Every question worth asking before you hire anyone.

Because the pieces only pay off together. The site brings an inquiry, the intake answers it inside a minute, the finished job triggers a review request, and those reviews raise how you rank locally, which brings the next inquiry. Split across separate vendors, none of it compounds and nobody can tell you what the whole thing produced.

Usually that you have become the integration layer. The web company does not know when a job finished, so nobody requests the review. The SEO invoice cannot be reconciled against revenue because the data sits somewhere else. You end up forwarding information between companies you are already paying, and no one of them is accountable for the outcome.

No, and you should not. Everyone starts with the build and the base retainer. Content, ads, social, custom software, and the voice agent are added one at a time, when a real bottleneck shows up in your own numbers. I would rather talk you out of an add-on than sell you one that has nothing to do yet.

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No, and nobody can. Anyone who guarantees a ranking is either lying or planning to rank you for a phrase nobody searches. What I will do is the durable work: correct technical structure, real content that answers what customers ask, consistent business information everywhere, town pages with genuine local substance, and a steady flow of reviews.

Site structure and speed so pages can be crawled and read. Content built from the questions your customers ask. One page per service town with real local detail rather than a template with the name swapped. Consistent name, address, and phone across the site, your Google profile, and directories. Then reviews, which are the strongest local signal most owners underuse.

Impressions are not customers. My monthly report leads with inquiries received, where they came from, and what happened to them, then lists what I did that month. If a service is not earning its line, I will say so and recommend dropping it. You should be able to reconcile the invoice against something real.

By giving the engines something accurate and specific to read. That means facts stated plainly, direct answers before the story, structured data describing the business, machine-readable summaries of every page, and content that stays current. There is no switch and no paid placement. The businesses that get named are the ones that gave the engines the most to work with.

No. Anyone selling you one is guessing. Be skeptical of llms.txt in particular: Ahrefs studied 137,000 domains and found 97 percent of published llms.txt files received no requests at all in the measured month, and Google has said there is no special AI Overview optimization beyond sound search fundamentals. I ship the cheap machine-readable files anyway, but I do not sell them as a visibility strategy.

Two ways. Bing Webmaster Tools publishes an AI performance report showing which AI answers cite your site, which Google has no equivalent for, and I pull it monthly. Second, your contact form asks how each person found you, with ChatGPT and other AI as an explicit option. That is the only direct ground truth available today.

They do if it is built correctly. AI crawlers download JavaScript but do not execute it, so anything rendered only in the browser is invisible to them. Your site is server-rendered, meaning the full content is in the raw HTML, and it also serves a clean markdown version of every page to any agent that asks for one.

Not if the migration is done properly, which is the single biggest technical risk in the project. Search engines have spent years learning your existing page addresses. If those addresses disappear, the equity goes with them, and owners usually find out months later when the calls thin out. Preventing that is a documented process, not a promise.

Read the migration standard

Every indexable address on your old site is inventoried, from the sitemap and from crawling the internal links, because the sitemap alone always misses pages. Each one is then assigned a destination: preserved at its exact address, redirected to the page that replaced it, or deliberately retired. You get the map as a document and can check any line of it.

Anything with search value is kept at its exact address, with the writing cleaned up where it made claims we cannot support. Genuinely stale posts are retired deliberately, each one redirected somewhere sensible rather than left to 404. Nothing is deleted quietly, and no page disappears without a decision recorded against it.

They close the gaps where money leaks out. An inquiry is captured and answered within the minute rather than the next morning. Quotes get chased on a schedule. Appointments get reminders so they do not no-show. Invoices go out the day the job finishes and get followed up until paid. Happy customers get asked for a review at the right moment.

No. Anything that must be reliable stays a deterministic rule: routing, permissions, status changes, payments, and reminders do not depend on a model guessing. AI is used where language genuinely helps, such as drafting and research, and always where you approve the output. That boundary is what makes the system trustworthy and, just as importantly, removable.

No. Most of it runs where you already are: an email or text arrives with the lead and the photos attached, and you call the person back. There is an admin area if you want to see everything in one place and edit your own pages, but the system is built so it works whether or not you ever log into it.

Yes. Invoices can be sent the day a job finishes and paid by card or bank transfer in a couple of taps, and unpaid ones get chased automatically on a schedule instead of when someone remembers. For recurring or maintenance work, autopay runs the charge on its own. Money arriving days earlier is often the clearest return in the first quarter.

No, and neither do you. Payments run through Stripe, which is PCI compliant and handles the card data on its own systems. Nothing sensitive touches your site or mine. Payouts go directly to your bank account, in your name, from an account you control rather than one I hold on your behalf.

Usually yes. Connecting the site to your accounting, scheduling, or point-of-sale tools is custom software work, scoped and quoted in writing before anything is built. The goal is that a job only gets entered once. Whether a given tool can be connected depends on whether it exposes a proper interface, and I will tell you honestly if it does not.

