Search Has Changed, And So Has "Ranking"
A stranger can find you in three places now: the map, the regular results and the AI answer. All three read the same thing, your pages.
A laptop, a phone and a Saturday. You do not need to know code for any of this.
The weekend version.
You need a laptop, a phone and a Saturday. You do not need to know code for any of this.
1Pick your top five pages
Your homepage, plus the pages that describe the work you most want more of. If you have one page that lists everything, that page needs to be split up, and step 3 is how.
2Write a real title and description for each
The title is the blue link. Say what the page is about and where: "Gutter Repair in Springfield, Illinois." The description is the line or two under it: one plain sentence about what you do, one about why to call or how fast you answer. Type them in yourself if you can, or hand them to whoever updates your site.
3Give each main service its own page
Not a section on a shared page. Its own page. Remember that Google indexes pages, not sites. If "Services" is one page with a long list of bullet points, Google sees one page about many things, which reads as a page about nothing in particular, and it cannot send a searcher to the exact job they typed. So it sends them to the competitor who has a page for that job. Give it the chance to send people straight to the service they want.
4Check that each page has a main headline in text
Try to highlight the big words at the top. If you can select them as words, a search engine can read them. If they are part of a picture, they need to be retyped as text. Then confirm those are the words marked as the H1, because the tag does not always sit on the biggest text. Elevated Page Check will show you which words carry the H1 and flag the rest of this list too, or ask whoever maintains the site.
5Write ten Answer First questions and answers
Use the questions you hear on the phone: price, timing, service area, what to do before you arrive, what happens if it rains. One question, a first-sentence answer, one concrete fact, how to reach you. Put each one on the page it belongs to, not all on one FAQ page nobody visits.
6Search your own trade and town in a private window
Not your name. "Plumber" and your town. Write down who is on the map, who is in the first results, and what the AI answer at the top says, if there is one.
7Ask one AI assistant the same question
"Who is a good plumber in my town?" with your town’s name in it. Read what it says about you, if anything. An assistant you use every day may know you, your business and your past chats, which is the same inside view as searching your own name signed in. So ask in a temporary or logged-out chat, and then have a friend or someone who does not know the business ask the same question on their own phone, and compare what each of you got. Write down what it gets wrong: an old phone number, a service you stopped offering, a town you do not serve. Those mistakes usually trace back to a page, a listing or a directory that says the wrong thing, and Chapter 4’s consistency sweep is where you fix them.
8Check your schema markup
Paste your page’s address into Google’s Rich Results Test, which is free. If the results look like gibberish, and they will, copy what it shows and paste it into ChatGPT or Claude along with your index card from Chapter 4, and ask: "Does this describe a local business, and do the name, phone, address and hours match my card?" Let the AI explain in plain English what is there, what is missing and what to ask your web person to fix. Let Google’s tool do the checking, though, not the chat assistant reading your page on its own, because a chat assistant opening a web page often strips out the code where the markup lives and can tell you it is missing when it is not. If the test finds no business details at all, or they differ from your card, write that down for whoever maintains your site. Run the same test on a page with an FAQ block, and check that the questions show up there too.
9Check that Google kept your pages
Open Google Search Console, which is free; whoever maintains your site can add you to it if you are not in it already. Paste the address of a service page or blog post into the URL Inspection bar at the top. "URL is on Google" means it is indexed. "URL is not on Google" means it is not, and the page cannot show up in a search no matter how good it is. Then open the Pages report and look for "Crawled - currently not indexed." Those are pages Google read and chose not to keep, usually because they said nothing it did not already have. Those are the ones to rewrite with your own numbers and your own work.
Keep that list of what the AI got wrong, and ask the same question again in a month. It is the closest thing to a before-and-after you can run from your couch.
Open each of your top five pages and work the tabs in the order of the steps. Turn on the Searches To Sales setting under the gear and each result links straight to its chapter page.
- Overview tabsteps 2 and 9: the title, description and canonical Google will use, with character counts, and whether the page is allowed in Google.
- Headings tabstep 4: which words carry the H1, and the whole heading outline.
- Schema tabstep 8: the business details as a readable tree, with one-click buttons for the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.
- Quick Links tabstep 9: is this page in Google, every page Google has for the site, the sitemap and robots.txt, already filled in.
Answer First writer.
One question, the answer in the first sentence, one concrete fact from your own work, how to reach you. Fill in the four lines and copy the block onto the page it belongs to.
Answer First
Saves on this device as you go. Nothing is sent to us.
