What this lesson covers
How do people find answers now, and how do I become the answer?
- How search engines work
- Keyword and intent research
- On-page and technical SEO (search engine optimization)
- Local SEO: optimizing the Google Business Profile, the map results, listings and service-area pages
- Reviews as a ranking and trust signal
- Product feeds and Google Merchant Center: free product listings and shopping results
- Structured data and entity signals
- Visibility in AI answers, overviews and AI shopping results
Why this matters now
Placeholder for the lesson's opening story: a vivid, real moment where a marketer or small-business owner meets this exact problem.
You can now
Research keywords and search intent, and set up the basics of local SEO and visibility in AI answers.
For your own business or employer: Help the business become the answer when customers search or ask an AI assistant.
Industry case studies
Industry Case
Bajada Plumbing & Drain
Local home service · Demand capture
Case update 4.3
Module 4 of 8 in this case
Into the three-pack
When Dana searches “emergency plumber near me,” she sees three businesses on a map before anything else. Bajada's goal from 3.3 is to be one of them in all six zip codes.
Carmen starts with consistency. She searches for Bajada across the directories and finds three versions of the business: an old address, an old phone number, and a listing still in her father's name. Search engines trust what agrees, so she fixes all of them to match the profile exactly.
Next, service-area pages, one for each zip code, each with real jobs done in that neighborhood and a photo from a real driveway.
Then the review engine, the part that moves the stars. After every job, the customer gets a text with a direct link to leave a review, sent while the relief is fresh. And Carmen answers every review, good and bad, by name and within a day. Reviews are a ranking signal and a trust signal at the same time, and right now Bajada has 41 to Copper Canyon's 900.
The last layer is new. Homeowners are starting to ask AI assistants, “Who fixes slab leaks on the east side?” Those answers are assembled from the web: listings, reviews, pages that name the service and the neighborhood. So Bajada's pages say exactly what it does and where it does it, and the review requests ask customers to mention the job.
A year from now, the 2 a.m. search will look different.
Artifact added
Local SEO plan and the review-request process
Industry Case
Ocotillo & Ash
DTC fashion · Demand creation
Case update 4.3
Module 4 of 8 in this case
The Sedona Pant has to go
Lena's product names are pretty and invisible. Nobody searches for “The Sedona Pant.” They search for “linen wide-leg pants for hot weather.”
So the product feed she sends to Google Merchant Center gets rewritten in customer words: what it is, what it's made of, who it's for. Every product gets complete attributes: material, size range, color, price, availability. That feed puts Ocotillo & Ash in the free product listings and shopping results now, and it's the same feed her catalog ads will run on in Module 6.
AI shopping answers read the same data, plus the reviews. A complete feed is how a small brand gets recommended at all.
Artifact added
Product feed checklist: titles, attributes and free listings
Industry Case
Tepary Kitchen
Local restaurant · Local and offline
Case update 4.3
Module 4 of 8 in this case
“Closed Tuesdays”
Miguel searches for Tepary on every directory he can find, and on two of them his heart sinks. They list Tepary as closed on Tuesdays, from an old schedule six years ago.
Remember the Saturday guests in 2.3 who said, “I didn't know you were open on Tuesdays”? Some of them had checked.
The cleanup takes an afternoon: the same name, address, phone, hours and menu link everywhere, with the menu marked up so search engines can read the dishes and prices. Then reviews. Rosa answers every one, including the ones about the 40-minute wait. Her answer to those is honest, and it's also an invitation: “Come on a Tuesday. The table's yours.”
Artifact added
Listings cleanup and review-response plan
Who owns what, and selling the long game
Onboard with a checklist. Collect access, brand assets and goals in the first week, the same way every time. Get access through user roles and admin invitations, never by asking for a client's passwords.
The client owns their assets. The domain, website, Google Business Profile, social accounts, ad accounts and customer data belong to the client and should be registered in the client's name. You get access, not ownership, and when the work ends nothing is held hostage.
Setting expectations. Search results take months, and no one can guarantee a ranking. Explain the timeline up front, and report early signs of progress, such as impressions, map views and calls from the listing, before revenue arrives.
Listen
Podcast · Move at the Speed of Culture
Cultural Context Is the New SEO
Listen for how understanding the searcher's context, not just the keyword, shapes what ranks and converts.
More from Move at the Speed of Culture →
Listen online: moveatthespeedofculture.com/cultural-context-is-the-new-seo
Key terms
- AI Overviews: AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results, citing the sources they draw on.
- AI search visibility: Whether and how a business appears in answers from AI tools such as Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. Emerging names for the practice include generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO).
- Citation (local listing): A mention of a business's name, address and phone number on another site, such as Yelp, Apple Maps or a directory.
- Crawling and indexing: How search engines discover pages (crawling) and store them in their database so they can appear in results (indexing).
- Entity: A distinct, well-defined thing, such as a person, business, place or product, that search engines and AI systems recognize and connect to facts.
- Free product listings: Unpaid product results that appear in Google's Shopping tab and other Google surfaces, powered by the Merchant Center feed.
- Google Merchant Center: Google's free tool where retailers upload their product feed so products can appear in free listings and Shopping ads.
- Keyword: A word or phrase people type or speak into a search engine.
- Local pack: The map and short list of businesses Google shows for local searches, such as "plumber near me." Also called the map pack.
- Local SEO: Optimizing to appear in local and map results, through the Google Business Profile, consistent listings, reviews and location or service-area pages.
- On-page SEO: Optimizing what is on the page itself, such as titles, headings, content, images and internal links.
- Product feed: A structured file of a store's products, with titles, prices, images and availability, that is sent to platforms such as Google and Meta.
- Search engine: A system, such as Google or Bing, that crawls the web, indexes pages and ranks them in response to a query.
- Search intent: The goal behind a search: to learn something (informational), to find a specific site (navigational), to compare (commercial) or to buy or book (transactional).
- SEO (search engine optimization): Improving a website and its content so it appears higher in unpaid (organic) search results for relevant searches.
- Service-area page: A web page for each city or area a service business covers, so it can rank for searches there.
- Structured data: Code added to a page, usually in the schema.org vocabulary, that tells search engines exactly what the page is about, such as a business, product, review or event. Also called schema markup.
- Technical SEO: Making sure search engines can crawl, understand and load a site quickly, including site speed, mobile-friendliness, site structure and secure (HTTPS) pages.