Getting found on Google, and now on AI too
Most small businesses are missing the same handful of free things. None of this needs an agency.
1. Your Google Business Profile
The single biggest one, and it costs nothing.
It is the panel that appears on the right when somebody searches your name, with your hours, photos and reviews. Claim it, fill in every field, pick the right categories, and add photos of actual jobs.
Then add your website to it. A surprising number of profiles say "Add website" years after the business got one, which means Google knows about the business and not the site.
2. Reviews
Reviews do two jobs. They move you up the local results, and they are what a person reads before ringing.
Ask after every job, while they are still pleased. A text with the link works better than anything else. Most people will do it and almost nobody thinks to ask.
3. Bing, which everyone skips
Bing feels irrelevant. It is not.
When somebody asks ChatGPT to recommend a plumber, it searches Bing. That is the index behind it. If you are not in Bing, you do not exist to the AI assistants people increasingly ask instead of searching.
Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and Bing Places can import straight from your Google profile, so it is about ten minutes.
4. Say where you work, in words
If you cover five towns, the towns should appear on your website in normal sentences. Not stuffed in a list at the bottom, written into the page like a human wrote it.
Search engines cannot guess your area. Neither can an AI.
5. Be readable by a machine
This is the newer part. AI assistants read pages differently to people. They struggle with text baked into images, sites that need JavaScript to show anything, and pages with no clear structure.
If your prices, services and contact details only exist inside a graphic, a person can read them and a machine cannot. Put them in text.
6. Consistency
Your name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere. Google, Bing, Facebook, directories.
"087 123 4567" and "+353 87 123 4567" and "0871234567" should all be the same string. Small thing, real effect.
What takes time
Directory listings publish in a few weeks and get indexed weeks after that. AI assistants start naming a business at roughly two to three months, dependable at six or more, never guaranteed.
Anybody promising faster is guessing.
The bit that matters most
None of the above works if the underlying site is slow, broken, or has nothing worth reading. The listings are supporting signals. The lever is having pages worth pointing at.
Let's get your website working.
Tell us about your business and we'll come back with a fixed price and what we would actually do.
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