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5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Show Up in AI Overviews
Brad Smith · Jun 1, 2026
phone number, website, and a detailed business description.
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Choose the right categories: Select the most relevant primary and secondary categories for your business. Be specific and accurate.
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Upload high-quality photos: Add photos of your storefront, team, products, and services. High-quality visuals make a positive impression and help AI understand your business.
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Manage reviews: Encourage customers to leave reviews and respond to them promptly, both positive and negative. Reviews are a key ranking factor in local search and influence AI recommendations.
2. Build a Strong Local SEO Foundation
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your online presence to rank higher in local search results. This includes everything from your website to your citations to your online reputation. A strong local SEO foundation is essential for appearing in AI Overviews because it signals to AI algorithms that your business is relevant and trustworthy. Driving traffic to your local business website starts with local SEO.
Here are some key local SEO tactics:
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Optimize your website for local keywords: Include location-based keywords throughout your website content, including page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and body text.
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Build local citations: List your business in relevant online directories and citation sites, such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, and industry-specific directories. Ensure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent across all citations.
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Get local backlinks: Earn backlinks from other local businesses, organizations, and websites. Backlinks are a vote of confidence from other websites and help improve your website’s authority.
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Growing Beyond Your Market, Part 2: Local SEO for Service Businesses With One Location: How to Rank in Multiple Cities
Brad Smith · Jun 24, 2026
duplicate city pages with minimal unique content
- Using keyword stuffing instead of helpful information
- Ignoring technical SEO issues
- Failing to build authority beyond their home market
- Neglecting user experience and website performance
These approaches may have worked years ago, but modern search engines—and AI search platforms—expect more.
Today’s winners are the businesses that provide genuine value while clearly demonstrating expertise and geographic relevance.
How AI Search Is Changing Local Visibility
Local SEO is no longer just about rankings.
More people are discovering businesses through AI-powered experiences such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
These systems evaluate information differently than traditional search engines.
Rather than focusing solely on rankings, they analyze authority, expertise, consistency, and relevance across multiple sources.
That means businesses need a broader visibility strategy—one that extends beyond traditional SEO.
Want to start showing up in AI overviews? Check out our tips.
Don’t Let Geography Limit Growth
If your company serves multiple markets, your visibility strategy should reflect that reality.
The businesses seeing the greatest success today are the ones building authority beyond their headquarters city and creating digital experiences that clearly communicate where and how they serve customers.
With the right local SEO, content, website, and AI visibility strategy, it’s possible to attract prospects from multiple cities without opening multiple offices.
In Part 3 of this series, we’ll tackle one of the most common questions in local SEO:
Can you rank in a city where you don’t have an office? What Google allows—and what actually works.
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Google’s Discover Core Update: What Changed, Why It Matters, and How Small Businesses Can Still Win
Barqar · Feb 9, 2026
The Google Discover Core Update: SEO Is Dead, Long Live AEO and AIO
For years, small businesses were taught that SEO success meant ranking on page one of Google.
Pick the right keywords. Optimize your pages. Build some links. Wait for traffic.
That playbook is no longer enough.
Google’s latest Discover Core Update signals a much bigger shift in how visibility works — not just in traditional search results, but in how businesses are discovered before someone ever types a query. Discovery is becoming proactive, personalized, and increasingly driven by AI-powered systems that decide what content is worth surfacing.
If your business depends on being found online, this update matters — a lot.
And for small businesses, it’s both a warning and an opportunity.
What Is the Google Discover Core Update?
Unlike past updates that focused on ranking webpages in traditional search results, this core update is aimed squarely at Google Discover — the personalized content feed users see on mobile devices and inside the Google app.
Discover doesn’t respond to searches. It anticipates them.
Google surfaces articles, insights, and recommendations based on what it believes a user will find relevant, trustworthy, and useful — often before they actively look for something.
With this update, Google is refining how it evaluates:
- Content quality and usefulness
- Real expertise and experience
- Local and personal relevance
- Originality and timeliness
- Headline accuracy and page experience
In short, Google is deciding which businesses and voices are worth putting in front of users early in the decision-making process.
Why This Update Is a Big Deal for Small Businesses
This update reinforces a truth many businesses are just starting to realize:
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Driving Traffic to Your Local Business Website: Tips and Tricks
Brad Smith · Oct 18, 2023
more and more people using their mobile devices to browse the internet, mobile optimization is vital for ensuring a positive user experience. Here’s how to optimize your website for mobile devices:
- Responsive design: Make sure your website is designed to adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions. A responsive design ensures that your website looks and functions well on any device.
- Mobile-friendly content: Optimize your content for readability on mobile devices. Use shorter paragraphs, larger fonts, and avoid using flash elements that may not be supported on mobile devices.
- Page speed: Improve your website’s loading speed by optimizing images, minifying code, and using caching techniques. A fast-loading website is not only user-friendly but also favored by search engines.
By following these optimization strategies, your website will become more attractive to search engines and provide a better experience for your visitors. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, so regularly evaluate and update your website to stay ahead of the competition.
Local SEO Strategies
When it comes to driving traffic to your local business website, implementing effective local SEO strategies is essential. Local SEO focuses on optimizing your website to appear in search results for local queries and increasing your visibility to potential customers in your area. Here are some valuable tips and tricks to boost your local SEO game:
Claiming and Optimizing your Google My Business Listing
One of the first steps in boosting your local SEO is to claim and optimize your Google My Business (GMB) listing. This platform allows you to manage your online presence on Google and make sure your business information is accurate and up-to-date. Here’s what you need to do:
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Why You’re Overspending on Ads When Your Website Ranks Nowhere , A Local Service Contractor’s Guide to Free Visibility
Barqar · Apr 29, 2026
phone) and stop. They don’t add service area radius. They don’t post updates regularly. They don’t ask for reviews. They don’t respond to customer feedback. They don’t add photos of actual work.
What actually moves the needle: complete your profile fully (every field filled). Add high-quality photos of your team and completed projects. Post monthly updates about seasonal services or special offers (posts appear in search and maps). Generate a steady stream of customer reviews; Google prioritizes profiles with recent reviews. Respond to every review, positive or negative. Add your service areas explicitly so Google understands your geographic reach.
A properly optimized Google Business Profile often generates 20–40% of inquiries for local contractors, completely free. Yet most are left dormant.
Local SEO Basics That Determine Whether Nearby Customers Find You
Beyond Google Business Profile, local SEO for contractors relies on several foundational elements that directly affect whether you show up when nearby customers search.
Location-specific pages: If you serve multiple cities, each needs its own page. Not a dropdown menu on one page, actual, unique pages with content specific to that city. Why? Because search engines rank pages, not websites. A page about plumbing services in Portland should mention Portland, local landmarks, neighborhoods you serve, and local customer stories. This tells Google you’re a real, local player.
On-page SEO: Your page titles, headers, and main content should naturally include your service and your city. Not stuffed unnaturally, but present. “Emergency Plumbing Services in Portland” is better than “Plumbing Services.” It’s more useful to readers and clearer to search engines.
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