Hyperlocal SEO, GEO & AEO

Search Changed. Most Local Businesses Didn't.

Your next customer might not Google you at all. They might ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's AI: "Who's a good handyman in Barrhaven?" — and the assistant will name two or three businesses. If yours isn't one of them, you don't exist for that customer.

Being named in those answers isn't luck. It's structure: machine-readable pages, real neighbourhood-level content, schema markup, and copy that answers the actual questions people ask. That's AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) — layered on top of classic local SEO.

The Case Study: ottawahandiman.ca

Ottawa Handiman is a one-person accessibility-focused handyman business. It spends zero dollars on advertising and gets 100% of its work from inbound search.

What's under the hood:

• Neighbourhood-level pages — content written for Barrhaven, Kanata, Orleans, Nepean searches, not one generic "Ottawa" page.
• Schema markup everywhere — services, service areas, reviews, and business identity in the structured formats machines actually read.
• AEO copy — pages that directly answer the questions customers ask, in the words they ask them.
• Machine-readable signals — llms.txt and clean site structure so AI assistants can understand and cite the business.

Result: a small local business that outranks bigger contractors for the neighbourhood searches that turn into booked jobs.

What I Do For Your Business

1. Visibility audit. How you show up today — in Google, in Maps, and in what ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini actually say when asked about your category in your area. You see the gap in plain English.
2. The build. Neighbourhood and service pages, schema markup, llms.txt, answer-focused rewrites, citation cleanup. Fixed scope, fixed price.
3. Proof. Before/after of the AI-assistant answers and search rankings for your target queries. Honest timelines: structure lands in weeks, rankings build over months.

Straight Answers

Is this different from what an SEO agency does?

The SEO part overlaps. The difference is the AI layer — most agencies optimize for Google's link list; I also optimize for the answers AI assistants give, which is where a growing share of "who should I hire" decisions now happen.

How fast will I see results?

Structure and AEO signals land within weeks. Competitive rankings build over 2–4 months. I'll tell you before we start whether your niche is a quick win or a war.

Do you guarantee first place?

No, and nobody honestly can. What I can show you is a working example — a real business living entirely off inbound search — and the exact same method applied to yours.