◈ Hame Lourie

Hi, I’m Hamish (Hame) the SEO / AEO Consultant you should hire.

I’m an independent SEO consultant with 15+ years running SEO as a product discipline inside Trade Me, The Warehouse Group, a Bank and agencies before that — now working directly with site owners on the technical side of search and AI visibility.

I focus on technical SEO and run SEO programmes like a product, not a checklist — roadmaps, measurable outcomes, and working directly with engineering to ship fixes that matter and also that stick.

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Hame Lourie

Hame Lourie

Technical SEO at scale @ hamelourie.com

Wellington, New Zealand

About Hame

I’ve spent the last decade-plus running SEO inside real product organisations — not just auditing from the outside. At Trade Me I owned SEO as a product function through a full platform migration, building the 3–12 month roadmap and working squad-by-squad with engineering to prioritise fixes that actually shipped.

At The Warehouse Group I set a technical SEO strategy and delivered against it for a year before I went out on my own.

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What’s technical SEO / AEO?

Technical SEO is about how your website works behind the scenes — the plumbing that lets search engines and AI tools actually find, read, and understand your pages. Good content doesn’t matter if it can’t be reached in the first place.

Googlebot — crawls everything

Homepage
Guide ✓
FAQ ✓
Blog ✓
Login page ✓
Thin page ✓
JS-heavy page ✓
Product page ✓
Sign up page ✓

Indexes for search rankings — visits nearly every page.

AI crawlers — visit selectively

Homepage
Guide ✓
FAQ ✓
Blog ×
Login page ×
Thin page ×
JS-heavy page ×
Product page ×
Sign up page ×

Scrapes for training and direct AI answers — skips most of your site.

Technical SEO / AEOOther SEO / AEO practices
Crawl access & robots.txt rulesKeyword research & content writing
Site speed & Core Web VitalsLink building & digital PR
Structured data & schema markupBrand mentions & E-E-A-T signals
Mobile rendering & JavaScriptSocial media & distribution
URL structure & internal linkingContent strategy & topic planning
Server & hosting configurationOn-page copywriting

Common issues that quietly block both SEO and AEO

JavaScript rendering

  • Content that only appears after JavaScript runs, with nothing in the page's initial HTML response
  • Client-side routes that return a normal 200 status for a missing page instead of a real 404, so dead pages get indexed anyway
  • Different content loaded behind a URL fragment (like #/products) instead of a real, separate URL

URL structure

  • Filter and sort combinations generating thousands of near-duplicate URLs for the same content
  • Tracking, session, and referral parameters bloating the URL count unnecessarily
  • Non-descriptive URLs (ID numbers instead of readable words) that are harder for crawlers and people to parse

Both affect SEO and AEO equally — and AI crawlers are typically less forgiving of JavaScript-rendered content than Google's own crawler is.

Source: Google Search Central — JavaScript & URL structure

Where I help

Contact

What size should your business be to get the most from SEO / AEO?

A few things tend to be true when technical SEO consulting delivers the best return:

  1. An established brand (roughly 1–3+ years in) with a business model that’s already working.
  2. A marketing or communications team with at least one person responsible for the website.
  3. Development resource able to actually implement what an audit recommends.

If that’s not quite you yet:

  • New to market, or a tiny team? SEO probably isn’t what makes or breaks your first couple of years — it helps, but it’s rarely the biggest lever that early.
  • No way to action changes on your website? That’s the real limiting factor. I diagnose and hand off a prioritised fix list — I don’t build or implement, so someone on your side needs to be able to pick it up.