Not on day one. I want sixty days of real intake data first, so spend can be pointed at what the numbers show converts rather than at a guess. Advertising into a site that does not convert is the most common way small businesses waste money online, and it is worth fixing the conversion path before buying traffic for it.

The management fee is a share of spend that falls as the account grows, so the bigger it gets the smaller the percentage. Your ad budget is always yours, held in your own account, and never moves without your written approval. I prepare and propose; you approve every dollar of exposure. The exact figures are in your proposal.

You get a readable monthly receipt showing exactly what ran, what it cost, and what it produced in inquiries, not impressions. Because the ads, the landing pages, and the intake are one system, a click can be followed through to a real customer. That is the reconciliation most ad agencies cannot give you.

No, and the process is designed specifically to prevent it. Every month I send a short questionnaire asking for the real material: project photos, the jobs coming in, what changed this season. I supply the ideas so you never have to plan anything, and you approve before anything publishes. What goes up reflects your business because you supplied the truth of it.

Answering a short questionnaire once a month and reading what comes back before it publishes. At the higher rung there is also a quarterly phone call where we harvest deeper material. Your job is approving, never writing. If you would rather not even approve, say so and I will just let you know when something posts.

They get updated. Content autopilot keeps existing pages current rather than only producing new ones, so when a price moves, a rule changes, or a page goes stale, it gets corrected. A blog whose most recent post is from three years ago actively signals to both customers and answer engines that the business may not be operating.

Yes, as an add-on. Your channels get posted and watched on a set cadence, drawn from the same monthly material that feeds the website: real project photos, finished work, seasonal notes. Posts are queued for your approval before publishing, and the profiles themselves are kept accurate, which is a genuine search signal rather than a vanity one.

No. That kind of posting tells a customer nothing true about your business and tells an answer engine even less. If there is no real material in a given month, the honest answer is fewer posts, not filler. I will also not invent activity you did not do or reviews you did not earn.

A monthly report that leads with the numbers that matter: inquiries received, where each came from, what happened to them, and what changed since last month. Then a plain list of what I actually did. If you cannot tell what the money bought, I have not done my job, and I would rather you ask than quietly resent the invoice.

Partly through analytics, which handles search and ads reasonably well. But the honest answer is that no analytics product can see an AI recommendation or a word-of-mouth referral. So the contact form simply asks, with options including Google, ChatGPT or another AI, referral, and social. It is optional for the customer and it is the only real ground truth available.

Then you will see that too, along with what I think is causing it and what I intend to do about it. A report that only ever contains good news is not a report. The point of measuring is to make bad months visible early enough to act on, which is precisely why vague agency scorecards are worth so little.

Every factual claim on your site is either sourced or explicitly flagged for you to confirm before launch, and you get the whole list as one document to correct in a single pass. Nothing is invented to fill a page. Where a claim is regulated, such as licensing or legal wording, it is checked rather than guessed at.

Read the accuracy standard

AI assists with research, drafting, and cleanup. It does not decide what is true. Every fact is verified against a source, the judgment and architecture are mine, and I am accountable for what ships. The reason the process includes a correction pass and a sourced claims list is precisely so nothing reaches your customers unchecked.

No. I do not sell to a direct local competitor of an existing client. Working in the same trade in other markets is how the work gets better, and a build pattern developed for one business does get applied elsewhere with entirely different facts and positioning. But your market stays yours for as long as you are a client.

Only with your explicit agreement. Client work appears in the portfolio when the client has said yes, and never before. Unsigned prospect builds are never presented as public proof of anything, because showing off work for a business that never hired me would misrepresent what I have done.

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You own every account. I hold the access needed to do the work, credentials live in a password manager rather than in email or notes, and access is scoped rather than shared. Anything with a login is built so one customer cannot reach another's data, and administrative areas are blocked from search engines entirely.

Read the security standard

I am monitoring it and I fix it, which is the core of what the base retainer buys. Your database is backed up, your content is recoverable, and the site is hosted on infrastructure that fails over rather than sitting on a single machine. If something breaks badly, I will stay up to fix it. That is the actual job.

Yes. The domain, the site, its content, and your customer database are yours, in your name, written into the agreement. This is the specific thing most agencies do not offer: they build on a platform you cannot leave, so you rent your own website indefinitely. Ownership only means something if the exit is written down before you sign.

Read the ownership standard

Your domain, your website and all its content, your customer database, and your accounts, moved to hosting you control, plus a developer-ready relaunch guide so any competent developer can run it without me. The exit is priced up front rather than invented at the moment you ask, so leaving is never a negotiation from a weak position.

No, and I would rather be blunt about that than bury it. The intake routing, follow-up sequences, review requests, payment flows, and the reporting behind them are my own software, licensed to you while I run your account. You keep every record they produced, and your new developer can rebuild equivalents. Everything else on this page is genuinely yours.