A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Kaimoana Cloud · Farm management SaaS · Hamilton
Near-identical Australian and New Zealand sites swapped places in each country's results, so farmers often landed on the wrong pricing and regulations.
Headline figure · 7 months
−88%
Wrong-country landings -88%
NThe challenge
Near-identical Australian and New Zealand sites swapped places in each country's results, so farmers often landed on the wrong pricing and regulations.
Kaimoana Cloud sells herd, paddock and compliance software to farms on both sides of the Tasman. It ran two sites, kaimoana.com.au and kaimoana.co.nz, built from the same templates with nearly the same copy. To Google they looked like one site published twice. So it picked one page per topic, and the pick kept changing from week to week.
An Australian beef farmer searching for NLIS compliance software would land on New Zealand pricing and a NAIT guide that doesn't apply to them, then leave. Trials fell in both countries, support spent hours sorting out the wrong currency, and neither site built up steady rankings.
The wrong country's page ranked in 7 of 12 weeks.
EThe survey · audit findings
We crawled both ccTLDs together, read 90 days of server logs and compared every pair of equivalent pages. The grid references match the sheet above.
No hreflang on 4,180 equivalent URL pairs. Google read .com.au and .co.nz as duplicates and kept one page per cluster, often the wrong country's.
612 New Zealand pages carried a canonical tag pointing at their Australian twin, which told Google to show the AU page to NZ farmers.
/pricing used a geo-IP redirect. Googlebot crawls mostly from the US, so it only ever saw AUD prices and never indexed the NZD page.
NLIS (AU) and NAIT (NZ) traceability copy shared one template behind a JavaScript toggle, so the country-specific rules never reached the rendered HTML.
94% text similarity between equivalent pages: same headings, same examples, only the currency symbol changed.
Mobile LCP of 4.6 s on AU pricing (map tiles fetched from an Auckland origin) and INP of 380 ms on the trial form.
One combined sitemap listed both domains: 2,300 entries returned 404s, redirect chains or URLs on the other ccTLD.
Region filter facets spawned about 19,000 parameter URLs, using up crawl budget on pages nobody searches for.
Crawl errors at baseline · 2,300
SThe route · strategy
The plan is built on Signal, our technical seo plan. We didn't merge the sites or add new content. The job was to tell search engines which country each page is for, and to make that true on the page.
Bearing 045°
Fence the two countries so each one knows which page it owns.
Bearing 135°
Subdivide the shared paddocks into country-specific ones.
Bearing 225°
Clear the track so mobile users on rural connections get through.
Bearing 315°
Give each country an accurate map of the land it actually holds.
kaimoana.co.nz › pricing
Pricing | Kaimoana Cloud NZ: farm software from NZ$49
NAIT-ready animal records, Freshwater Farm Plan tools and paddock maps for New Zealand farms…
kaimoana.com.au › pricing
Farm Management Software Pricing (AUD) | Kaimoana Cloud
From A$45 a month. NLIS-ready livestock records, grazing planner and paddock maps for Australian farms…
↗The traverse · 7 months
Month 1
Crawled both domains and read 90 days of server logs. Mapped 1,410 duplicate clusters and flagged which country's page won each one.
Month 2
Shipped hreflang in the sitemaps, removed the cross-domain canonicals and turned off the geo-IP redirect on /pricing.
Month 3
Moved the NLIS and NAIT guides onto their own URLs and set up 301s. Pricing now renders per country on the server.
Month 4
Core Web Vitals sprint: regional tile edges, a deferred chat widget and a lighter trial form. Mobile LCP is under 2.5 s.
Month 5
Rewrote the top 140 templates for each market: local regulations, local examples and local farm systems.
Month 6
Rebuilt the sitemap indexes, handled the facet parameters and fixed redirect chains. Crawl errors fell below 100.
Month 7
Added wrong-country landing alerts, a review of each Search Console property and a runbook for new pages.
WThe yield · results
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Wrong-country landings
−88%
From 31% of organic landings to 3.7%, measured as organic sessions that started on the other country's site.
Organic trials (AU)
+114%
Before · after
Organic trials (NZ)
+46%
Before · after
Crawl errors
2,300 → 40
Before · after (log scale)
Organic trials per month, by market
Drag the survey date. Dashed hills belong to the wrong country's site. Once the fence is half built, each peak goes back to its own domain and its contours close in as the ranking climbs.
Ten tracked queries, with the position and the domain that held it before the work and after month 7.
| Query | Mkt | Vol / mo | Before | After |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| farm management software | AU | 2,900 | #14 wrong site (.co.nz) | #3+11 |
| paddock mapping app | AU | 880 | #9 wrong site (.co.nz) | #2+7 |
| livestock records software australia | AU | 720 | #22 own site | #4+18 |
| NLIS compliance software | AU | 590 | #31 wrong site (.co.nz) | #5+26 |
| grazing planner app | AU | 480 | #11 wrong site (.co.nz) | #3+8 |
| farm management software nz | NZ | 1,300 | #6 wrong site (.com.au) | #1+5 |
| NAIT recording app | NZ | 390 | #12 wrong site (.com.au) | #2+10 |
| paddock rotation planner | NZ | 320 | #8 wrong site (.com.au) | #2+6 |
| freshwater farm plan software | NZ | 260 | #27 own site | #4+23 |
| dairy farm software nz | NZ | 590 | #9 wrong site (.com.au) | #3+6 |
Your next survey
Running more than one country, language or domain? Signal starts with the same survey: crawl, logs, hreflang pairs and a fence line drawn where it belongs.
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