What we&#x27;re seeing in the SERPs.

What a Calgary website actually costs, line by line

What is in a 14-page fullstack site, what drives the price, and the published numbers with no ranking promises attached.

What actually moves a Calgary local pack result

The map pack is not a mystery novel. Here are the levers that matter in Calgary, and the ones agencies inflate because they are easier to sell.

Does a contractor website need schema markup?

Schema will not magically rank you. Missing or fake schema will waste the crawl on a site that already had enough problems.

NAP consistency for Calgary local SEO

Mismatched phone numbers and fantasy addresses still sabotage otherwise decent Calgary sites. Here is the boring fix.

When to rebuild vs optimize the site you have

A rebuild is the right tool when the substrate cannot support SEO. It is the wrong tool when the site is fine and nobody answers the phone.

How many pages should a contractor website have?

Enough pages to rank for money services and take a lead. Not so many that the launch never happens.

Who should you hire for Calgary web design?

A buying guide for Calgary businesses comparing freelancers, productized shops and full-service agencies - without fake review theatre.

What to look for in a Calgary home-services SEO company

Home-services SEO in Calgary fails when agencies sell citywide rankings and ignore the phone. Here is a checklist instead of a crown.

How to choose a local SEO company in Calgary

A practical shortlist process for Calgary owners comparing local SEO pitches.

How local businesses get named by AI assistants

You cannot buy a ChatGPT sponsorship for local trades. You can make your business easy to cite correctly.

How AI assistants pick local service companies

Assistants synthesise what the open web repeats. That is good news for accurate businesses and bad news for keyword stunts.

2026-09-19

9 min read

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.

2026-09-17

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.

2026-09-15

10 min read

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.

2026-09-14

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.

2026-09-12

9 min read

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.

2026-09-02

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.

2026-08-21

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.

2026-08-21

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.

2026-08-08

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.

2026-08-04

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.

2026-07-28

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.

2026-07-19

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.

2026-07-11

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.

2026-07-08

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.

2026-06-30

10 min read

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.