How To Brief An AI SEO Agency Properly

How to Handle Published Statistics Every figure you repeat should carry its publisher, sample size and date. This is not pedantry, it is self protection, because figures in this field get repeated until nobody remembers the sample.

You Have No Stable Identity Models need to connect scattered mentions to a single entity. If your company appears under three different spellings, lists two different founding years, and gives an address on your site that does not match your directory listings, those mentions may never be joined up.

The sources column is the one people skip and the one that generates the actual work. It tells you which third party pages your category's answers are built from, which is a target list you did not have to guess at. ai seo company

The shortlist is shorter than a conventional local results page, which raises the stakes on being included. Being fourth on a map still gets calls. Being fourth in a recommendation that names three businesses gets none.

What Transfers to an Ordinary Business Three things, and they are the three that most small operators skip. Check that you are readable before assuming you have a content problem, since on a small site an access failure is total rather than partial.

Measure Position Change in the Prompt Set This is the closest thing to an output metric that you can genuinely audit, because you own the instrument. Run a fixed prompt set on a fixed schedule under fixed conditions, and track four things:

Where you serve several towns, resist the instinct to claim the widest possible area. A stated coverage radius that you genuinely honour is more useful than a list of thirty places you would only travel to reluctantly, because the specific claim gets quoted and the vague one does not. Being the obvious answer within a tight radius produces more work than being one of many possibilities across a county.

One presentational point makes this considerably easier to defend. Put the limitations on the first page rather than in a footnote. A report that opens by stating what cannot be measured is read as careful, while the same information discovered later is read as something that was concealed, and the difference determines how the numbers around it are treated.

A frequently quoted comparison showing assistant referrals converting several times better than search came from a vendor selling the service, across 312 business to business brands. A widely shared claim about explosive referral growth rested on nineteen analytics properties. Both are legitimate observations and neither supports the confident generalisation usually attached to them.

The lesson generalises to any brand whose name is short, generic or ambiguous. The correction is not clever, it is repetitive: pick one written form, use it everywhere, and pair it with a descriptive phrase so that a mention alone is never the only clue about what it refers to.

Your Pages Contain Nothing Quotable Look at your homepage and count the sentences that could be lifted, attributed to you and remain true and useful out of context. On most brand sites the count is close to zero, because the copy is written to persuade rather than to inform.

A Single Topic Site Has No Redundancy A site covering one subject has no second chance. If the handful of pages describing that subject are not readable, there is nothing else for a system to fall back on.

Use the Soft Signals Deliberately Two free signals carry more information than their informality suggests. Add a how did you hear about us question to your enquiry form and read the free text monthly rather than the categories.

Why Local Is More Exposed The classic local query is a recommendation request with a geographic constraint, and that maps directly onto what a generated answer does well. Somebody asking who to call for a specific job in a specific town receives two or three names rather than a map and a list to work through.

If you will not name competitors, say that too, and understand it removes the highest performing content format from the plan. Better to have that argument in the brief than to have a comparison page written and then killed.

State who signs off, how fast, and what is off limits. An agency that knows the constraints will build a plan that fits them. One that finds out gradually will spend the retainer producing work that never ships. ai seo company

These names go directly into the prompt set and into any comparison content, and getting them wrong sends the entire measurement effort in the wrong direction. If you lose to a low cost regional operator rather than to the market leader, say so.

Broad sites are forgiving. A blocked section or a badly rendered template still leaves a hundred other pages describing the organisation. A small site with five pages has no such buffer, which makes the mechanical checks disproportionately important.

You also cannot cleanly attribute a purchase to a recommendation the buyer received three weeks earlier in a conversation you never saw. That influence is real, it is often the main value of the channel, and it will not appear in any report you own.