What we're seeing, running an AI-native agency
Local SEO, measurement, and the build itself, written from our own work and checked before it ships.
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Nine shelves, each with the posts that belong on it
- AI Native Ops The operator's view of running an agency crew built on AI tools: supervision, trust, and the habits that make it reliable.
- Local SEO Field Notes What the search data actually says for local service businesses, told straight, including the parts that did not work.
- Measurement Truths Tracking, analytics, and attribution: what the numbers really show once you check the pipeline that produced them.
- Behind the Build Web craft, design, and performance lessons from building and rebuilding our own site and our clients' sites.
- Ads Lab Notes from running paid channels for local service businesses: what we tried, what we measured, and what we changed.
- Honest Marketing Claims, trust, and compliance: how we keep marketing copy accurate and what happens when we catch ourselves overstating something.
- Founder's Notebook Realizations and principles from running the agency, told in the first person and labeled as opinion.
- Toolbox The tools we use and recommend, with the real gotcha we hit along the way and a link to the official docs.
- Trade Guides State-by-state licensing and insurance guides for garage door and locksmith businesses, written so an owner can check each requirement at its source.
Showing all 20 articles
Latest Articles
Notes from the work, in the order we published them
Test your site on phones before it ships
A site that looks right on a laptop can slide sideways or hide its call button on a small phone. Here is how to check before launch.
An alert that cries wolf stops being read
Our own update scanner kept flagging a tool that was never behind. We fixed the check instead of muting it, and you can do the same.
How to work through a Business Profile checklist written for your trade
A generic profile checklist skips the categories, services and photos that matter in your trade. Here is how to work through a trade-specific one in order, and how often to run it again.
Google cannot hear your phone ring, but it can see who gets the next call
Google never hears your phone ring. It can see what a caller does next, and a caller who comes straight back to dial a competitor tells it plenty. Our theory, and our fix.
PHP2Shell isn't a WordPress bug. Your WordPress site still runs the thing that broke.
The defenders are right: it is a PHP bug, and WordPress builds its pages with PHP. What to ask your host this week, and why a site that only gets leads may not need a PHP server at all.
Should your analytics live in the tag manager?
Analytics belongs in the site code, where every build can check it. The tag manager should hold only short-lived ad tags, and a quarterly check keeps it that way.
Why your sitemap lastmod is the same date on every page
A sitemap where every page shows the same last-changed date often means the build cannot read git history at deploy time, not that nothing changed. Here is the fix that held.
Your Google Ads IP exclusion list has a ceiling
An exclusion list fills up fast if you only ever block one address at a time. Here is where we draw the line on collapsing addresses into ranges, and why we never trust a single signal.
Installed is not the same as working: a ten minute analytics check
A tracking tag in your page source proves it was installed. It does not prove your analytics property ever recorded a visit, and here is the short check that tells you which one you have.
Three places a relaunched campaign can still be paused
A relaunched campaign can read enabled and still serve nothing, because its ad groups and ads carry their own paused statuses. Here is our checklist and the report that shows what is running.
Check whether AI answers mention your business once a quarter
A short quarterly routine to see whether AI assistants name your business: fixed questions, a plain record sheet, and one site change per gap.
Is Bing Webmaster Tools worth setting up?
Bing's webmaster tools are free, and a site already verified in Search Console can be imported directly. Here is what to check afterward and what to ignore.
Want to talk through your marketing?
Tell us where things stand and we'll tell you plainly what we'd do next.