Getting Started: Frequently Asked Questions

The single highest-impact starting action for any local business is to complete their Google Business Profile fully. This free tool directly feeds Google's AI Overview recommendations for local searches. A complete profile — with verified business details, comprehensive service listings, 10+ real photos, a detailed description, and regular posts — significantly increases your chances of appearing in local AI recommendations. It requires no technical knowledge, costs nothing, and can be completed in approximately two hours. Because it is both free and high-impact, it is the obvious place for any local business to begin.

Most GEO fundamentals can be implemented without a developer. Completing your Google Business Profile, rewriting website content to replace vague claims with specific facts, creating an FAQ page, and listing on key directories all require only time and clear thinking. For Schema markup, WordPress users can install Yoast SEO or RankMath for automatic implementation. Non-WordPress users may need brief developer assistance to add Schema code — typically 15-30 minutes of developer time. For everything else, a few hours of focused, clear-thinking effort usually delivers the bulk of the early gains.

Probably not as a priority, and we would rather say so than sell you the work. Google has confirmed it does not support the convention, and a large Ahrefs study across roughly 137,000 sites found the file is essentially never fetched by AI crawlers. It costs about forty-five minutes and it does no harm, so if you want one for completeness there is no reason not to — and writing it has a mild side benefit, in that stating plainly what your business is tends to improve the pages that do matter. But it is housekeeping, not strategy. The things that demonstrably move AI citations are schema correctness, consistent entity signals across the web, and specific quotable claims on your pages. If you have limited time, spend it there.

Yes. Either publish each type as its own JSON-LD block, or put both in a single @graph array, give the WebPage an @id, and point the FAQPage at it with isPartOf or mainEntityOfPage. Whichever you choose, the questions and answers in the markup must match the text visitors can see on the page, and the page should still read well without the markup. Test the result with the Schema Markup Validator and Google's Rich Results Test. One caution: Google narrowed FAQ rich results in search to a small set of sites in 2023, so the value of FAQ markup today is mainly clarity for machines, not a guaranteed rich result.

Normally a tag in the visitor's browser sends conversion data to Google, Meta and others. With server-side tracking the browser sends the event to a server you control, and that server forwards a cleaned, consented version to each platform. The gains are control over what leaves your site and less dependence on what a browser chooses to allow. The costs are hosting, set-up and ongoing maintenance, and it does not remove the need for consent. It tends to be worth it when paid media spend is meaningful, lead quality is judged in a CRM, or browser restrictions are already distorting your numbers. For a low-spend brochure site, a correct client-side set-up usually comes first.

The Meta Pixel is a script that runs in the visitor's browser and reports events such as page views and leads. The Conversions API sends events from your server straight to Meta instead. They are designed to run together: Meta recommends sending the same events both ways and using a shared event ID so duplicates are removed. Running both gives Meta a second route for events the browser fails to deliver, and it lets you send events that never happen on the website, such as a lead becoming a customer in your CRM. If you only run one, the Pixel is the easier start; the Conversions API is the more durable addition.

PPC describes how you pay: per click, on platforms such as Google Ads. Performance marketing describes what you are held to: a commercial outcome, rather than a platform metric. In practice you see the difference in reporting. A PPC report leads with impressions, clicks and a conversion count. A performance marketing report leads with cost per qualified lead and what those leads became in your CRM, and it states where the platform's count and yours disagree. The two overlap heavily, since most performance marketing is run through PPC channels. The label matters less than which numbers an agency is willing to be judged on, so ask for those in writing before you start.

Check three things. First, what leads the report: cost per qualified lead and pipeline contribution, or clicks and platform conversions. Second, whether the report is reconciled against your CRM, and what it says when the two disagree. Reports that never show a disagreement have probably not been compared. Third, whether the agency tells you what it cannot determine. Where ads appear in AI Overviews, for example, Google's help page says they cannot be targeted on their own or opted out of specifically and are not reported separately; its list of countries does not currently include South Africa, but a report that mentions the limit shows the agency has read the documentation. If the accounts are in the agency's name rather than yours, you cannot verify any of this independently, which is reason enough to move them.

If shoppers can buy the product on the page, Google documents Product and Offer markup for its merchant listing features, and it expects the markup to match what visitors can see. The Offer needs a price and a currency, which is ZAR for rand, and Google also recommends availability, price validity dates, shipping and returns. It is not a ranking switch, and it does nothing for a page whose visible information is incomplete, so fix the page first. The one operational risk is staleness: if the markup still advertises a sale price after the sale ends, it no longer matches reality, so update it when the offer does.