Search engine optimization is the work of making your business the answer Google returns when a nearby customer searches for what you sell. For local service businesses that means three things: a properly optimised Google Business Profile, a technically clean website with correct structured data, and genuinely useful pages targeting the terms your customers actually type. Cibbster Designs handles all three, and increasingly optimises for AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews as well.
Starting from $750 / month, plus a one-time $1,500 foundation engagement
First payment $2,250. Covers the technical audit, the fixes it turns up and baseline measurement. A standalone technical audit, without a retainer, is the same $1,500.
You rank on page three for your own service in your own town, a competitor with a worse website sits in the map pack, and the agency you tried sent a monthly PDF of numbers that never turned into phone calls.
Everything below is part of the engagement. Where something is genuinely optional, we say so in the quote rather than discovering it later.
Crawl and index coverage, site speed, Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content and canonical errors — with a prioritised fix list, not a 90-page export.
Categories, service areas, services, attributes, photos, Q&A and posting cadence. For local businesses this single asset often drives more calls than the website.
The terms real customers in your area search, mapped to search intent and grouped into pages worth building.
LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article, Product and Review markup so search engines and AI models can parse exactly what you do and where.
Titles, descriptions, heading structure, internal linking and content depth on every page that matters.
Genuinely distinct pages for each town you serve — not one template with the city name swapped, which Google treats as spam.
Your name, address and phone identical across every directory that matters, because inconsistency actively suppresses local rankings.
Content structured so large language models can extract and cite it: direct answers, clear entities, factual specificity and clean markup.
Rankings, calls, form fills and which pages produced them. Plain English, with what we changed and what we are doing next.
Full technical and local audit, plus a documented snapshot of where you rank today so progress is measurable.
Technical errors, site speed, schema and Google Business Profile. This phase alone often moves local rankings within weeks.
Service and location pages targeting the mapped keywords, written to be the most useful result on the page.
Local citations, relevant directories, supplier and association links, and genuine local relationships.
Monthly review of what moved, doubling down on what works.
Local SEO improvements — Google Business Profile, technical fixes, schema — often show movement in four to eight weeks. Competitive organic rankings for commercial terms usually take four to six months of consistent work. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches or is about to do something that gets you penalised.
Our local SEO retainers start at $750 per month, after a one-time $1,500 foundation engagement covering the technical audit, the fixes it turns up and baseline measurement. A standalone technical audit without a retainer is also $1,500. We do not require a twelve-month contract — the foundation fee exists so that the heavily front-loaded first month is paid for directly rather than recovered by locking you in.
Local SEO targets searches with geographic intent — "roof repair near me", "web designer Lapeer MI" — and is heavily influenced by your Google Business Profile, proximity to the searcher, review volume and NAP consistency. Regular organic SEO competes nationally and is driven more by content depth and backlinks. Local service businesses should invest in local SEO first, because it converts far better.
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting your business cited in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. It overlaps heavily with good SEO but rewards different things: unambiguous factual statements, clear entity definitions, structured data, direct answers to real questions, and content that reads as authoritative to a model summarising a topic. It is becoming a meaningful traffic source and it is easier to win now than it will be in two years.
Not necessarily. For most local service businesses, well-built service and location pages outrank a blog every time. Blogging helps when you are competing for informational searches or building topical authority in a competitive market. We would rather build you eight excellent service pages than forty thin blog posts.
No, and neither can anyone else honestly. Google does not sell or guarantee positions. What we guarantee is the work: a documented audit, a fix list actually implemented, and monthly reporting you can verify independently in your own Google Search Console and Analytics accounts.
Analytics setup is the work of making your marketing measurable: knowing which pages, channels and campaigns produce actual phone calls and form submissions rather than raw traffic. Cibbster Designs configures Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, conversion goals, call tracking and privacy-compliant consent, then builds a dashboard that answers one question — where do my leads come from.
Cibbster Designs builds custom websites for small businesses, contractors and service companies in Lapeer County, Michigan and nationwide. Every site is hand-coded rather than assembled from a page builder, which keeps pages light, fast and fully under your control. A typical build covers strategy, design, development, accessibility, on-page SEO and launch, and takes four to eight weeks depending on page count. Builds start at $4,500 for a five-to-eight page business site, or $1,800 for a single-page or landing site, and rise with scope from there.
ADA website compliance means your site can be used by people with disabilities — including those navigating by keyboard, screen reader, magnification or voice control. In practice, compliance is measured against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the standard US courts and the Department of Justice reference. Cibbster Designs performs manual accessibility audits, remediates the failures, and documents the result in an accessibility statement. Automated scanners catch only a minority of real issues, so every audit we run includes hands-on keyboard and screen-reader testing.
Tell us where you are now and what you need to happen. We will come back with scope, timeline and a fixed price — usually within two business days.
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