How To Brief An AI SEO Agency Properly
Weeks Three and Four: The Access Findings A technical report covering crawler permissions, what the relevant agents actually receive from your server, whether bot management is interfering, and what survives on your key pages with JavaScript disabled.
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.
They also appear in the roundups by default, because journalists writing about a category name the companies everyone knows. You cannot short circuit that, and pretending otherwise wastes the effort that should be going into a narrower position where the incumbents are absent.
Be Honest About What Cannot Be Measured State the limits at the top rather than being caught out on them. There is no console reporting how often you were named. Referral attribution is incomplete because some assistants strip referrer data. Most of the channel's value arrives without a click.
One section most briefs omit is worth adding: what has already been tried and what happened. Agencies frequently propose work that was done two years ago and abandoned, because nobody told them. Listing previous efforts, including the ones that failed, saves a month and signals that you will be a straightforward client to work with.
The third question matters most. A good answer names a cause, attaches a number and admits an alternative explanation. A weak answer describes activity in the language of effort without connecting it to anything observable.
The truthful answer is that different parts of the work move at very different speeds, and knowing which is which lets you judge an engagement at the right moment instead of the convenient one. answer engine optimization
Ask for a Small, Bounded Commitment Do not ask for a year. Ask for one quarter with a defined scope: run the baseline, fix access problems, correct the listings on the sources that appeared, publish two pages that answer the questions your baseline showed were answered badly.
Expect the shape of progress to be uneven rather than gradual. Nothing appears to move for weeks, then several things change at once as a batch of corrected sources is re-crawled. Teams reading a flat month as failure tend to intervene precisely when the earlier work is about to land, which is why the checkpoints matter more than the weekly readings.
Publish one honest comparison page naming your real competitors, including where they are the better choice. And start asking every satisfied customer for a review, at the moment they are satisfied rather than a month later.
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.
Keep the brief to something you would be willing to send to three suppliers unchanged. The temptation is to tailor each one, which feels attentive and makes the resulting proposals impossible to compare. Identical briefs produce differences that reflect the agencies rather than the instructions, which is the entire point of asking more than one.
One caution about narrowing. Defining your category narrowly is the core advantage here, and it has to be a narrowing customers recognise rather than an invented segment. Claiming to be the leading provider of a category you named yourself impresses nobody and gets cited by nothing, because no buyer asks a question using that phrase.
Three to Nine Months: Earned Coverage The slowest and most valuable part. Getting into the comparison articles, trade publications and community discussions that assistants actually cite depends on other organisations deciding to write about you, which no amount of budget reliably accelerates.
Specificity Is the Small Brand Advantage Large companies write for every segment at once, which produces copy that commits to nothing. A small business can say exactly who it serves, in what geography, at what price, with what turnaround, and where it is not the right answer.
Write these plainly and prominently. A page that says we serve the wider area and offer competitive pricing contains nothing a model can use. A page that says we cover a fifteen mile radius, charge a fixed call out fee, and can usually attend within four hours can be quoted directly into an answer.
How to Run the Ninety Day Review Ask three questions. Can you show me the prompt set is unchanged. Can you show me the raw answers. What specifically did you do, and which of the changes do you believe caused which movement.
Alongside it, the first rewritten pages. Not a volume of new content, but your most commercially important existing pages restructured to answer directly and to carry specifics. You should be asked to confirm figures, since nobody outside your business can verify a lead time or a price range.
