Search audit

Weekly report: 2026-10-09 · Google data: 2026-09-15 → 2026-10-12 · Past reports · Practitioner reviews
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This week

Nothing from the list shipped this week, so the back pain, neck pain and headache titles (#43) are still the quickest win.

Google's numbers (to 2 Oct) show early movement: all five new blog posts now appear in Google, the sciatica page improved from position 33 to 23, and the sports injury page reached 7.9 for “sports injury treatment”. Clicks from people not searching for Meridian by name held steady at 142 (143 before).

The estimated ranks this week aren't usable. The search tool returned mostly directories and overseas sites for every search, and competitors' clinic sites disappeared too, so Meridian's absence isn't a real loss.

    Your Google results

    Recommendations

    Each one says who needs to act, how sure we are it will help, and — once Google is connected — what your own search data shows.

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    Estimated rankings

    A weekly spot-check of important searches using Claude's web search. These are estimates: they aren't what someone in Christchurch sees on Google, and they don't include the Google Maps listings. When Google is connected, trust Your Google results first. Searches marked “Always checked” are never dropped from the list. Last checked 2026-10-09.

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    Background & history

    Detailed notes from the latest weekly report

    Google data (Search Console, 28 days to 2 Oct vs the 28 days before): 257 clicks (272 before) from 4,347 appearances in Google (4,528). Clicks from people not searching for Meridian by name: 142 (143). 30 searches show Meridian on Google's first page, up from 25. The homepage's average position slipped from 6.5 to 12.8, mostly because it now appears for broad searches such as “osteopath” and “acupuncture”; “osteopath christchurch” is at 8.0 (193 appearances, 5 clicks). The sports injury page is at 7.9 for “sports injury treatment” (167 appearances) but still has no clicks. The sciatica page improved from 32.8 to 23.4 overall and is 4.3 for “sciatica treatment christchurch”. All five blog posts now show up; the pregnancy acupuncture post averages 8.4 (18 appearances).

    Estimated ranks (a US-based web search, not what someone in Christchurch sees): 30 searches checked, including all 8 core ones. Meridian didn't appear in any of them, but neither did Better Health, Cashmere Osteo or most other clinic websites that led these searches last week. The results were mostly directories (Healthpoint, Yellow, Fresha), Ara's teaching clinic, and overseas health sites. That points to a change in the search tool, not a real drop, so last week's estimated wins (sports injury #1–#4, pregnancy back pain #1) can't be confirmed or ruled out this week. Search Console is the reliable guide until the tool settles.

    Pool changes: added “sciatica treatment pregnancy” and “lower back pain osteopath” from Google's autocomplete. Dropped “chinese herbal medicine christchurch” (covered by “herbal medicine christchurch”) and “post concussion osteopath christchurch” (covered by the concussion search). Google's September spam update finished around 4–6 Oct, so the next Search Console window is the first clean read after it. Nothing on the list shipped this week; the only site change was Kaylee's new profile photo.

