Right now, somebody in town is looking for a business like yours. There’s a good chance they never opened Google.
They opened ChatGPT, or Siri, or whatever came with their phone, and they typed something like find me a bookkeeper in Laredo who works with restaurants. A few seconds later they got back three names and a sentence about each one.
The only question that matters is whether you were one of the three.
Your website just got a second kind of visitor
For twenty years the job was to build a site that looked good to a person. Sharp photos, clean layout, a big button that says Call Us. That’s still the job. None of that stopped mattering.
But there’s a new visitor showing up now, and it doesn’t have eyes.
It’s more like somebody calling your shop from the road. They can’t see your window. They can’t see the sign or the truck in the lot. They only know what you tell them out loud. If you mumble, or you can’t answer a straight question, they hang up and call the next place on the list.
That’s the whole thing. Your website has to be able to answer questions out loud now, not just look good.
What it’s actually reading
Your basic facts, in plain text
Hours. Address. Phone number. What you do. Which parts of town you serve.
This sounds too obvious to mention, and it’s the single most common thing I find broken. Usually because the hours are sitting inside a picture. A designer made a nice graphic with the hours on it, dropped it on the page, and it looks great. To anything reading that page, it’s a blank square.
Same goes for hours that only live on your Facebook page, or a phone number that’s only in the logo. If it isn’t typed out as text, it might as well not be there.
One page for each thing you sell
If you do three things, you want three pages, each one saying plainly what it is and who it’s for.
A single page called Services with a list of nine bullet points is fine for a person skimming. It’s thin for anything trying to figure out whether you’re actually the right fit for a specific job. The more specific the page, the more specific the question you can win.
Some kind of answer on price
I know. Nobody wants to publish prices.
But understand what happens when you don’t. Somebody asks what a website costs in Laredo. Three businesses have numbers on the page. You have Call For A Quote. Guess which three get mentioned.
You don’t have to publish a full price list. You have to say something real: a starting number, a typical range, what makes a job cost more. We put ours right on the Website Development page because the asking part is what everybody hates anyway.
The same story everywhere
Your website says you close at six. Google says five thirty. An old directory listing has a phone number from two offices ago.
A person shrugs and calls anyway. A machine reading all three has no way to know which one is true, so it either picks wrong or leaves you out and moves to a business it’s more confident about. Consistency isn’t a detail here. It’s the whole basis for whether you get recommended.
A way to actually finish the job
Somebody decides they want you. Now what?
If the only path forward is calling during business hours, you just lost every person who was looking at nine at night, which is most of them. A booking link, a quote form, something they can finish right then. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It has to exist.
Go check yours right now
This takes about five minutes and it’s the most useful thing in this whole post.
Open ChatGPT and ask it three things:
- What do you know about [your business name] in Laredo?
- What are their hours and how do I contact them?
- I need [the thing you sell]. Who should I call in Laredo?
Then read the answers carefully.
If it gets your business wrong, that’s a real problem and you now know exactly what to fix. If it doesn’t know you exist, that’s a bigger one. And if you don’t come up at all on that third question while three competitors do, that’s not a technology problem. That’s revenue walking past your door every day.
Most owners find at least one thing wrong. Wrong hours, an old address, a service they stopped offering in 2021. Every one of those is fixable in an afternoon.
The part nobody warns you about
Here’s the twist, and it’s the one I’d actually worry about.
Say you do all of this and it works. The assistants start sending people your way. Quote requests come in at eleven at night, on Sunday, while you’re at your kid’s game.
If nobody answers them until Tuesday, you’ve gained nothing. Worse than nothing, because those people got recommended to you, reached out, and heard nothing back. They already called somebody else by Tuesday.
Being findable is the front half. Answering fast is the back half. Getting good at one without the other is how businesses end up frustrated with the whole idea and conclude none of it works.
Where to start
Don’t rebuild anything. Do this instead, in order:
Run the ChatGPT test above and write down what’s wrong. Fix your hours, address, and phone everywhere they appear, starting with Google. Then type out any information currently trapped inside an image. Then put a real number, or a real range, next to the thing you sell.
That’s a week of small fixes, and it’s most of the benefit.
The businesses that sort this out early aren’t doing anything clever. They’re just easy to understand. That turns out to be the whole trick, same as it was before, except now the thing struggling to understand you doesn’t get to squint at your logo and figure it out.