What we're seeing in the SERPs.
No trend pieces and no borrowed statistics. Each note explains a mechanism, what we do about it, and how you can check it on your own site.
We put a voice agent on a plumbing line for ninety days. Here is what it actually did
An AI receptionist is being sold as a replacement for your office. It is not. It is a replacement for your voicemail, and once you frame it that way the maths gets very easy.
Read the note ->Missed call text back is the cheapest thing on our price list and the hardest to argue with
One automatic text, sent from your own number, to people who already wanted to hire you. The setup takes an afternoon and most shops get the cost back in the first fortnight.
Read the note ->The assistant named three plumbers. Nobody scrolled down to check its work
Rankings holding while clicks slide is now the most common pattern in our reporting. The answer is being given above you, and getting named in it responds to different work than ranking does.
Read the note ->The lead called. Nobody picked up. The report still says the site is working
Ranking work ends the second the phone rings. For most contractors the largest single loss in the whole funnel happens after that, and nothing in the marketing report can see it.
Read the note ->Most automation projects in a trades business fail for the same reason: nobody wrote down what happens now
The two automations worth building in a contracting business are boring, take a week, and are worth more than another thousand visitors a month. Everything else is a demo.
Read the note ->Your quote form asks for eleven things and gets four leads a week
Every field on a quote form costs you a share of the people who started it. Here is how to find out which fields are doing the damage on your own site, and which ones you actually need before you can quote.
Read the note ->Conversion rate is one number hiding three different failures
A site can rank better, take more traffic and close less work, and a single conversion rate will not tell you which of three unrelated things went wrong. The step-to-step chain will, in about an hour.
Read the note ->Search Console now reports AI impressions - and gives you nothing to divide them by
Google's Generative AI report finished rolling out to every property on 11 August. It counts impressions inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, and reports no clicks, no click-through rate, no position and no queries. Both of the obvious conclusions people are drawing from it are wrong.
Read the note ->Your reviews went quiet and nobody changed anything
Review counts do not usually collapse. They taper, for reasons that have nothing to do with how happy customers are, and by the time it shows up in the local pack it has been happening for months.
Read the note ->Google's local pack shake-up: proximity is losing to review velocity
Review recency is doing work that raw review count used to do. Here's the mechanism, the standing procedure we set up for it, and the two shortcuts that get profiles suspended.
Read the note ->Programmatic location pages that survive a spam update
City-name-swap boilerplate gets filtered. Here is the data model we build to, why the rule caps how many pages you can publish, and how to tell whether yours are already thin.
Read the note ->INP is quietly killing contractor sites built on page builders
The taps that matter on a contractor site are the call button and the quote form - which is exactly what page builders wrap in the most JavaScript. Here is the fix list in order of impact.
Read the note ->What a fourteen day build cannot include, and why we say so up front
A fixed timeline is only honest if the scope behind it is fixed too. Here is exactly what fits in fourteen days, what does not, and what happens to the things that do not.
Read the note ->GBP service areas: 20 is the cap, but 6 is the number
Stuffing the service area list feels like free reach. It usually costs you relevance - and drive time. Here is the mechanism, and the eight-week test to run on your own listing.
Read the note ->AI Overviews are eating informational queries - and leaving the money ones alone
The queries that convert are still a blue-link fight. Here's how that should change where your content budget goes.
Read the note ->Follow this on Google
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