Practical guides on Local SEO, AEO, and GEO for London and Home Counties businesses. Written by the people who do this work — not a content team following a brief.
There are exactly two routes into an AI model's answer — its trained knowledge and its live web search — and both can be influenced. The entity work, the quotable page shape, the classic SEO that still gates everything, and how to measure it honestly.
ChatGPT already shortlists tradesmen and agencies for millions of people. Where its recommendations come from, the Bing indexation lever almost no UK business is pulling, and the page and reputation work that earns citations.
The three businesses in the map pack take most of the calls. What Google actually weighs — relevance, distance, prominence — and the profile work, review system, photo habit, and geo-grid measurement that move a trade business into the three.
The postcard era is mostly over — video verification is now the default. Every method still in circulation, what to film so you pass first time (including the service-area trade version), and what to do when verification stalls or fails.
There's no phone number to ring — and anyone who rings you claiming to be Google is a scammer. The channels that do exist, how to get from the help centre to a human, and why the community forum often beats the official ticket.
Editing now happens directly in Search and Maps — and some edits sail through while others send your profile back into review. Which is which, the editors changing your profile who aren't you, and a maintenance rhythm that compounds.
Deleting the profile doesn't delete the listing — that surprise catches almost everyone. What each kind of 'delete' actually does, the right move for closures, moves, rebrands and duplicates, and the delete-and-restart trap to avoid.
A suspension means the phone goes quiet overnight — and what you do in the first day largely decides whether reinstatement takes days or months. The exact order of operations, the evidence that works, and the three panic moves to avoid.
Google's appeals tool is the only route back from a suspension, and it gives you one good shot. Every step in order — including the short evidence-upload window that decides most appeals and that almost everyone fumbles.
A denial ends the easy route, not the profile. The three escalation channels that still work — fresh evidence, GBP support, and the community forum's Product Experts — plus how to keep leads coming in while the listing is down.
Unverified, suspended, duplicated, miscategorised, outranked, or just too new — a missing Maps listing is always one of eight things. How to diagnose which one is yours in two minutes, and the fix for each.
Most London plumbers have a website. Most of them rank for their own name and nothing else. The fix isn't a new site — it's building borough pages that match the searches that actually convert.
SEO earns you a position in a ranked list. AEO earns you the single answer that gets spoken aloud or cited by an AI tool. Here is what separates them, why most UK businesses need both, and how to decide where to invest first.
Search engines return ten results. Answer engines return one. AEO is the discipline of making sure that one result is your business — whether someone is asking Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, or ChatGPT.
Both terms get used in the same breath so often that many businesses assume they're interchangeable. They're not. Here's what separates them, why each matters, and why doing one without the other leaves half your customers unreachable.
Reading about SEO is useful. Knowing exactly where your business is losing customers online is more useful. We'll check your Google, voice search, and AI visibility and send you a plain-English breakdown of what to fix first.
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