Traditional SEO still matters, but the way search works has changed. Answer engines like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity don’t just rank your page and hope someone clicks. These engines read your content, extract facts, and synthesize a response. Small businesses win when they state who they are, what they do, and where they operate in plain language that machines can quote accurately. The goal is the same as it has always been: be the clearest, most credible source in the room. Read on for tips you can follow to become visible to AI.
Write for direct answers
Lead each key section with a single sentence that could stand alone as a definition or answer. Then follow with supporting detail. For example, instead of opening a services page with “Welcome to ABC Plumbing, where we’ve been serving the community since 1987,” try: “ABC Plumbing provides emergency and residential plumbing repair in Columbus, Ohio.” That first sentence is something an AI summary can quote directly. The backstory and personality can come after.
This matters because AI systems extract discrete facts about your business, not mood or atmosphere. They are looking for subject, verb, object: who you are, what you do, where you do it.
What to avoid is “thin fluff,” which is padding that sounds like content but contains no quotable facts. Thin fluff includes phrases like “We are passionate about delivering world-class service to our valued customers.” That sentence communicates nothing a machine (or a skeptical human) can verify or use. It contains no specific claim, no location, no service, no credential. Pages built primarily on thin fluff rank poorly in classic search because they have low informational value, and they are skipped over by AI systems for the same reason. Replace fluff with specifics: what you do, who you serve, what area you cover, what problems you solve, and what makes you different in concrete terms.
What to do
If you manage your own WordPress or GoDaddy site, go to each service or product page and read the first two sentences out loud. Ask yourself: if someone read only those two sentences, would they know what this page is about and who it is for? If the answer is no, rewrite the opening. On most page builders (WordPress Gutenberg, GoDaddy’s Website Builder, Squarespace), you can simply click into the text block and edit it directly. No developer required.
If you have a developer, ask them to audit your page headlines (the H1 on each page) and opening paragraphs for specificity. The H1 is the large heading at the top of a page and is one of the strongest signals search engines read. It should name what the page is about, not just echo your business name.
Use structured data thoughtfully
Structured data is code added to your website that helps search engines understand what your content means, not just what it says. Think of it as labeling your information so a machine can read “this is the business name,” “this is the address,” “this is a frequently asked question,” rather than guessing from context.
The format most commonly used today is called JSON-LD, which is a small block of code placed in the background of your page (in the HTML head section). You never see it as a visitor, but crawlers read it and use it to build richer search results.
Three types are most relevant for small businesses:
- Organization schema tells search engines your business name, website, logo, social media profiles, and contact information. It establishes your business as a recognized entity in the knowledge graph, which is the database Google and others use to connect related facts. This is relevant for any business website.
- LocalBusiness schema is a more specific version that adds physical address, service area, hours of operation, and geographic coordinates. This is especially important if you serve customers in a specific city or region, operate a physical location, or want to appear in local search results and map results. There are subtypes for specific industries such as Restaurant, MedicalBusiness, AutoRepair, and dozens more. Using the right subtype signals relevance to local queries.
- FAQPage schema marks up a list of questions and answers on your page so search engines can display them directly in results as expandable snippets. For this to work correctly, the questions and answers must actually appear as visible text on the page. The schema simply reinforces what is already readable to humans. Do not add FAQ schema pointing to content that does not exist on the page, and do not fabricate answers or keyword-stuff them. The questions should reflect what customers actually ask you.
A caution: incorrect structured data can hurt you. If your LocalBusiness schema says you are open 24 hours but your actual hours listed on the page say otherwise, that conflict erodes trust with search engines. If your schema marks up a page as an FAQ but the page contains no actual questions and answers, it may trigger a manual penalty. When in doubt, accurate and minimal is better than ambitious and wrong.
What to do
If you are using WordPress, install a plugin such as Rank Math or Yoast SEO. Both have free tiers that generate Organization and LocalBusiness schema from a settings form, no coding required. You fill in your business name, address, hours, and logo, and the plugin handles the JSON-LD output. For FAQ schema, both plugins also allow you to add FAQ blocks directly within the page editor that automatically generate the correct markup.
If you are on GoDaddy’s Website Builder (their drag-and-drop product, not WordPress), structured data options are limited in the base editor. GoDaddy does inject some basic schema automatically, but it is minimal. Your best option is to ask your developer to add a JSON-LD script block manually through GoDaddy’s “Custom Code” or “Header/Footer” injection feature, which is available under the website settings. Give your developer your business name, address, phone, hours, service area, and a list of five to ten genuine FAQs with answers, and ask them to implement LocalBusiness and FAQPage JSON-LD using Google’s recommended format. You can validate the result for free at Google’s Rich Results Test.
If you are on Squarespace, the platform adds basic schema automatically but does not natively support FAQPage schema. A developer can inject it via the Code Injection panel under Settings.
Build authority the old-fashioned way
Links from reputable external sources still signal trust to search engines, and that has not changed. A mention and link from your local chamber of commerce, a regional news outlet that covered your business, an industry directory, or a partner organization carries real weight. These signals tell search engines that independent sources consider your business relevant and credible.
For AI-powered answer engines specifically, there is an additional dynamic. These systems synthesize multiple sources to construct an answer. When they find the same fact (your specialty, your service area, your founding year) confirmed across several independent pages, they treat it as more reliable. This is why consistent, accurate business information across your website, Google Business Profile, Yelp, industry directories, and local citations matters beyond just traditional SEO.
Page speed and accessibility are also authority factors that many small business owners overlook. A page that loads slowly or fails on mobile is crawled less thoroughly by search engines. More importantly, AI systems that crawl content to build their knowledge bases prioritize pages they can fully read. If your page has large uncompressed images, broken elements, or text buried inside images (rather than actual HTML text), that content may simply be skipped.
What to do
Check whether your business is listed consistently across Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yelp, Apple Maps, and any relevant industry directories. Your business name, address, and phone number should be identical everywhere, including the same abbreviations or spellings. Inconsistencies across listings create conflicting signals.
For page speed, go to PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL. It is free and will show you a score for both mobile and desktop along with the specific issues dragging your score down. Common culprits on small business sites are oversized images and slow hosting. If your score is below 50 on mobile, bring those results to your developer and ask them to address the top three flagged items.
Ask your developer whether your pages render in plain HTML that a crawler can read, or whether large portions of content are loaded via JavaScript after the page opens. Text that loads via JavaScript is less reliably indexed by some crawlers. If your key service descriptions, location information, or FAQs only appear after a script runs, ask about moving them into the static HTML.
Finally, write or update the copy on your About page to include your city and state, the types of clients or customers you serve, how long you have been in business, and any credentials or affiliations that are verifiable. That page is often one of the most visited on a small business site and is one of the pages AI systems read to establish who you are as an entity.
The through line across all of this is clarity. The businesses that surface in AI-generated answers and traditional search results are not necessarily the biggest or the ones with the most content. They are the ones whose pages make it easiest for a machine to extract an accurate, specific, trustworthy answer. That is entirely achievable for a small business with a modest site, a focused message, and a willingness to replace vague language with concrete facts.
We plan technical SEO and structured data in our services engagements. Tell us your market and we will outline a realistic plan.