Showing up when someone searches for what you do.
Two things have to happen for a local business to get found. You have to appear in Google’s map results when someone searches nearby — that’s the three businesses shown above everything else, and most calls come from there. And increasingly, you have to be the business an AI assistant names when someone asks it for a recommendation instead of searching at all.
Both come down to the same thing: being the clearest, best-documented answer to the question your customer is asking.
The two words people use for this
SEO
Making your business the thing Google decides to show when someone nearby searches for what you sell. Not buying the ad at the top — earning the results underneath it, and the three businesses on the little map, which is where most of the calls actually come from.
Google is deciding between you and everyone else who does what you do. It makes that decision by reading your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and what other sites say about you. Every one of those is something you can change.
GEO
The same idea, aimed at a different machine. More people are skipping the search box and asking an assistant instead — ChatGPT, Gemini, the AI answer sitting above Google’s own results. Ask one for a good dentist in Hanover and it will name two or three. Something decided that.
What decided it was reading. These systems answer from what is written about a business in plain, well-structured language — your own pages, your hours, your reviews, the directories you appear in. A business that is easy to read about gets named. A business that is a phone number and a photograph does not.
The reason both fit on one page is that they have stopped being different jobs. Whatever answers the question — a search engine or an assistant — it is looking for the same thing: the clearest, best-documented, most obviously real answer to what somebody asked. Almost everything below serves both at once.
What that involves
- Getting your Google Business Profile complete, accurate, and active
- Building pages that answer the actual questions people ask before they call
- Making sure your name, address, and hours match everywhere they appear
- Reviews — asked for steadily rather than in bursts. Every customer asked, nobody filtered out for seeming unhappy, nothing paid for, and never a review written by me or by you. That is the honest way and it is also the only lawful one.
- Structured data so search engines and AI models can read your site without guessing
What it doesn’t involve
No monthly retainer for a report nobody reads. No keyword stuffing. No buying links. The work is slow and it compounds, and I’d rather tell you that up front than sell you a spike.
And no promise of a position. Nobody can guarantee you a rank on Google — not me, not an agency, not anyone quoting you a number. What I can do is make you the clearest answer to the question, which is the part that is actually in anyone’s hands.
What moves you up the list.
A made-up search for a dentist near Hanover. Your practice is sixth — three places below where the calls come from. Tick off what you already have and watch where it puts you.
- 1Keystone Dental Care91
- 2Hanover Family Dental85
- 3Main Street Dental78
- 4Northgate Dental Group71
- 5Willow Creek Dental62
- 6Your business58
- 7Elm Street Dental51
Your business — position 6 of 7
An illustration, not a live search. The businesses and the scores are made up.