Lighthouse (SEO)
Ask ChatGPT who does your job in your town
Go ahead, do it now. Then ask Gemini. Then Perplexity.
If they name your competitors and not you, that isn't bad luck. If they name you but get your services wrong, or your hours, or confuse you with another business across town. That's worse, and it's fixable.
A growing share of "who should I call" now gets answered by something other than a search results page. Those systems and Google's map results read the same information about your business. Most local businesses have never made that information correct, consistent, or complete for either one.
That's what I fix.
The thing that bothers you
Your competitor shows up in the map pack and you don't. Your reviews might even be better than theirs. Nobody has ever been able to tell you why.
There's usually a specific reason, and it's usually findable. It's not visible from the outside. It's in profile categories nobody set, in services sections left half-filled, in business information that disagrees with itself across thirty directories, in a competitor's backlink profile, in what their reviews say that yours don't.
That's the work: finding the specific reason, then fixing it.
What I look at
Not just the public page. The secondary categories, the services, the attributes, including the ones your competitors have set and you haven't.
Your three closest. Their categories, their attributes, their review patterns, their backlink sources, their posting rhythm.
Not the count and the star average. What customers actually say, and what they say about your competitors that they don't say about you.
Twenty to thirty directory and citation platforms. Every place your business information disagrees with itself is a place Google loses confidence in who you are.
Whether it can carry local rankings at all, what it's missing, and what your Search Console data says people are already trying to find you for.
Your Knowledge Panel, your Wikidata presence if you have one, and the structured data on your site that tells search engines and AI systems what kind of business you are. Almost nobody in local SEO is doing this yet.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, asked cold, with the answers recorded word for word.
About that AI part
People are already overpromising about this, so I'll be specific.
I can't make ChatGPT say what I want about your business. Nobody can, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
What I can do is find out what it currently says, show you the exact words, and make sure the information those systems read about you is accurate, consistent, and actually present. Right now, for most local businesses, it isn't there at all. The same work fixes your standing in Google's map results, because both are reading from the same place.
Most local businesses haven't done this work yet. That includes most of your competitors.
Two engagements
Foundation
$1,500Two to three weeks. For a solo operator, one location, one main service.
You get the full research above, a prioritized plan in your dashboard ranked by impact and color-coded by urgency, a go/no-go verdict on your website, and a review request script and text message you can start sending the day you get them.
Foundation ends with the plan. I write every item so you can execute it yourself, and for Google Business Profile work the dashboard walks you through it click by click. Set once, leave it. If you'd rather the writing were done for you, that's the next tier.
This is the right fit if you're hands-on, you have some time, and what you're missing is knowing what to do first.
Full Playbook
$3,000Ten weeks. For an established business, or a competitive market.
Everything in Foundation, plus the deeper research: website audit, keyword gap analysis, competitor backlink audit, citation audit, search intent mapping, content gap analysis, entity and schema work, competitor posting analysis.
And then I write it:
- —Up to six complete service and city landing pages: title, meta description, headline, body copy, FAQ, calls to action, internal links. Written for your business. Ready to publish.
- —Seven structured data documents ready to paste into your site, so search engines and AI systems can read what you are.
- —Three versions of your Google Business Profile description, each under Google's character limit, on a rotation schedule so you can see which performs.
- —Fourteen written service entries for your Google services section.
- —Sixteen drafted Google Posts with copy and image direction, scheduled across eight weeks.
- —Twelve review response templates, sorted by star rating.
- —Three homepage headline options.
- —Twenty content briefs for the topics your competitors rank for and you have nothing to answer with.
- —A photo plan: eighteen slots, what to shoot, when it posts.
- —Entity work: a Wikidata guide if you don't have an entity, a gap check against it if you do.
You're publishing finished work rather than working through a list. The site work, I handle.
The dashboard
Every engagement runs through a client dashboard. It holds the audit, the prioritized plan, the reports at every phase, the finished content, the schedule, and live status.
Instead of waiting on a monthly PDF to know where things stand, you log in. This is why the work doesn't die when the report lands. The report becomes the plan, and the plan lives in one place you can check and update.
Not a PDF attachment from three months ago.
Why this is different
Most agencies hand you a report and a punch list that creates billable hours. It rarely covers the full picture, and it almost never shows the data behind what needs doing.
Two things are different here. The research goes into your competitors' profiles and link profiles, not just a crawl of your own site. And at the Full Playbook tier the engagement doesn't end at recommendations. It ends at content you can publish.
One more thing: if the data isn't there, I tell you. If your Search Console history is too thin to draw real conclusions from, I tell you that instead of handing you a report full of invented findings. That happens more often in this industry than anyone admits.
Reviews
Reviews are one of the strongest factors in whether a local business shows up in Google's map results, and they directly affect whether a visitor becomes a customer.
Both tiers include a review audit against your competitors, a request script that fits how you actually talk to customers, and a posting rhythm you can keep. Full Playbook adds the twelve response templates.
Your website
A site-readiness check is part of every audit. It tells you whether your current site is what's holding you back, or whether the problem is elsewhere.
If you need a rebuild, I scope it as a separate engagement, not bundled into the audit. The Websites page has full details.
Lighthouse Watch
Quarterly re-run, $119/quarter. Every three months I re-run the audit and refresh the dashboard, so you can see what moved and what's new. Good if you mainly want a periodic check that the foundation is holding.
Continuous monitoring, $99/mo. Ongoing tracking of rankings, reviews, and competitor moves, and I keep the dashboard current between audits. Good if your market moves and you want to catch changes as they happen.
Either way, Watch is monitoring. The work it surfaces (posts, review responses, content updates, site fixes) you do yourself or hand to me. I bill it separately from the subscription. Ongoing done-for-you content is outside this scope; I'll refer you to a partner who handles it.
When I'm not the right fit
I'm not a national SEO agency. I'm not running paid Google Ads campaigns inside these engagements. I can do that separately. And I'm not promising organic rankings on specific keywords. Anyone who promises that is either lying or about to be.
I'll also tell you on the first call if I think your problem is a website rebuild rather than an audit, or if someone else would serve you better.
How the intake works
Book a free 30-minute call. Before the call, I review your Google Business Profile, your website, and your top three competitors. I also ask the AI assistants about you. That way the conversation is specific to your business instead of generic.
On the call, you describe your goals. I tell you honestly what I think will move the needle and what it will take. If it makes sense to move forward, you get a firm quote and a proposed start date within 48 hours.
The research I do before that call is yours either way.