The Big Shift in How Customers Find Your Business
The way customers find you online is undergoing a massive change, and to win in Google’s new AI search, you need a sharp strategy. With AI-powered search on the rise, the traditional list of ten blue links is no longer the main attraction. A concise, AI-generated answer now sits at the very top of the page. This makes the fundamentals of “classic SEO” more important than ever, but with a new objective. The goal isn’t just to rank at the top; it’s to have your business mentioned directly in those AI-generated answers. This guide gives small business owners like Kingston and Richmond Removals and Simply Done Removals a clear, step-by-step checklist to master both new and classic SEO strategies. You’ll get a proper game plan to ensure your brand is the one AI platforms recommend. This transactional guide helps you boost your online presence and increase your revenue.
1. Your New #1 Priority: The Google Business Profile (GBP)
For any local business, your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the single most critical factor for appearing in AI search results. Google’s AI relies heavily on its own products, so a perfectly optimised GBP is now responsible for about 90% of your performance in local, AI-generated answers. Ultimately, if you don’t have a strong GBP, the AI will simply not see you as a legitimate, local choice. Taking the top-ranking “Kingston Removals commpanies” as our model, here is what a perfect profile looks like.
Your GBP Optimisation Checklist
- Choose the Perfect Category: This is a simple but powerful setting. For example, selecting the single most accurate category for your business can result in a significant ranking increase of five to ten spots. This is a massive step towards dominating your local market.
- Verify Your Address and Phone Number: Local relevance is paramount. You must ensure you have a legitimate physical address in the city you serve and a phone number with the correct local area code. Without this foundational data, the AI has no way of confidently recommending your business.
- Dominate with Customer Reviews: The number of reviews you have is a massive competitive advantage Your goal must be to narrow any “review gap” between you and the top players, as the AI uses these reviews as a primary signal of trust and commercial viability. This is a direct investment in your brand’s credibility.
- Respond to Every Single Review: This is a non-negotiable activity. It’s not just brilliant for customer service, but top-ranking businesses make it a priority to respond to all reviews, demonstrating engagement. A responsive business is a trustworthy one, and the AI sees this as a key signal of quality.
- Write a Smart Description: Use your description to create a strong association between your business name (your “entity”), your core services, and your location. You should include key terms like “removals company” and your city name, but be careful not to be “too aggressive” by repeating them excessively.
- Link to the Right Webpage: Your GBP profile must link directly to the specific service and location landing page on your website, not your general homepage. For instance, the “Kingston Removals” GBP should link to the “Kingston Removals” page. This sends a clear signal to the AI about what the page is about.
- Upload Plenty of Photos and Videos: Visuals build trust and provide more information for Google. The AI can analyse these visuals to better understand the nature of your business.
- Post Regularly: Consistent activity signals to Google that your business is active and relevant. Plus users want to hire services from a business that is updated on its GBP.
- Link Your Social Media Profiles: Connect your primary social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) to your GBP. This further solidifies your online presence and provides more data for the AI to crawl.
2. Mastering Your Online Reputation (Beyond Your Own Website)
Google’s AI doesn’t just look at its own platform; it scans the entire internet to understand who is trustworthy and authoritative. Building a strong reputation across multiple third-party sites is essential for influencing AI recommendations. After all, the AI is only as good as the information it’s given.
2.1. The Power of Reviews and Directories
AI platforms aggregate reviews and information from dozens of sources, not just Google. This concept of “review diversity” is critical. AI models see that a business has positive reviews on Google, Yelp, and other industry-specific directories and conclude it’s a reliable choice. The more positive sources a business has, the stronger its authority becomes in the eyes of the AI.
Actionable Advice: To start, identify the key directories where your top competitors are listed. Next, make it a priority to ensure your business is listed on those same platforms. Furthermore, you should work to get reviews there as well. This provides a richer, more comprehensive picture of your brand’s reputation.
2.2. Controlling Your Story with Press Releases
Surprisingly, press releases have found a new, strategic role in the age of AI. The primary goal is no longer about getting a “backlink.” Instead, it’s about playing the long game: training the AI platforms about your business. Every press release you publish creates new information on the web that helps AI models understand more about your business “entity.”
