Search + AI visibility

Get found by Google and by the AI that answers for it.

Your next customer is asking Google — or asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — who does this work in San Jose. This is the setup and the monthly upkeep that makes a local service business the answer they get back, not the one that never comes up.

Get a free visibility check See the seven pillars
Assistants checked
3
ChatGPT · Gemini · Perplexity
Pillars, reviewed monthly
7
audit, fix, measure, report
Notice to cancel
30 days
month to month, no lock-in

Free instant check

See where your site stands, in about 20 seconds

Enter your website and get a live grade of the technical and search side, pulled straight from Google’s own PageSpeed data. The AI-answer side is a hand check I do myself — the full audit covers both.

Grades speed, SEO basics, accessibility and best practices on your live site. Nothing is stored.

01 What SEO actually has to do

A found website has two jobs

Every one of the seven pillars below serves one of these two jobs. Miss the first and nobody sees you. Nail the first and miss the second, and you pay to send traffic to a page that does not turn a visitor into a phone call.

Job 01

Visibility

Be found, read, and trusted — by Google and by AI.

A search engine and an AI assistant both have to be able to reach your pages, understand what you sell and where, and decide you are credible enough to put in front of someone. That is crawlability, structured data, clean profiles, and speed — the plumbing that decides whether you exist in the results at all.

  • Robots can reach every service, location and contact page
  • Your details are stated in a language machines read, not guessed at
  • Assistants have something clean and quotable to pull from

Job 02

Conversion

Win the click, then win the call.

Showing up is half of it. The listing has to earn the tap over the four competitors around it, and the page it lands on has to answer the one question the visitor came with — can you do my thing, near me, and how do I reach you — before they bounce back to the results and pick someone else.

  • Titles and descriptions written the way locals actually search
  • A page that loads before an impatient thumb gives up
  • The phone number, hours and service area impossible to miss

02 The framework

The seven pillars

This is the whole method, in the open. Seven things that decide whether a San Jose service business gets found and gets chosen. Nothing here is a secret; the work is in doing all seven and keeping them done.

  1. P01

    Crawlability & Technical

    Can Google and AI robots actually reach and read every page?

    Search engines and AI crawlers send automated readers through your site. If your services page, your about page, your contact page or your location page is blocked, broken, buried, or duplicated, it simply does not exist to them — no matter how good it looks to a human.

    This is the foundation everything else sits on. A clean robots file and sitemap, working links, one canonical version of every page, and no crawl traps. Get this wrong and the other six pillars are pushing against a locked door.

  2. P02

    Structured Data

    Does your site tell Google exactly what you are, in its own language?

    Structured data is a small block of code — LocalBusiness, Service and FAQ schema — that states your hours, your services, your area and your ratings in a format machines read directly instead of inferring. It is why some listings show “open now,” star ratings, directions and answered questions, and others show a plain blue link.

    It is also what lets an AI assistant quote your business correctly instead of hallucinating your hours. A site I build ships this from day one; on a site I did not build, adding and maintaining it is one of the highest-return fixes there is.

  3. P03

    Social & Open Graph

    What shows up when your link gets shared — or pulled into an answer?

    When someone texts your link to a friend, drops it in a neighborhood group, or an assistant surfaces it, Open Graph tags decide what appears: a clean branded card with your name, a sharp line about what you do, and the right image — or a broken thumbnail and a truncated URL that looks like spam.

    For a local business, a share is a warm referral. A referral that unfurls into a broken card gets fewer clicks than one that looks like a real business took two minutes to set itself up properly.

  4. P04

    The differentiator

    AEO & AI-Citation

    When someone asks an AI “best HVAC in San Jose,” are you the answer?

    More and more people never see ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity “who’s a good plumber near Willow Glen” or “family dentist near Almaden” and act on the two or three names the assistant hands back. Answer-engine optimization is the work of being one of those names.

    It runs on signals an assistant trusts: a complete, consistent Google Business Profile, review schema, a genuinely quotable FAQ that answers the real question in a sentence, and clean matching data across the directories these models read. The goal is not to rank a link. It is to be the recommendation — and this is where most local competitors are doing nothing at all.

  5. P05

    On-Page & Content

    Does your wording match how locals actually search?

