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E-commerce (photo printing, New Zealand)onlinephotoprinting.co.nzPublished

OnlinePhotoPrinting NZ: a thousand pages, a click-through rate that tripled, and impressions that fell

A print-on-demand store launched into New Zealand with a catalogue of products and hundreds of town-level service pages, and had to find out which of those pages Google would show, click and keep.

Timeline
First Google impressions 17 June 2026; data to 11 October 2026
Stages covered
AccessUnderstandRetrieveConvert
Services
Technical SEOContent strategy

  • 0.51%1.82%

    Google click-through rate · Jul vs Sep 2026

    Source: Search Console, web search

  • 98138

    Google clicks per month · Jul vs Sep 2026

    Source: Search Console, web search

  • 19,3667,584

    Google impressions per month · Jul vs Sep 2026

    Source: Search Console, web search

  • 280311

    Impressions in Google AI features per month · Jul vs Sep 2026

    Source: Search Console, Generative AI features filter

Month by month

The whole series, not just the two ends

Monthly totals summed from the daily exports. The first month starts at the first recorded impression; October 2026 is partial and left out.

Google clicksSearch Console, web search
Google impressionsSearch Console, web search
Impressions in Google AI featuresSearch Console, Generative AI features filter; reported from 18 May 2026
Citations in Bing AI answersBing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance

Context

The property, and what the exports show

The property

OnlinePhotoPrinting.co.nz sells photo prints, canvas, framed prints, photo tiles and personalised gifts across New Zealand. The site is a static build with a product catalogue, a photo editor, offers, and town-level service pages across the country.

What happened

New Zealand supplies 380 of 407 clicks. The queries are local and product-specific: “photo tiles nz”, “print a1 poster near me”, “photo printing feilding”, “photo printing motueka”. The pages that earned clicks split between town pages (Te Anau, Katikati, Cromwell) and specific products (Hahnemühle Photo Rag, kiss-cut stickers).

Approach

Stages this engagement covered

Filled stages are the ones we worked on.

  1. 1Access
  2. 2Understand
  3. 3Trust
  4. 4Retrieve
  5. 5Cite
  6. 6Convert

Give every product and town page a complete entity and offer description, keep the whole catalogue open to search and AI crawlers, and read the first four months honestly: which pages earned clicks, which earned impressions only, and what happened to click-through rate as Google re-sorted them. Stages Access, Understand, Retrieve and Convert.

What we did

Changes, in order of impact

  1. OnlineStore, Offer, OfferCatalog, FAQPage, HowTo and BreadcrumbList structured data on the catalogue, with one organisation entity reused across pages; product snippets earned 22,683 impressions in Search Console's appearance report.
  2. Town-level service pages across New Zealand (Cromwell, Te Anau, Katikati, Feilding, Motueka and many more): at least 1,000 URLs received impressions (the export's row cap) and 319 received at least one click.
  3. A robots.txt that names Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Applebot explicitly, plus llms.txt and ai.txt describing the catalogue, pricing range and policies.
  4. Product pages for specific papers and processes (Hahnemühle Photo Rag, lustre paper, C-type prints) that both rank and appear in AI features.

Results

Before and after, same sources, same window

MetricBeforeAfterWindowSource
Google click-through rate0.51%1.82%Jul vs Sep 2026Search Console, web search
Google clicks per month98138Jul vs Sep 2026Search Console, web search
Google impressions per month19,3667,584Jul vs Sep 2026Search Console, web search
Impressions in Google AI features per month280311Jul vs Sep 2026Search Console, Generative AI features filter

Open questions

What did not work, and what comes next

Not yet working, or not yet known

  • Impressions fell from 19,366 in July to 7,584 in September. Clicks and click-through rate rose, which is consistent with Google dropping low-relevance town-page impressions and keeping the ones that match, but the export does not show impressions by page by month, so this stays a reading rather than a finding.
  • Product snippets earned 76 clicks from 22,683 impressions (0.34%) at an average position of 44.9. Rich-result eligibility without ranking does not produce visits.
  • Clarity's bot count (8,374 bot sessions against 2,488 human ones) means scroll and click metrics are not reported for this site.
  • GA4 recorded no key events, so orders and revenue cannot be tied to search from this export.

What we would do next

  1. Add purchase and add-to-cart key events.
  2. Pull the page-by-date view from the Search Console API to confirm which town pages lost impressions.
  3. Consolidate town pages with impressions but no clicks into regional pages, keeping the ones that already convert (Te Anau, Katikati, Cromwell).

Related services

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