    Already done (55)
    • llms.txt and llms-full.txt auto-generated from site data
    • Explicit AI-crawler allow-list in robots.txt (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot-Extended, CCBot, anthropic-ai)
    • MedicalClinic + MedicalBusiness JSON-LD in base template with address, hours, priceRange, offer catalog
    • FAQPage JSON-LD on the homepage
    • Canonical URLs, OpenGraph, Twitter Card tags on every page
    • Auto-generated sitemap with lastmod
    • AggregateRating + Review schema (ratingValue 4.9, reviewCount 65, three real testimonials) nested under MedicalBusiness
    • Physician JSON-LD per team profile with sameAs to professional registers and visible 'Registered with …' block
    • Per-service MedicalTherapy / Service schema with provider, areaServed, hasOfferCatalog of specialties, and mainEntityOfPage
    • FAQPage JSON-LD on every service page (driven by faq arrays in services.json)
    • BreadcrumbList JSON-LD + visible breadcrumb strip on non-home pages
    • Visible 'Last updated' block on service and team pages, with dateModified in WebPage schema
    • sameAs block on clinic JSON-LD (Google Business Profile etc.)
    • Expanded llms.txt — Conditions-treated, Pricing-&-ACC, Common-questions sections
    • Homepage H1 reframed to 'Osteopathy, Acupuncture & Herbal Medicine in Christchurch'; practitioners section demoted to H2
    • /conditions/sciatica/, /conditions/headaches-migraines/, /conditions/pregnancy-back-pain/, /conditions/sports-injury-recovery/ — four condition Q→A pages with MedicalCondition + FAQPage schema, plus a What We Treat nav dropdown
    • ProfilePage + MedicalWebPage @graph schema on every team profile (alongside the Physician node), so each practitioner URL is its own retrievable AI-search entity
    • Hero subtitle and practitioners intro reframed to evidence-informed language (no longer says "holistic"); each line is now distinct rather than restating the H1
    • "Serving Hillmorton, Halswell, Hoon Hay, Cashmere, Addington, Riccarton, Sydenham, Wigram & surrounding Christchurch suburbs" — site-wide footer block + extended llms.txt Area-served line
    • Treats: chips on every team profile (in a What I Treat card), with Nina's row carrying a clickable pink-tinted pill linking to the new fertility page
    • /services/acupuncture/fertility/ sub-page — MedicalTherapy schema linking to the parent acupuncture #service, FAQPage on IVF timing / ACC status / Nina's credentials, hero + 3 specialty images
    • Site-wide sweep removing 'GP referral' from patient-facing copy (per the CLAUDE.md copy rule); condition CTA banners simplified to heading + booking button only
    • Google Business Profile services audit completed manually (item #21) — owner added Osteopathy, Medical acupuncture, Dry needling, Neck pain treatment, Headache & migraine treatment, Sports injury treatment, Pregnancy back pain, Paediatric osteopathy, Herbal medicine to GBP service list
    • /conditions/neck-pain/ — Q→A page with MedicalCondition + FAQPage schema, mirroring the four item-#10 pages; covers acute vs chronic, when to seek urgent care, ACC eligibility, links back to the osteopathy service (item #22, PR #63)
    • /conditions/back-pain/ — Q→A page with MedicalCondition + FAQPage schema; covers acute vs chronic, sciatica overlap, when to seek urgent care, ACC eligibility, links to /conditions/sciatica/ and the osteopathy service (item #23, PR #64)
    • + the same for /llms-full.txt added in the HTML head — signals AI crawlers that a Markdown summary exists alongside the HTML (item #26, PR #62)
    • Physician schema upgraded to Schema.org v30 IndividualPhysician on every team profile, with practicesAt: { @id: '#clinic' } linking each practitioner to the MedicalClinic node — sharpens entity disambiguation for ChatGPT / Perplexity / AI Overviews (item #27, PR #65)
    • Image alt text rewritten descriptive-not-titular across team profiles (team-profile.njk now uses member.photoAlt with name fallback), condition pages, and service pages — each now describes what's visible plus relevant clinical context. Closes G14 (item #28, PR #70 / bundled in #71)
    • Hillmorton + Wigram + Addington + Halswell + Cashmere now appear in flowing intro copy on every service page in services.json (osteopathy, acupuncture, herbal medicine), not just the site-wide footer line. Closes G22 (item #29, PR #68 / bundled in #71)
    • 'Conditions we commonly treat' block added to the osteopathy service page linking all six condition pages (back-pain, neck-pain, sciatica, headaches-migraines, pregnancy-back-pain, sports-injury-recovery), plus a matching 'Common conditions we treat' section on the homepage with high-intent button links — gives the condition pages an internal-link surface beyond the nav dropdown so Google can pass relevance signals to them. Closes G23 (item #30, PR #69 / bundled in #71)
    • /book/ page made AI-citable — added ReserveAction schema and visible intro content so ChatGPT / Perplexity / Gemini can recommend it as a booking action, not just an interstitial. Especially relevant after Perplexity Health launched 2026-03-19 with EHR integration, since AI assistants are increasingly handling the appointment-booking step (PR #72)
    • Explicit www → apex 301 redirects added in netlify.toml — Google now consolidates link equity onto the canonical meridianosteopathy.co.nz apex domain rather than splitting it between www and apex variants (PR #73)
    • /services/medical-acupuncture/ renamed to 'Acupuncture & Dry Needling' across nav, homepage card, JSON-LD, breadcrumbs and inter-service cards; Min Jin positioned as TCM lead and Nina Hu as Western medical acupuncture / dry needling lead; new FAQ entries on acupuncture-vs-dry-needling, which practitioner to book, and what to expect at a first dry-needling session. Implementation diverged from the original spec (which had been a separate /services/acupuncture/dry-needling/ sub-page) — the rename achieves the same G16 goal of one indexable URL targeting Western dry-needling intent, without splitting authority across two pages. Closes G16 (item #17, PR #78)
    • Every condition page (back-pain, neck-pain, sciatica, headaches-migraines, pregnancy-back-pain, sports-injury-recovery) and every service page (osteopathy, acupuncture, herbal-medicine) now opens with a 40–60 word citation-ready direct answer in the 'X treatment at Meridian Osteopathy in Christchurch …' format, followed by the existing evidence-informed prose as the second paragraph onward. The answer-leading sentence also becomes the first sentence of the MedicalCondition / Service JSON-LD description field, so it propagates to AI-citation crawlers. Closes G24 (item #31, PR #77)
    • Per-practitioner booking pages added — each practitioner now has their own /book// URL with Cliniko pre-targeted to their calendar (no more landing on the generic 'select a practitioner' page after a homepage card click); homepage practitioner cards repointed at the matching per-practitioner /book/ page. Reduces clicks from 'pick a practitioner' to 'pick a time' from 3 to 1 (PRs #80, #81)