Over time, this “trains” the AI’s foundational knowledge, ensuring that when future versions of the model are released, the correct, positive information about your brand is already baked in. This reframes press releases from a short-term tactic to a long-term brand-building exercise for the AI era.
3. Getting Your Website in Order (The “Classic SEO” You Still Need)
A well-organised website remains the foundation of your online presence. This is more important than ever because of how AI search engines work—a process called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In simple terms, when an AI doesn’t know the answer to a question from its existing training data, it performs a quick, “classic” Google search to find the top-ranking web pages on the topic. It then uses the information from those pages to create its answer. This is why classic SEO is still critical. If you don’t rank on the first page, the AI won’t find you and won’t mention you. It’s a transactional process that begins with a proper search ranking.
3.1. Quick Technical Cleanup
A common and serious technical issue is having two accessible versions of your website: one with www (e.g., www.yourwebsite.com) and one without. This effectively creates duplicate content and confuses search engines. The solution is simple but crucial: choose one version as your “preferred” domain. Then, have your web developer set up a permanent 301 redirect to send all traffic from the non-preferred version to the correct one. This technical step is a key part of your SEO performance and signals to Google that your site is clean and well-maintained.
3.2. Smart Website Structure
- Dedicated Pages: Your website must have a separate, dedicated page for each core service you offer in each specific location. As an example, you need a unique page for “removals in Richmond.” In one real-world case, a business that used to have this correct structure later made the mistake of redirecting these specific pages to its homepage, which is a problematic move that dilutes relevance and reduces its chances of being featured in AI Overviews.
- Clean URLs: Your page URLs should be simple, clean, and contain the core service and location. A great structure to follow is: yourwebsite.com/location/service-name. This makes it easy for both users and search engines to understand what the page is about.
- Unique Titles & Meta Descriptions: Every single page on your website must have a unique title and meta description. With modern AI tools like ChatGPT, this task can be completed quickly and easily. Consequently, there is no longer a good reason to have duplicate meta descriptions on your site, as it is a mark of poor quality that both search engines and AI platforms will pick up on.
3.3. Creating Relevant Page Content
Your service pages must cover the key topics that customers care about and that your top competitors are already discussing. It’s common for businesses to have “relevance gaps” where their website fails to mention important sub-topics. For instance, a removal company’s page might be missing sections on “office removals” or “packing services,” even though its competitors cover them thoroughly. Follow this simple process to close those gaps:
- Look at the top-ranking competitor pages for a specific service.
- Identify the main sub-topics and sections they include in their content.
- Ensure your own page is updated to cover those same topics comprehensively. This shows the AI that your content is a complete and authoritative resource.
4. A Peek Behind the Curtain: How AI “Knows” Your Business
To truly understand how you appear to customers, you need to test your visibility the way they search. Instead of old-school keywords like “removals Kingston,” try using more natural, conversational questions like “What are the best removal companies in the Kingston area?” This gives you a more realistic picture of your AI search performance.
To put all these steps into context, it helps to understand a core concept: entity association. In simple terms, an “entity” is just a thing—your business name is an entity, your city is an entity, and the service you provide is an entity. The goal of everything you do—optimising your GBP, getting mentioned in directories, writing press releases, and structuring your website—is to consistently create a strong association between your business name entity and your service and location entities.
When AI crawls the web and sees your brand name repeatedly and positively connected with “removals” and “Kingston,” it learns to recommend you for that query. You can even check what AI knows about you. Free tools, like the “Geo Brand Audit” available in ChatGPT, can analyse AI training data to show you what information it has about your brand and whether there are any inaccuracies you need to correct. This is a crucial step in ensuring your digital brand is properly protected.
Conclusion: Your Path to Ranking Higher
Success in Google’s new AI-driven search landscape is not about abandoning what works. It’s about combining a powerful local presence, a stellar online reputation across many different websites, and rock-solid “classic” website fundamentals. By focusing on how your brand is perceived across the entire internet, you can directly influence the AI models that are now guiding customers to their final choice.
If you’re wondering where to start, begin with your Google Business Profile. Optimising it fully is one of the most impactful actions a local business can take right now to win in 2025 and beyond. This is your chance to get a competitive advantage and secure more commercial transactions. Start your journey to becoming an AI-recommended business today.
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