Your page block
Paste it at the top of the page that answers this question, with the question as the heading. Put the long version underneath for the reader who wants it.
Indexing checklist, for whoever runs your site.
Hand this to the person who maintains your website. Each line is something they can show you, from Google's own console, with a date on it.
Indexing checklist
Saves on this device as you go. Nothing is sent to us.
Check it took.
in a few weeks, search your trade and town again in a private window. When the blue link for your page shows the title you wrote, and the text under it is the description you wrote rather than something Google pieced together, Google has read the sticker.
Where it stops being a weekend job.
This is where the failures get quiet. Everything in this section can look fine from the inside.
Pages that Google crawled and then declined to put in its index. A sitemap that reports "Success" and has not actually been read. A site built from a copied template whose code still tells Google it belongs to a different business, with somebody else’s name or address tucked into the settings. Structured business details that are broken, so they fail without a single error you can see on the page. Any one of these can keep good pages out of the results however well you wrote them.
Someone who can read Search Console and the page source, and has done this before. That might be the person who already maintains your site, an employee who is handy with it, a relative who builds websites, or us. The question to ask is simple: "Have you fixed pages that Google crawled but did not index, and can you show me one?" If the answer is a blank look, keep looking.
A Search Console screenshot showing your important pages indexed and the date Google last read your sitemap. Not a ranking report. Not a dashboard from a tool you have never heard of. The screenshot from Google’s own console, with the date on it. If it shows the sitemap was read recently and your service pages are indexed, the job is done. If nobody can produce it, the job is not done, whatever the invoice says.
Ryan, should I be blogging?
Probably yes, if you do it properly.
A good blog is one of the most powerful things a local business can build. Every post that answers a real question is another page Google can send a stranger to, another answer an AI assistant can quote, and another reason for someone to trust you before they ever call. It compounds. A post you write this spring can still be bringing in calls three years from now.
Doing it properly means four things. Each post answers a question people in your area actually type, in the words they use. Each post carries something only you have. Each post is linked from the service pages people already visit, so Google and your visitors can find it. And it comes after the basics in this chapter, not instead of them: the listing, the page labels and the Answer First blocks on your service pages first, then the blog on top of a site that already reads clearly. What does not work is a post every Tuesday about whatever came to mind, sitting alone at the end of a feed nothing points to.
That fourth one matters more every year. Google likes real numbers and first-hand detail: how many jobs like this you did last year, what the work usually costs around here, what you found when you opened up a wall, a photo from your own truck. A post a writing tool spun out in a minute says what thousands of other sites already say, and Google already has those pages. It will often crawl yours and then leave it out of the index, which means it never shows up for anyone. Give it something it cannot get anywhere else, your own data and your own work, and you give it a reason to keep the page.
That second condition has a name, internal linking, and it is half of why a blog pays. An internal link is one page on your site pointing to another, with link text that says what is there: "gutter repair in Springfield," not "click here." Those links show Google which pages matter and how they relate, they lend some of a strong page’s standing to the pages it points to, and they keep a visitor moving toward the call instead of leaving. A blog gives you a steady supply of them. Each post links up to the service page and the town page it belongs to, and each service page links down to the posts that answer its common questions. Every new post is a new path into the pages that bring in work.
So start with the Answer First questions in the weekend list below. If a question needs more than a paragraph to answer well, that is a post. If it does not, it belongs on the service page. Chapter 13 shows how to pick the questions and turn one into a page.
Tools and next.
The two tools the book points to, then the chapters on either side of this one.
Elevated Page Check
Click it on any page for a score out of 100, the fixes that matter most, and eight tabs that show the headings, links, photos, schema, share preview and business details behind the page, in plain English. For this chapter, start on the Overview, Headings, Schema and Quick Links tabs. Nothing it reads leaves your computer.
How it works and where to get it →Done for youFree online presence report
Your listing, your business details, your reviews, your site speed and the heat map, scored from the outside. It asks for your email so we can send it.
Get the report →Nearby chapters
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
Page last updated October 26, 2026. The steps get updated when Google changes something. Found a step that no longer matches your screen? Email ryan@elevatedideas.com or call or text (217) 724-8153.
Maintained by Elevated Ideas, a U.S.-based agency in Jacksonville, Illinois. All chapters.
Give every important page a clear sticker.
The free online presence report is the one thing in the book we ask you to let us run: the outside view of your listing, your details, your reviews, your speed and the map.
Prefer to talk? Call or text (217) 724-8153 or email ryan@elevatedideas.com.