    • Min Jin's ACC eligibility correctly distinguished from Nina Hu's across acupuncture pages and per-practitioner booking pages — Nina is an ACC-registered osteopath who lodges claims in clinic and integrates dry needling within ACC-subsidised consultations; Min is registered to treat as an ACC acupuncture provider but does not lodge new claims herself. Wording on /book/min-jin/ adjusted accordingly (PR #82)
    • Kaylee Frost team photo updated, colour-corrected, and optimised across multiple iterations (PRs #86, #88, #90, #93)
    • /admin Decap CMS coverage gaps filled — all editable content blocks on the live site now have corresponding CMS controls so the clinic can self-serve copy updates without code changes (PR #91)
    • Claude-SearchBot + Claude-Web added as explicit allow lines in src/robots.txt alongside the existing ClaudeBot / anthropic-ai entries — safeguards Claude.ai live-retrieval citation traffic against any future Disallow line we add. Item #33, PR #96 (2026-06-03)
    • Structured 5–7 item list blocks added to every condition page (back-pain, neck-pain, sciatica, headaches-migraines, pregnancy-back-pain, sports-injury-recovery) — three
        sections under their own H2s per page ('Common signs', 'When to see an osteopath', 'What to expect at your first appointment'), sourced from a new `lists` array on each condition in conditions.json so future edits stay in data not markup. Search Engine Land's May 2026 analysis of 25k AI-cited URLs found list-formatted pages cited at materially higher rates than equivalent prose. Item #34, PR #97 (2026-06-03)
      • Min Jin's profile and the Acupuncture service page restructured: Min now titled 'Acupuncturist & Massage Therapist' site-wide; qualifications reformatted to a bulleted list; About Me trimmed; special interests refocused on women's health (PCOS, endometriosis, dysmenorrhoea) and post-cancer supportive care (nausea & vomiting, fatigue, chronic pain, peripheral neuropathy); What I Treat refreshed; Acupuncture page reflects Min's new focus + massage-therapist role; broken practitioner links fixed in llms.txt / llms-full.txt with flattened qualifications and an enriched meta/OG description (PR #98, 2026-06-05)
      • Jonathan Grice promoted to Senior Osteopath & Low Level Laser Therapist site-wide — title updated in team.json, homepage cards, Physician JSON-LD and /book/jonathan/; homepage practitioner order reshuffled to Maddison → Kaylee → Jonathan → Nina → Min (PR #103, 2026-06-23)
      • IPP3A indirect-collection privacy notices added — new section 3 of privacy.njk covering all six required notification elements (what / why / recipients / clinic identity / legal basis / access rights) per the Privacy Act 2020's IPP3A (in force 2026-05-01); submit-referral.js now emails an IPP3A notice to referred patients; docs/ipp3a-compliance.md captures the clinic-side checklist and Cliniko/verbal templates for indirect collection outside the website (PR #104, 2026-06-24)
      • Min Jin profile content refreshed at her request (PR #105)
      • Monthly Practitioner Spotlight infrastructure added — homepage spotlight section, team-card ribbon, profile hero badge and highlighted 'What I Treat' pill, all driven by src/_data/spotlight.json and editable in the CMS under Homepage → Practitioner Spotlight. First cadenced fresh-content surface the site has ever had; June spotlight = Maddison. Partial address for #14 (blog) — gives us a monthly editorial cadence without a full blog collection (PR #108, 2026-07-11)
      • Maddison's qualifications reformatted as a bullet list (PR #109, 2026-07-13)
      • ACC copy rewritten site-wide from 'we lodge claims for you' to 'ACC-registered provider' framing after Google Ads disapproved the clinic under the 'Government documents and official services' policy (ACC is a Crown entity; Google's classifier read facilitation language as paid-intermediary status). Explicit non-affiliation line + acc.co.nz link added on the two ads-target service pages and in the ACC FAQ / llms.txt. ACC-registered status, pricing labels, meta descriptions, footer badge and privacy.njk untouched (factual status claims and required disclosures respectively). Changes the angle item #25 (/acc/ landing page) needs to take — the page should describe provider status and patient benefit, not the mechanics of claim filing (PR #113, 2026-07-29)
      • CLAUDE.md copy-rule violations swept out: 'at no extra charge' removed in three places (Nina's approach + two appointment-type descriptions), reworded to describe the session itself; five 'GP' → 'doctor' fixes in clinically legitimate contexts (red-flag escalation advice + coordinating with a patient's existing care) — 'doctor' carries the same clinical meaning without suggesting gated access (PR #114, 2026-07-29)
      • Cliniko booking funnel tracked as GA4 conversions with real booking_completed events (not click proxies) — the widget's cross-origin iframe broadcasts step transitions (cliniko-bookings-page:schedule / :patient / :confirmed) which we now listen for; drop-off between steps is visible rather than inferred; duplicate inline handler across book.njk + book-practitioner.njk consolidated into src/js/cliniko-booking.js. Pairs with item #35 (GSC Gen AI report) for end-to-end AI-surface → booking attribution once GSC has data (PR #116, 2026-07-29)
      • Referral form now reports why a submission failed (per-field validation errors surface to the user rather than a generic 'submission failed' message) — reduces silent-drop-off from would-be referrers who type a phone number in an unexpected format or leave a required field blank (PR #121, 2026-08-19). Not a backlog item — a UX fix to existing form infrastructure.
      • Blog launched at /blog/ with five pregnancy and baby posts (pregnancy osteopathy, pregnancy acupuncture, labour preparation acupuncture, postnatal recovery, baby osteopathy), a post layout with author and dates, and a Decap CMS collection (item #14, PR #124, 2026-09-28)
      • /conditions/postpartum-recovery/ condition page, linked from the pregnancy back pain page (item #36, PR #124, 2026-09-28)
      • Sports injury page Google title and description rewritten to lead with “Sports Injury Treatment in Christchurch” (item #40, PR #129, 2026-09-25)
      • Sciatica page Google title set to “Sciatica Treatment in Christchurch”, main heading “Sciatica treatment”, plus “sciatica treatment” links from the back pain page and homepage (item #41, PRs #130 and #133)
      • Acupuncture page Google title leads with “Acupuncture & Dry Needling in Christchurch”, shorter description, homepage links using “acupuncture in Christchurch” and “dry needling” (item #42, PR #131, 2026-09-26)
    Known gaps (3)