    People do not search “HVAC solutions” — they search “AC not blowing cold San Jose” and “emergency plumber near me.” On-page work is titles, descriptions and service-page copy written in those real words, so the page a searcher lands on obviously answers the exact thing they typed.

    It has to be benefit-led without over-promising — which matters most in regulated work. A dental, medical or med-spa page can describe the experience and the outcome honestly, but claiming a guaranteed result crosses an advertising line. Writing to that edge, and not past it, is part of the job.

  6. P06

    Core Web Vitals

    Is it fast and smooth — especially on a phone on cell data?

    Core Web Vitals are Google’s measures of how quickly a page shows something useful, how fast it responds to a tap, and whether the layout jumps around while it loads. They are a ranking factor, and more importantly a conversion factor: a customer standing in a parking lot will not wait four seconds for your hours.

    Speed is not set once and forgotten. Every plugin, tracking script, embedded map or heavy photo an owner adds later chips away at it. Maintenance is what keeps the site fast as real life gets bolted onto it month after month.

  7. P07

    Indexation & Measurement

    How do we prove any of this actually worked?

    First, the pages have to be indexed — genuinely in Google’s catalogue, not just published. Then the movement gets measured: which local terms are climbing, whether calls and direction requests are up, and whether the assistants are starting to mention you.

    This is the accountability pillar. Search Console plus a plain monthly report, in language an owner can read, so you are never taking “trust me, it’s working” on faith. If a number is not moving, the report says so, and next month’s work goes there.

03 Pillar P04, up close

Being the answer, not just a link

Here is what “show up in the AI answer” actually looks like. The card below is a hand-built illustration of the kind of response an assistant returns — it is not a real screenshot, a real AI response, or a real result for any business.

Example AI assistant · illustrative mockup
You asked

Who’s a good HVAC company in San Jose?

Assistant

A few San Jose HVAC companies come up consistently. Valley Comfort Heating & Air is frequently mentioned for residential AC and furnace repair — it has a complete, well-reviewed Google Business Profile, lists its service areas across San Jose and Santa Clara County, and publishes clear answers to common questions like pricing and emergency availability. Two others with strong, consistent local profiles are often named alongside it.

  • Google Business Profile
  • Site FAQ & service pages
  • Directory listings
Illustrative only. “Valley Comfort Heating & Air” is an invented example, not a real business, and this is not a real AI response.

Why that business showed up

An assistant does not invent its recommendation. It leans on the sources it trusts and can read cleanly. Notice what the illustration rewards — and what it has nothing to do with paying for placement.

  • A complete, consistent profile. Name, categories, hours, service areas and reviews all filled in and matching everywhere the models look.
  • Answers written to be quoted. A real FAQ that responds to the actual question in one clear, liftable sentence.
  • Clean data across directories. The same address, phone and hours everywhere, so nothing looks contradictory or stale.
  • Structured data it can parse. Schema that states the facts directly, so the model is not guessing from prose.

Most local competitors have done none of this. That gap is the opportunity, and closing it is ongoing work — which is exactly what the monthly plan is for.

04 The monthly rhythm

How the maintenance works

SEO and AEO are not a one-time switch. Google changes, competitors move, and every edit an owner makes can quietly break something. The retainer is a loop that runs every month: audit, fix, measure, report — then start again.

  1. Audit

    Re-check all seven pillars against the live site. What broke since last month, what a competitor changed, where a ranking slipped, whether the assistants still surface you. The month’s work list is whatever this turns up — not a guess.

  2. Fix

    Do the work. Repair the technical issues, refresh schema, tighten titles, publish or optimize a page, clean a directory listing, keep the Google Business Profile current. The heavier content and AEO work scales with the plan you are on.

  3. Measure

    Pull the numbers from Search Console and the Business Profile, and spot-check the assistants by hand — asking the real local questions and noting who gets named. Indexed pages, ranking movement, calls and directions, AI mentions.

  4. Report

    One plain-English summary: what moved, what I did, and what next month targets. No jargon wall, no vanity dashboard. If something is not working, it says so — that is what makes the next month’s audit worth anything.

Then it loops. The compounding is the point: month two builds on month one, and a year in, the gap between you and a competitor who did nothing is very hard for them to close.

