Team Empathy  ·  Roman Blinds Direct

A search story
starting from scratch.

Where you begin, what is already built, and the six months ahead
Sources: Ahrefs · SEMrush · Google Search Console · our research and delivery records  ·  Assembled 7 September 2026  ·  This page is your reporting home now, with a new tab each month from kickoff

Where you begin, honestly

Most businesses come to us with a search problem. You come to us with something rarer: a search story that has not started yet. Across the whole of August, Google Search Console recorded 1 click for the site. That is not a business in decline, it is a website search has not met, and it means every month from here gets measured up from an honest zero, on this page, where you can watch it happen.

1
Click from Google search in all of August 2026 (Search Console, read 2 September)
DR 8
Domain authority today, with 525 referring domains (Ahrefs, 7 September)
~407
Estimated monthly organic visits across 591 keywords (SEMrush, 7 September)
5,400
Monthly NZ searches for "blinds" alone, a demand pool nobody has claimed for you yet

The new website is the moment this changes. Your new site is nearly ready, and the work below is designed around its launch, so the day it goes live it starts earning the search history the old one never built.

What is already built

The engagement does not start cold. The sprint work through August finished the strategy layer, and it was built properly:

AssetWhat it is
490 approved keywordsTriangulated across three data sources (Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush), tiered by priority: 371 Tier 1, 51 Tier 2, 68 Tier 3.
113 AI-search promptsThe questions people ask ChatGPT and Google's AI about blinds and curtains, organised into 9 clusters, 70% of them top-of-funnel research questions.
The strategy workbookTen tabs mapping every keyword and prompt to a page on the new site: open it here.
Your FAQ bankThe question-and-answer content for the new site, with Arlen's corrections folded in: open it here.
12-month roadmap + 3 pillar articlesDelivered and approved during the sprint.

The opportunity, specifically

The biggest single finding in the research: "blinds" is searched 5,400 times a month in New Zealand and you have no page for it to land on. The same pattern repeats down the keyword set. The demand is real, measured three ways, and largely unclaimed.

The AI layer is even more open. When people ask AI assistants the buying questions in your category (roman versus roller, blockout versus thermal, how to measure a window), no New Zealand blinds brand has claimed those answers. The established players hold the transactional searches and have left the explainer and comparison layer, which is where buying decisions actually form, empty. Your 113-prompt library is the map of exactly that territory.

And you have the trust assets AI systems reward: a genuine New Zealand maker with its own Hamilton workroom, free fabric samples, a real person on the 0800 number, and 54 Google reviews where customers name Bernie personally and come back years later to say the blinds have lasted. That story is currently invisible to machines. Making it legible is a large part of the work.

The six months ahead

PhaseWhat happens
First 90 daysFull baseline and AEO scorecard, AI visibility tracking live (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews), technical foundations and schema on the new site, the redirect plan for the cutover (up to 2,000 redirects included), and the content engine starting: 30 to 60 pieces, prioritising what the new site needs to launch strong.
Months 4 to 6Production at pace, up to 30 pieces a month: 100 to 150 pieces across the engagement, spanning product and category refreshes, content refreshes and new answer-focused pages.
ThroughoutThis live report, updated with a dated tab every month from kickoff, so you can open it any day rather than waiting for a monthly PDF. The goal we work toward is AI-Ready at 80/100; content volume governs the timing, so we treat it as a goal rather than a dated promise.

Everything we build, the content workflows, the technical and authority work, and the Notable platform it runs on, transfers to you at the end of the six months. You keep the system.

The engine: Notable. Your content runs on Notable, our own AI search platform, live now. It comes with a dashboard including AI visibility tracking, so you can watch exactly where Roman Blinds Direct shows up in AI answers as the work lands.