    G7. No ACC landing page

    Meridian still has no /acc/ page. Better Health's ACC page was estimated #1 for “osteopath acc christchurch” last week, ahead of Active Health. Item #25 covers it, using the “ACC-registered provider” wording from July (PR #113).

    G8. Blog started; needs regular posts

    The blog launched on 28 Sep with five pregnancy and baby posts, and all five already appear in Google (the best at about position 8). Competitors such as Better Health and osteopath-christchurch.com rank with one page per topic, so the gap is now keeping posts coming on topics people already search for. Item #45 suggests the next one.

    G15. No off-site citation strategy

    Reddit is a major AI-citation source but the platform mix shifted sharply in the Jul-Aug window. UNCHANGED 2026-09-18: no material movement in the Reddit-Perplexity litigation / licensing situation since 31 Jul motion-to-dismiss rejection. Between Jul 1 and Aug 19, 2026, Perplexity supplied 71% of tracked Reddit citations while ChatGPT supplied 23%; ChatGPT Search citations linking to Reddit fell from ~250/day in early Aug to 16/day the week after Aug 14 — a -94% decline in six days. Reddit's Perplexity share is now ~24%, Gemini 0.1%. Item #15 stays on the backlog scoped to Perplexity-visibility only (larger share, smaller more curated source pool means single well-structured posts can surface); skip the ChatGPT-oriented seeding. 90/10 rule still applies: 90% non-promotional, 2–4 weeks of karma-building before any mention of Meridian.