05 Case study

Ascend

One thing sets this apart from the four concept builds in the portfolio: Ascend is a real client — real SEO and AEO work for a real business, not spec work. It is deliberately light on specifics until there are measured results worth reporting.

The client

Ascend is a real client Austin did SEO and answer-engine optimization work for. It is the one real engagement behind this page — not a concept build, not spec work. Out of respect for a real client, the details on this page stay to what is true and confirmed, and nothing more.

The approach

The work followed the same seven-pillar approach laid out above — technical, structured data, social, AEO, on-page, Core Web Vitals, and measurement. That is Austin’s method on every account: work the pillars in order, then keep them working with the monthly audit-fix-measure-report loop.

06 Pricing

Real prices, on the page

No “contact us for a quote.” A one-time setup, then a month-to-month plan you can leave with 30 days’ notice. The setup is credited toward your first month if you start a plan.

These are the monthly search plans. If you need the website built first, that is a one-time project — priced on the website build plans.

One-time setup

Foundation

$900

Credited toward month one if you start a plan.

The groundwork every plan builds on. Done once, up front, so the monthly work starts from a clean base instead of firefighting.

  • Technical crawl fixes across the site
  • LocalBusiness + Service + FAQ schema
  • Google Business Profile setup and cleanup
  • Baseline Search Console and a starting report

Then, month to month

Essentials

$500 /mo

Keep a solid site solid. For one location that needs to stay found and stay healthy.

Each month

  • Stay indexed and schema kept healthy
  • Core Web Vitals protected
  • Google Business Profile maintained
  • One location, roughly 15 local terms tracked
  • A plain monthly report
Ask about Essentials

Most pick this

Growth

$900 /mo

The one that actually moves the needle. Active AEO plus fresh content, every month.

Everything in Essentials, plus

  • Two optimized service pages or posts a month
  • Active AEO: quotable FAQ and directory cleanup
  • Monthly AI-citation checks — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity
  • Review-request setup
  • Expanded keyword tracking
Ask about Growth

Authority

$1,500 /mo

For competitive or multi-location businesses that want to own the category, not just appear in it.

Everything in Growth, plus

  • More content each month
  • Multi-location Google Business Profile
  • A quarterly strategy call
  • Priority turnaround
Ask about Authority

What is not included

Said plainly, because a straight list is worth more than a soft one. None of these are in the monthly price:

  • Paid ad spend and ad management — Google Ads, social ads, and the budget behind them.
  • Third-party tool or subscription fees the business owns.
  • Professional photography.
  • Content the owner has to supply — menus, service details, staff names, offers.

There is no hourly meter. Anything beyond the plan is quoted per job, in writing, and agreed before the work starts — never billed as a surprise afterward.

07 What you get

The monthly report, in full

Every plan ends the month with the same thing: a plain report you can actually read. Here is exactly what it tracks. No fabricated numbers live on this page — these are the lines your report will carry once your own data is flowing.

  • Indexed-page count

    How many of your pages are genuinely in Google’s index — and any that dropped out.

  • Ranking movement

    Where your tracked local terms sit this month versus last, up and down, no cherry-picking.

  • Google Business Profile insights

    Calls, direction requests, website taps and searches that surfaced your profile.

  • AI-citation spot-checks

    Whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name you for the real local questions — checked by hand.

  • Core Web Vitals status

    A pass/fail read on speed and stability, so a slow month gets caught before it costs calls.

The direction is what matters, and it is measured honestly. A flat or down month gets reported as flat or down, with what the next month does about it.

08 Contact

Get a free visibility check

Send your business and your website and I will look at where you actually stand — in Google and in the AI assistants — and tell you the two or three things that would move the needle first. No charge, no obligation, and a straight answer if the honest one is “you do not need me yet.”

Email me directly

The fast path. The button opens your mail app with a short template already filled in — answer the lines and send. That is enough for me to run the check and reply with something specific.

austinguyens@gmail.com Or just write to austinguyens@gmail.com yourself
  • A reply within one business day, including the ones that are a no.
  • A specific read on your visibility, not a generic audit PDF.
  • Clear prices — the ones on this page — and no sales sequence.
  • If SEO is not your bottleneck, I will say so and tell you what is.

Or send the details here

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