Short, plain-English notes on websites, search, reviews, ads, social and tracking — by Sobhan Ghavam, LetsGrow.Cloud.
Exciting news: AI visibility is now the seventh scorecard category
Exciting news for local businesses.
Customers still Google you — and more of them also ask AI.
So we added a seventh category to the free Business Growth Scorecard:
AI visibility (GEO/AEO) — 15 points.
It checks whether your site is clear enough for Google and AI answers to describe you accurately: who you are, what you do, where you serve, answer-ready pages, FAQs, and proof that can be cited.
Same free scorecard. Same honest, evidence-only approach. Not magic “LLM SEO” — good SEO is good GEO.
Your website looks fine on your laptop. On your customers' phones, it's crawling.
Most local business owners never check load time on mobile. Their customers do — by leaving.
If the homepage takes more than about 3 seconds on a phone, a big chunk of people bounce before they see your offer, your number, or your "Book now" button. You paid for the click (or the search) that brought them there.
A 10-minute check this week:
Open your site on your phone on mobile data (not Wi‑Fi).
Time how long until the main headline and button are usable.
If it's over 3 seconds: compress hero images, kill auto-play video, and drop heavy page builders you don't need.
Speed isn't a tech vanity metric. It's whether a busy parent in the car park can actually book you.
Free second look for local businesses (website, search, reviews, ads, social, tracking). What's your homepage load time on mobile right now?
Your Google reviews are climbing. Your reply rate isn't.
I keep seeing the same pattern on local business listings: 80+ reviews, solid stars — and the last dozen still sitting unanswered.
People read the replies as much as the stars. A 3-star review with a calm, specific response often lands better than a 5-star you ignored. Silence reads like "we don't care."
A simple weekly habit:
1. Reply to every new review within 48 hours.
Thank them for one concrete detail (the job, the suburb, the staff name).
For a tough review: acknowledge, explain the next step, invite them offline — never argue in public.
If you haven't opened your Google listing in a month, that's usually where the quiet leak is.
