Why your competitor gets recommended for your own town

Here is a pattern we see in audit after audit. A business is based in a town. It has done great work there for years. Ask an AI assistant "who should I hire for this in that town," and it names a company based somewhere else, sometimes twenty minutes away.

The owner’s first reaction is that the other company must be paying for it. They are not. They just built something the owner never did.

An illustrative example

Picture two remodelers. The first is based in a coastal town and has finished a dozen whole-home projects there. Its website has a homepage, a services page, an about page and a gallery. The gallery has beautiful photos and no captions.

The second remodeler is based two towns north. Its site has a page for each of the eight towns it serves. One of them is the first remodeler’s home town, with a paragraph about the older housing stock there and a case study titled with that town’s name.

Someone asks an assistant for a whole-home remodeler in that coastal town. The assistant searches, finds the second company’s page about exactly that, reads the case study, and recommends them. The first company, which has done ten times more work in that town, is not mentioned.

The model can’t credit work it can’t read about.

What a good town page has

Town pages got a bad name years ago, when sites generated hundreds of copies with the town name swapped. Those do not work and never really did. A page worth building has real content only you could write.

• A title and heading that name the service and the town. "Whole-home remodeling in Newburyport, MA."
• An opening paragraph that answers the question. Who you are, that you work in this town, what you do there.
• Something local and true. The kind of homes, permitting or historic district realities, what projects there usually involve.
• Proof from that town. A project, a review, a before-and-after. If you have none there yet, say which nearby town the example is from.
• Questions people in that town ask. Answered in two or three sentences each, and marked up as FAQ.

Case studies named by place

If town pages are the map, case studies are the evidence. Name them the way someone would search: the work, then the town. "Kitchen and mudroom remodel, Hamilton" beats "The Johnson Project" every time, both for a person scanning and for a model matching a question.

Then connect them. The case study links to its town page. The town page shows the case study. The service page links to both. That web of links is how a machine learns that your business, that service and that town belong together.

Start with your home town

If you only build one page this month, build the page for the town you are based in. It is the question you most deserve to win, and the one where losing to a competitor costs the most.