Fewer people saw you, and far more of the ones who did came through. Google showed your site 31,961 times in September, down 31.5% on August, yet clicks only eased 7.8%, from 245 to 226. That is because the share of people clicking after seeing you rose from 0.53% to 0.71%. Had that share stayed at August's level, September's impressions would have produced around 169 clicks rather than 226.
In plain terms: Google trimmed how often it put you in front of people, and the appearances that remained were better matched to what those people actually wanted. For a services business that is the healthier of the two numbers to have moving in your favour, because an appearance nobody clicks is worth nothing.
Against the same month last year the picture is clear and green. September 2025 produced 137 clicks from 27,523 appearances. September 2026 produced 226 clicks from 31,961. That is 65.0% more clicks on 16.1% more appearances, so you ended the engagement being both shown more often and chosen more often than a year earlier.
Where the clicks came from matters for how you read all of this. Your homepage, which is mostly people who already know the name Growth Maintenance and are looking you up, earned 37 clicks from 1,185 appearances, a click share of 3.1%. Your two main service pages, which are almost entirely people searching for the job rather than the business, earned a click share of 0.18%. People who know you find you easily. People searching cold for hedge cutting or tree pruning still mostly land on somebody else's page, and that gap is the same one we flagged in August.
One housekeeping note so the tabs read consistently: Google has since restated August slightly upward as its data settled, to 245 clicks and 46,643 appearances, against the 239 and 44,697 shown on the August tab. September is compared against the restated figures.
Two things are missing from this report, and we would rather name them than quietly leave them out.
Window 25 August to 24 September 2026, against the previous window (Google reports these on a rolling basis rather than calendar months).
| Measure | 25 Aug to 24 Sept | 26 Jul to 25 Aug | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profile views | 625 | 586 | +6.7% |
| Direction requests | 41 | 63 | −34.9% |
| Website clicks | 26 | 23 | +13.0% |
| Calls | 7 | 5 | +2 |
625 profile views is 39 more than the previous window, and 521 of those came from Google Search with the other 104 from Maps itself. Calls and website clicks both rose. Direction requests fell by 22, and that is the one to be straight about: it is the single biggest action count on the profile, so a drop there pulls total profile actions down 18.7% even though the other two measures went up. Direction requests move around a lot from one window to the next, so a single month is too short to call it a trend, and the calls and website clicks going the other way are worth weighing against it.
Your profile has been running since 14 April 2024. Across that whole period it has produced 8,404 views, 873 direction requests, 444 website clicks and 150 calls, and it now carries 55 reviews and 427 photos. Google under-reports profile interactions, so treat every one of these counts as a floor. Google Business Profile
We measure your Maps visibility across a grid of 169 points spread over your service area, checking where you rank from each one. This scan was taken on 1 October 2026, so it reads the position you finished September in. The comparison column is the March 2026 baseline, the earliest point in this scan series.
| Service | Points where you rank in the top 3 | March 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| hedge maintenance | 168 | |
| tree removal | 63 | |
| arborist | 45 | |
| garden maintenance | 39 | |
| gardener | 27 | |
| gardening services | 18 |
"Hedge maintenance" is complete coverage. You sit in the top three from every one of the 169 points, up from 168 in March. Five of the six services improved on the March baseline, and across all six your average Maps position came in at 6.7, against 7.6 in March.
"Gardening services" is the one going backwards, from 18 top-three points in March to 10 now, and its average position slipped from 13.3 to 14.2. We flagged it last month and it has kept sliding, so it belongs at the top of the list for anyone picking this up.
One more to be straight about: "arborist" read 68 top-three points on the 2 September scan against 62 on this one, so it has eased off its peak while still sitting well ahead of the March baseline of 45. The same scan also checks whether AI assistants name you. Across the six services, only "hedge maintenance" currently returns Growth Maintenance in an AI answer, in fifth place on Gemini. The other five services and the other assistants checked returned nothing for you. Google Business Profile
The finding we put to you in August held through September, and the September numbers make it sharper.
Two blog posts do more than half your search traffic. "When to trim hedges in NZ" earned 62 clicks and "Complete guide to tree removal in NZ" earned 57, which is 119 of your 226 clicks, or 52.7% of everything, from two pages. Both grew their clicks on August despite being shown less often, so they are genuinely working.
Your service pages have the demand without the ranking. In September alone the hedge cutting page was shown 3,392 times for 6 clicks, and the tree pruning page was shown 2,683 times for 5 clicks. That is 6,075 appearances for 11 clicks. Google knows those pages exist and puts them in front of people searching for exactly what you sell, just not high enough on the page to be clicked. Lifting those two pages is the clearest piece of value left on the site.
One small bright spot worth passing on: your team page went from 3 clicks in August to 14 in September from only 235 appearances, a click share of 6.0%, the highest of your ten best pages. People are checking who you are before they get in touch, and the page is doing its job.
| Page | Clicks | Appearances | Click share |
|---|---|---|---|
| When to trim hedges in NZ (blog) | 62 | 3,274 | 1.89% |
| Complete guide to tree removal in NZ (blog) | 57 | 4,991 | 1.14% |
| Homepage | 37 | 1,185 | 3.12% |
| Team | 14 | 235 | 5.96% |
| Hedge cutting and trimming Auckland (service page) | 6 | 3,392 | 0.18% |
| Tree pruning services Auckland (service page) | 5 | 2,683 | 0.19% |
Your ten best pages carried 209 of the month's 226 clicks between them. Google Search Console
September was the last month of the engagement, so here is the position being handed over, in the order we would want it if we were the ones picking it up.