive, and your accountant can confirm the right presentation for trade customers. The price, currency, availability and shipping details in markup should agree with the page and with any Merchant Center feed. The ecommerce SEO page covers store structure further, and my ERP work in New Zealand covers the back-office systems behind it.

New Zealand and Australian stores side by side

Businesses selling on both sides of the Tasman often run two Shopify stores, two folders on one domain or a single store with a currency switcher. Whatever the setup, search engines see two sets of very similar English pages, and technical details decide whether each country gets the right one.

The checks I run are specific:

• Each country version has its own URLs, rather than a cookie or switcher changing prices on one address
• Each canonical tag references its own country's page
• Hreflang for en-NZ and en-AU is reciprocal and points only at live, indexable pages
• Product handles stay aligned across stores when items are added or renamed
• The CDN does not cache one country's page and serve it to the other
• No automatic redirect by location stops crawlers from reaching either version

Product markup and feeds must carry NZD on New Zealand pages and AUD on Australian ones, with the correct GST treatment for each market. When these basics are right, strategy questions become the main issue, such as whether the New Zealand version needs different content. The New Zealand international SEO page deals with those, while the Australian technical SEO page looks at the same setup from across the Tasman.

Rebuilds, limited logs and working with a small developer

Many New Zealand sites reach a point where the original agency has moved on, the CMS is out of date and a rebuild on a new platform is planned. Rebuilds are where visibility is most often lost, because URLs change and old pages are not redirected. I record which pages currently bring in traffic and inquiries, map each to its new address, review the new site before launch and check redirects, titles, canonicals and tracking on the day it goes live. The SEO migration page describes the process.

Server logs are often unavailable on shared hosting or hosted site builders, which is common for smaller sites. That is not a barrier. Search Console's crawl stats, page indexing report and URL inspection tool, combined with a full crawl, give enough evidence for most New Zealand sites, and I note where logs would add certainty.

If your site uses a cookie or consent banner, I check how it affects loading and layout. The Privacy Act governs personal information you collect, and visitors from the EU or UK may bring other rules into play; your privacy advisor should confirm what your setup needs.

I work with whoever maintains your site, whether a local agency, a freelancer or an in-house generalist. Instructions are written plainly, calls are scheduled in the New Zealand afternoon and every fix is checked after release. Get in touch to discuss your site.