Joe Chierotti's SEO & Inbound Marketing Blog

Local SEO starts with accurate business information, relevant service pages, genuine customer feedback, and a reliable way to contact you. A business owner should prioritize the gaps that stop a nearby customer from choosing the business, rather than chase every possible directory listing. Audit the customer journey Search for your business name and your main service from the area you serve. Record the date and search location, because results can vary. Check whether the business details are correct and whether the landing page answers the question that prompted the search. Google describes local visibility in terms of relevance, distance, and prominence. Its local ranking guidance is a useful baseline. Distance is a constraint to understand, not something to solve by inventing addresses. Business profile checklist Confirm eligibility, ownership, and the real-world business name. Select categories that accurately describe the business. Maintain regular hours and special holiday hours...

A useful GEO content brief defines the customer’s decision, the answer a page must deliver, and the evidence needed to support it. Generative engine optimization is a working term for improving discovery in AI search experiences. A brief is valuable when it produces a better answer for people, regardless of where they discover it. Choose a decision instead of a broad keyword “Digital marketing” is a category. “Should a new accounting firm invest in local SEO or paid search first?” is a decision with constraints. The latter gives the writer a clear job: explain tradeoffs, requirements, and a practical next action. Collect questions from sales calls, support tickets, site searches, and customer interviews. Remove private details. Group questions that require the same answer, rather than creating a separate page for every wording variation. A brief you can use Field What to write Reader Role, problem, experience level, and constraints Decision What the reader should be able to decide Dir...

An AI-era SEO audit should identify whether customers can find, understand, trust, and act on your website. Start with the pages that influence inquiries, fix access and accuracy problems, then measure lead quality. AI visibility belongs inside this broader business goal. This working plan is designed for a small service business with limited time. The priorities below are recommendations, not a promise of rankings or AI citations. Choose five pages that influence revenue Start with the homepage, two core service pages, your strongest educational guide, and the contact page. For each, identify the customer, the question it answers, and the next action. An emergency service page needs a different answer and contact path from a guide explaining maintenance costs. Record the current URL, title, search description, indexed status, organic visits, inquiries, and known weaknesses. This baseline keeps the audit tied to a business outcome. Week 1: Check access and accuracy Open priority pages...

Quick answer: SEO helps people discover your website through search. GEO focuses on visibility in generative answers, while AEO emphasizes answering questions clearly. AIO is often used for AI optimization, but the label is less useful than the work: make your business easy to understand, verify and choose.

2026 BUYER GUIDE 16 reputation management companies Choose the service that matches your problem. REPAIR Harmful pages and search results PROTECT Privacy and monitoring MANAGE Reviews and local listings Compare scope, reporting, contract terms, and service fit. The best reputation management company depends on the problem you need to solve. A person facing a damaging search result needs a different service from a franchise managing reviews across dozens of locations. This guide compares 16 providers by their published service focus and shows you how to evaluate scope, reporting, costs, and realistic outcomes. Updated October 24, 2026. Provider descriptions are based on their official websites; services and terms should be confirmed directly. Editorial disclosure: Joe Chierotti is founder and CEO of Defamation Defenders, which is included below.

REPOST (Online Reputation Management companies) should have been all over this one): Is it possible to have my name removed from a 20 year old newspaper article that was published when I was a minor? from r/ReputationDefender  

Columbian Kids Play in Water on Beach at Sunset from r/photocritique

It’s inevitable pic.twitter.com/eBKnQm6QyF — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 18, 2020 Is he for real? Seems like Elon is taunting the SEC. He's one of my heroes regardless of his sometimes silly, spotlight grabbing ways.

Decent travel iphone photography taken by Joseph Chierotti, during his most recent stay in Jamaica as of 2020. View this post on Instagram We had an amazing time at Portland Jamaica's Blue Lagoon, a great destination for a weekend getaway in the Caribbean! Beautiful weather, beautiful water, beautiful people + more! ;) #bluelagoonjamaica🇯🇲🇯🇲🇯🇲🏊‍♂️ #bluelagoonportland #portlandjamaica🇯🇲 #bluelagoon #travelling #traveljamaica A post shared by Joseph Chierotti (@chierotti) on Feb 1, 2020 at 2:13pm PST

View the complete franchise disclosure document (FDD) for detailed information on franchise costs, fees, litigation, training, business experience and more.

Online Reputation Management Statistics

Not everyone knows what online reputation management (ORM) even is! At my digital marketing companies, we get this question all the time, and not from people who are uneducated. Far from it, in fact, many very smart businessmen that don't specialize in anything related to the internet or search engines, such as Google, are quite clueless when it comes to what Oline Reputation Management even means; just as I am likely clueless of what certain phrases I pick out in the technical jargon these businessmen and businesswoman speak to industry peers and colleagues. Common Components of Online Reputation Management Anyway, while an entire book could be (and has several times over) be written on the topic of 'what online reputation management is', I've summed it up into a few paragraphs that are very simple and easy to understand. Read J Chierotti 's answer to What is online reputation management? on Quora

Online Presence for Business Growth: The Definitive Guide https://t.co/47ujQ5ptHk via @CopyWarner pic.twitter.com/zDNuBPIblU — Joe Chierotti (@JoeChierotti) September 14, 2017

Which Business Directories should you submit your site to in order to improve national SEO rankings? When choosing which business directories to submit your website too you must use cation.  Submitting your website to too many business directories or submitting to trash directories may be picked up as a spam signal, resulting in lower rankings.  It's best to submit your website to only a few high quality national business directories that are trusted by Google. Top 3 Business Directories for National SEO Below I've listed a few good national business directories to help improve your website rankings and increase the visibility of your business on Google Search and other search engines. Best of the Web Business.com Directory Econsultancy Directory

2015 Top Most Influential Brands on LinkedIn Through Content Marketing A measure of the Top Global Brands on LinkedIn according to LinkedIn's Content Marketing Score, which measures and tracks the influence companies have on LinkedIn through their Content Marketing. 10 Most Influential Brands on LinkedIn (2015 Edition) from LinkedIn