Technical SEO and AI search visibility
The half of SEO that's engineering rather than copywriting, and the newer half that decides whether an AI answer engine can quote you.
Technical SEO is the work that decides whether a search engine can read your site properly: whether pages can be crawled, whether headings describe what a page is about, whether your prices and hours are marked up in a way a machine understands, whether two pages are quietly competing for the same term. None of it involves writing more blog posts, and most of it's invisible until it's missing.
It's unglamorous and it's usually where the quickest wins are. A page with no real heading and no description is being guessed at by Google. Two near-identical service pages are splitting whatever authority either of them had. A redirect that was never set up is sending people to a dead page. These are one-afternoon fixes with a disproportionate effect.
The newer half is being findable by answer engines. More people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI summaries a question instead of scanning ten blue links, and those systems favor pages with clear structure, explicit answers, and machine-readable markup. Much of that overlaps with good technical SEO, but some of it's specific, and almost nobody serving local businesses is doing it yet.
What's included
Everything covered, in plain terms.
Crawlability
Whether search engines can reach and read every page that matters, and aren't wasting effort on ones that don't.
Titles and descriptions
Unique, location-qualified titles and descriptions on every page, rather than letting Google invent them.
Heading structure
Real headings in the code, not text styled to look like one. Page builders get this wrong constantly.
Structured data
Your business, hours, location, services and prices marked up so machines can read them and results can show more than a blue link.
Duplicates and redirects
Pages competing with each other, and links that go nowhere, found and resolved rather than left to accumulate.
AI search visibility
Clear answers, explicit structure and the markup answer engines rely on, so your site can be quoted rather than skipped.
Questions
Technical & AI Search, answered.
What is the difference between technical SEO and regular SEO?
Technical SEO is about whether a search engine can read and understand your site at all: crawlability, structure, markup, duplicates, redirects. Content SEO is about what the pages say and whether they answer what people search for. Both matter, but technical problems cap everything else: the best page on the internet won't rank if a search engine can't read its heading or has indexed a duplicate of it instead.
How do I get my business to show up in AI search results?
Answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI summaries favor pages with a clear structure, explicit answers to real questions, and machine-readable markup describing the business. In practice that means writing answers that stand alone out of context rather than burying them in marketing copy, and marking up your services, hours and location properly. Much of it overlaps with good technical SEO; some of it's specific and very few local businesses are doing it yet.
Do you write blog posts or content?
No. We do the engineering half: structure, markup, crawlability, the things that decide whether what you have published can be read and understood. If you need someone writing articles, that's a different discipline and we'll point you at someone who does it well rather than pretending we do.
How long before technical SEO changes show up in Google?
Google needs to recrawl and reprocess the pages, which usually takes a few days to a few weeks depending on how often it visits your site. Structural fixes like headings and descriptions tend to surface faster than changes that depend on the wider index. It's slower than speed work and faster than content, and anyone promising results in a set number of days is guessing.
Related
Often done alongside.
Local Search
For a business people find by searching a service and a town, the map pack is most of the game, and it's a different discipline to ranking a web page.
Analytics & Tracking
Most local businesses have analytics installed and almost none of them can answer the only question that matters: where did the last ten customers come from?
Want to know what's costing you business?
We will scan your site before we talk and come to the call with the three things we think are most worth your attention. No prep needed from you. No obligation to hire us afterward.