Someone in your town needed what you sell this week. They did not open ten blue links and compare. They asked an assistant, got two or three names back, and called one of them.

That is the part worth sitting with. The assistant did not pick those names because those businesses were the best. It picked them because it could read their facts and was confident enough to repeat them out loud.

That is a different job than ranking. Ranking rewards the page that best answers a query. Being recommended rewards the business whose details are unambiguous enough that a machine will stake its answer on them. Plenty of good local websites fail the second test while doing fine on the first, and they fail it for reasons that take an afternoon to fix.

Here are the five that matter most, in the order we work them. Each one you can check on your own site in about a minute.

1. Say what the page is, in the title

Every page has a title and a description. They are the first thing any crawler reads and often the only thing it reads carefully. If your title is your business name repeated on every page, you have told an assistant nothing about what lives there.

Titles want to be under about 60 characters and to name both the service and the place. Descriptions want to be under about 155 characters and to read like a sentence a person would say. Longer than that and search engines cut them off mid-thought, which is how you end up recommended for the first half of an idea.

How to check yours: open your site, right-click, choose View Page Source, and look at the very top for <title> and the description. Do that on your home page and on two service pages. If all three are similar, that is your first afternoon of work.

2. Put your facts in text, not pictures

This is the one that surprises people. Hours, address, service area, prices, the list of what a package includes. On a lot of sites, all of that lives inside an image, because an image was easier to lay out and looked better.

An assistant cannot read a price list baked into a picture. Neither can a screen reader, which is the same problem wearing a different hat. If your service area is a map graphic with no town names written underneath it, then as far as a machine is concerned you do not have a service area.

How to check yours: try to select your own hours and prices with your cursor. If the text highlights, it is real text. If nothing highlights, it is a picture, and it is invisible to the thing you want quoting you.

3. Answer the questions you actually get asked

Most frequently asked questions pages are written by whoever built the site, guessing. The useful version is written by whoever answers the phone.

The difference is language. A business writes “What is included in our deep cleaning package.” A customer asks “Do you clean inside the oven.” Those are the same question and only one of them matches what somebody types or says. Assistants are matching against the customer’s phrasing, not yours.

How to check yours: ask the person who takes your calls for the five questions they answer every single week. Then search your own site for those exact words. If they are not there, you are not in the running for them.

4. Mark those answers up so machines can quote them

Once the answers exist in customer language, there is a small piece of code that labels them as questions and answers. It is called structured data, and it is the difference between a machine guessing that a chunk of your page is probably a frequently asked question, and a machine knowing it.

That distinction decides whether you get quoted. An assistant repeating your answer is making a claim on your behalf, and it prefers claims it can attribute cleanly.

How to check yours: paste any page of your site into Google’s Rich Results Test. It will tell you, in plain language, what structured data it found. On a lot of local sites, the honest answer is none.

5. Tell them who and where you are

The last one is the same idea applied to the business itself rather than to a page. Name, address, phone number, hours, service area, what kind of business you are, all labeled in that same structured way.

Without it, an assistant has to infer your identity from scattered mentions and hope. With it, there is one authoritative description of you on your own website, which is the source it trusts most.

How to check yours: same test as above. Look for a business type in the results. If you find nothing, that is the highest-value hour on this list.

What this looked like on a real site

We ran all five on Mrs. Clean Pittsburgh, a house cleaning company that has been in business since 1998, and the numbers are worth showing because they are unremarkable in the best way.

Before we started, one page on that entire website carried structured data. One. Everything else on the site was invisible in the sense that matters here.

Today 74 pages carry it, including every service page and every city page they serve.

The frequently asked questions half tells a smaller and more human story. We sent the owner a draft of fifteen questions in June. He answered all of them in his own words, which is exactly right, because his words are the ones customers recognize. Then that document sat for 72 days before anyone published it, which is on us and not on him.

Fourteen of those fifteen are now live and marked up. We dropped one, because his answer was that they do not offer that service anymore, and publishing it would have advertised something he cannot sell. Across the site there are now 38 distinct questions an assistant can quote directly.

None of that required a redesign. The site looks the same. It is simply legible now.

The offer

If you want all five done on your site rather than done by you, that is what we do. $500, live in under seven days. Titles and descriptions across your real pages, your facts moved out of images and into text, a genuine frequently asked questions section in your customers’ language, and both pieces of structured data installed and tested.

You will get the before-and-after counts the same way we just showed them, because a number you can check is the only kind worth sending.

And if you would rather run the five checks yourself first, please do. That is why they are written down here.