AC98 Heavy Haulage is an owner-operated transport company, moving machinery and oversized loads out of Napier across Hawke's Bay and beyond. The work speaks for itself and the phone rings on the strength of word of mouth — but online, AC98 was starting from almost nothing: a barely-used Facebook page, no Google Business Profile, and no Instagram. No consistent content, and no time to build any of it while running rigs all day.
For a business whose customers increasingly check Facebook and Google before they call, that gap was quietly costing reach — and handing visibility to bigger, less local competitors.
We took AC98's Get Found work off the owner's plate entirely. First we built the foundations that weren't there — set up the Google Business Profile so AC98 could show up on Google and the map, and launched an Instagram presence to sit alongside Facebook. Then we ran the content engine: every week we planned, wrote, designed and scheduled posts built around what AC98 actually does — real jobs and real rigs (the Kenworth T909, the C16), early-morning haulage, driver culture, and local landmarks people recognise, like the Hawke's Bay Expressway widening project.
We mixed it with genuinely useful, search-friendly education — what actually makes a load "oversized" in NZ, what goes into an oversize permit — and turned five-star customer reviews into posts. 30 posts in the quarter, roughly ten a month, every one human-checked before it went live. AI did the heavy lifting on drafting and design so it stayed fast and affordable; the owner just approved and kept driving.
All of it points somewhere worth landing: the AC98 website we built — fast, hand-coded, and designed to turn a visit into a phone call or a quote request.
The reach wasn't vanity traffic from the other side of the world — it was local. Nearly 70% of the audience was in New Zealand, with Napier the single biggest city, followed by Hastings and Havelock North: exactly the customers AC98 wants moving next to. The top post — "Took the old C16 for a run" — alone pulled 23,200 impressions and nearly 1,000 interactions.
It moved the website too. In the same quarter, social became the second-largest source of traffic to the AC98 site — around 29% of all visits — sitting just behind organic search and ahead of direct. A business that was effectively invisible online now shows up, consistently, in front of the right people.
The growth hasn't stopped at the quarter's edge. By mid-August the Facebook page had passed 1,200 followers — from around 50 when the work began. The consistent presence is flowing through to search too: AC98's website appeared in Google results 771 times in the first 19 days of July — more than double the whole of March (333), and climbing every month in between. When customers search the owner by name, AC98 is the first result on Google. And with organic search now the site's single biggest traffic source, the growth isn't rented from an ad budget — it's owned.
"Our presence on social media has grown a lot, 50 to 1000 followers in the last 2 months!"
— Jade, AC98 Heavy Haulage"Prompt, easy to deal with and nothing is a problem — and always answers the phone."
— Verified customer review of AC98, turned into a post that reached over 1,800 peopleBook an Audit — we'll show you where your customers are looking, and how to show up there. No jargon, no pressure.
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