SEO, described honestly enough to be useful.
Most SEO pitches lead with a ranking guarantee. Anyone who makes one either does not know how the local pack works or is counting on you not checking until month four. Here is the actual mechanism, and the parts of it I can move.
What decides local rankings
For a local service business, most calls come from the Google local pack — the three listings above the regular results. That ranking is driven mainly by proximity to the searcher, the completeness and activity of your Google Business Profile, and your review count and recency. Website quality contributes, and it contributes far less than the pitch decks imply.
This has a practical consequence. If you have no Google Business Profile, creating one will do more for your phone volume than anything I could do to your website. I will tell you that before I quote you for anything else.
The technical layer
The part I fully control is whether your site is legible to a machine. That means titles and descriptions that match what people search, a heading structure that reflects the page, structured data describing your business and services, a clean sitemap and canonicals, fast loads, and content that renders without JavaScript so a crawler that does not run scripts still sees it.
That last one matters more every year, and it is where sites quietly break without anyone noticing.
Being found by AI assistants
A growing share of ”who should I hire” questions now get asked to ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity instead of typed into Google. Those systems read your site to answer, and most of them do not execute JavaScript, so a site that renders its content client-side is invisible to them.
Every build I ship includes an llms.txt — a plain summary of what the business is, who it serves, where, and what it costs — plus structured data and server-rendered content. The goal is that when an assistant describes your business, it describes it accurately instead of guessing.
What’s included
In the base price. These are the reason the rest of it holds up.
Worth saying plainly
I will not promise you a first-page ranking, a traffic number, or a count of leads. What I commit to is the controllable part: a PageSpeed score I show you at launch, monthly Google Business Profile posts, a one-page report every month with real numbers, and the ability to cancel with 30 days’ notice and keep everything.
What it costs
Questions, answered honestly
Can you guarantee I will rank first on Google?
No, and I would be careful with anyone who does. Local rankings are driven mostly by proximity and reviews, which no agency controls. I commit to the parts that are controllable and report on them monthly.
How long does SEO take to show results?
Technical fixes land immediately in the sense that the site becomes legible to crawlers right away. Movement in rankings usually takes two to four months, and for local search the fastest lever is almost always your Google Business Profile and your review count rather than the website.
What is an llms.txt file?
A plain-text summary of your business placed at a known location on your site, written so AI assistants can describe you accurately. It states what you do, who you serve, where you operate, what you charge, and how to reach you. Every site I build ships with one.
Do I need SEO if I already have a Google Business Profile?
The profile is the bigger lever for phone calls, so if it is set up and active you have the important half. Site-side SEO is what makes you legible when someone searches for the service instead of the map, and what lets AI assistants describe you correctly.
Can you do SEO without rebuilding my site?
Yes. Technical SEO, structured data, and Google Business Profile work are all available on an existing site. If the platform itself is what is blocking results I will tell you, and you can decide from there.
Tell me what you’re building.
A real reply within 24 hours, and it’ll be me typing it. Start a project or email hello@novell.site.