The alphabet · SEO

The foundation everything reads.

Classic search still drives the traffic — and every AI engine learns who you are from the same site Google crawls. SEO didn’t die; it got a second reader.

SEO pillar two of four · 25% of your score

Search engine optimization — the craft of ranking in classic Google: technical health, content that covers what you actually sell, and the authority signals that make machines take you seriously. Now also the substrate every AI engine builds its model of your business on.

See also: Local SEO · AEO · GEO · AIO

Why it matters

Three truths about SEO.

01

Still the volume game

AI answers are growing fast, but classic search remains the biggest single source of customers for local businesses. The pillar that pays the bills deserves monitoring, not nostalgia.

02

AI learns you from your site

GPTBot and friends crawl the same pages Googlebot does. Thin content, broken pages, and missing information don’t just cost rankings — they leave AI with nothing accurate to say about you.

03

A slow site loses twice

Speed and crawlability gate everything downstream. A page that can’t be fetched cleanly can’t rank, can’t be quoted, and can’t be cited — one fix, three wins.

In your scan

What Speak Local checks.

Every scan measures these — scored, prioritized, and re-checked on schedule. See the full platform for how the pillars combine.

Technical health — speed, mobile, indexability, crawl errors
Rankings — your money keywords, tracked over time
Content coverage — depth on the services that actually pay
Authority — a 0-100 link score with the four numbers behind it, computed the same way for rivals
LOCAL SEO AEO GEO AIO
SEO questions

Asked and answered.

Is SEO still worth it in the AI era?
More than ever — it just stopped being the whole game. AI engines cite sources that already rank well and read cleanly, so classic SEO work now pays out on two surfaces at once. What’s changed is that rankings alone no longer tell you if you’re winning; that’s why Speak Local scores SEO alongside AEO and GEO.
What SEO factors does Speak Local check?
Technical health (speed, mobile-friendliness, indexability, crawl errors), rankings for your market’s money keywords, content coverage on your services, and a 0-100 link authority score built from your referring domains. All of it feeds the SEO pillar, 25% of your score.
How long does SEO take to work?
Technical fixes register in days; content and authority compound over weeks to months. The honest answer is that it’s a curve, not a switch — which is exactly why Speak Local re-scans on a schedule and shows you the movement, so nobody is guessing whether the work is working.
Link authority

A score you can take apart.

One 0–100 number with the four things behind it printed next to it — so “why is my score 62?” has an answer your client can check.

62Authority yourbusiness.com
  • Link power ×0.7 68
  • Reach 1,240 linking domains ×0.3 54
  • Spam penalty capped at 30% −4
  • Follow quality capped at 15% 0

Power leads because it already folds in the quality of the linking domains, which a bare count cannot. Both penalties are bounded on purpose: a score that can be halved by one supplier’s spam heuristic is that heuristic’s score, not ours. The same formula runs on every competitor you track — and a domain the index has never seen reads not measured rather than scoring zero.

Search Console

Google’s own numbers, synced daily.

Connect Search Console once and your clicks, impressions and positions arrive every day — free, and it never touches your credit allowance. We store it apart from our own rank checks and label it apart, because an impression-weighted average and a single observed position are not the same number and should never be blended. It also surfaces the pages that rank well and get almost no clicks — usually an AI Overview answering above you.