Practical observations on web design, local search and answer engines — written for business owners, not marketing departments. No filler, no predictions, no hype.
An entity is the concept your business occupies in a model's knowledge — distinct from your website, your Google listing, or your reviews. Those are evidence. The entity is the thing they prove. Here's why that distinction matters and how to define yours.
Read the note →Most businesses pick something that sounds right and leave it. But the primary category tells Google which map pack to put you in — and that choice determines who you're competing against. Here's how to test yours against what's actually ranking in your area.
Read the note →Text baked into a photo is invisible to every crawler that matters — Google, AI models, screen readers. The habit of designing with images instead of words is quietly making local businesses harder to find. Here's what it costs and what to do about it.
Read the note →Keyword-stuffed business names and lead-gen listings at addresses nobody works from rank above real businesses every day. Identifying them and filing a redressal takes about an hour — and removing one is often the fastest ranking improvement available.
Read the note →A new convention, not yet a standard. A plain-text file in your root that tells models which pages to read first when they're building their picture of your business. Small effort, useful signal — especially if your most important pages are buried in a large site.
Read the note →Google folds Core Web Vitals into its ranking algorithm. AI models skip pages that are slow to render. Both problems have the same root cause — too much code loading before the page can paint — and the same fix. Here's what to measure and what to do about it.
Read the note →No weekly newsletter. No drip sequence. When something useful comes out of a real project, I write it up.
Notes are written by Keith Graber, who builds sites and local search visibility for businesses across southern Indiana. When something comes up on a real project that seems worth explaining, it ends up here.