Local SEO and AEO for service businesses in Greater Seattle.

Search used to mean Google. Now it means Google PLUS ChatGPT PLUS Perplexity PLUS Google AI Overviews PLUS the answers your phone's assistant reads out loud. Each one decides which businesses to surface differently, and most agencies are still only optimizing for one of them.

About 95% of AI citations come from content under 10 months old — so stale sites stop getting cited. ChatGPT pulls from Bing's index, not Google's directly — so what ranks in Google doesn't automatically appear in ChatGPT. Perplexity favors niche and regional sites — so a Greater Seattle service business with a strong local footprint actually has structural advantages over a national agency competitor.

I optimize for both fronts at once. The work overlaps but it's deliberate — the FAQ schema, the direct-answer paragraphs, the comparison tables, the local entity signaling — those are the AEO moves that also reinforce traditional SEO. You don't choose between them.

Most agencies sell "SEO" as a single product. Local SEO is a different thing. The local pack — that three-result map block at the top of a Seattle service search — is its own ranking system, separate from the blue links below. Generic SEO works on the blue links. Local SEO works on both, because for a service business in Greater Seattle, the local pack is usually where the call comes from.

A real local SEO engagement covers four things generic SEO doesn't touch: Google Business Profile setup and ongoing management, citation cleanup across local directories (Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, the rest), a service-area page network that names every city you serve, and review acquisition. Without those, you can rank a blog post about heating repair without ever showing up in the map pack when someone in South Hill actually searches for an HVAC tech.

Honest answer: 90 days for movement, six months for meaningful results, twelve months for the compounding to kick in. Anyone telling you faster is selling you something.

Months 1 through 3 are foundation work — keyword research scoped to your specific service area, on-page SEO across every service page, FAQ schema, Google Business Profile setup, citation cleanup, the first round of local content. None of that shows in Search Console yet, because Google needs weeks to crawl and reweight everything.

Months 4 through 6 is when the signal starts. Rankings move on individual queries. Impressions climb in GSC. Calls from organic search start showing up in your tracking. This is the moment most clients stop second-guessing whether SEO works.

Months 7 through 12 is compounding. New content gets indexed faster. Backlinks accumulate. Pinnacle Air Control went from average Google rank 70 to rank 9 in four months — faster than typical, because the site was new and the underlying architecture was right. Most clients see meaningful movement by month six and clear ROI by month twelve.

Auburn home base. Service across Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, Kent, WA, Renton, Federal Way, Puyallup, and Covington — Pierce County and South King County are where most of my SEO clients live. Pinnacle Air Control is in South Hill; IGo Green is in Seattle proper. Local SEO works best when the developer knows the streets, the neighborhoods, the seasonal patterns, and the local competition. I'm in this region too, which is why the work translates.