When Customers Ask AI Who to Call: Six Checks for Your Homepage

Owners ask me about AI search more often than they did a year ago. Customers no longer type two or three words and scroll. They ask a full question, such as "Who should I call to fix the phones at my office?" An AI assistant reads what it can find about local businesses and gives back a short answer. I am Danielle Lemons, Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, and websites and digital marketing are part of what I oversee. I put together a presentation on this topic, "When Customers Ask AI Who to Call," and this post walks through the checks I would run on your homepage first.

The full written version is at When Customers Ask AI Who to Call: How a Local Business Shows Up.

Why it matters

On a results page, being fifth still gets you seen. In an AI answer, the assistant often names only a few businesses. If you are not one of them, a customer asking that question may never learn you exist. Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how each assistant chooses, but the assistants draw on much of the same public information your customers can see. That part you can control.

Six checks

  • Say what you do and where. "Quality service you can trust" tells an assistant nothing. "Commercial heating and air repair for businesses in Gallatin, Hendersonville and White House, Tennessee" tells it exactly when to mention you.
  • Give each main service its own page. Explain who it is for, what is included and what a customer should expect.
  • Answer the questions your front desk hears. What does it usually cost? How fast can you come out? Do you work on older equipment? Write honest answers in plain question-and-answer form.
  • Keep your business information identical everywhere. Your name, address, phone number and hours should match on your website, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. When listings disagree, anything describing your business has to guess.
  • Treat your Google Business Profile like a second website. Fill in every field, add real photos, and post updates when something changes.
  • Add structure and show the people behind the business. Put an About page with the owner's name on the site. Make sure your phone number is real text, not part of a picture of your logo, so a machine can read it.

The ten-second test

Read your homepage as if you were a stranger. Could you tell, in ten seconds, what this business does and which towns it serves? If the answer is no, start there. The top of your homepage is where a headline that says what you do and where belongs. I wrote more about that in What to Put at the Top of a Local Business Homepage.

What to avoid

Reviews are part of this, and they only help when they are real. Ask happy customers to leave one, and let them describe what you did. A review that says "They moved our phone system over a weekend and we did not miss a call on Monday" is useful to a future customer and to anything summarizing what people say. Never write reviews yourself, and never pay for them.

I am Danielle Lemons, Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect. You can read everything I have written at daniellelemons.com/writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Videos by Danielle Lemons: An Introduction and a Webinar on AI Search

Image
I've started putting short videos on my YouTube channel. Here are the first two: a quick introduction, and a webinar on how AI search is changing the way customers find local businesses. Danielle Lemons, Vice President of Operations, DirecTech Connect At DirecTech Connect I oversee managed VoIP and telecommunications, managed IT for small and medium-sized businesses, and client project delivery. Through daniellelemons.com I build websites for Middle Tennessee businesses with a research-first approach. Webinar: How AI Search Is Changing the Way Customers Find Your Business More customers now ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling search results. This webinar covers what that means for a small business and the practical steps that help a business show up in those answers. Every video, including short summaries of my articles, is on daniellelemons.com/videos and on my YouTube channel . Danielle Lemons Vice President of Operations, DirecTech Connect
Read more

Is Your Small Business Ready for a Bad Technology Day?

Every business has a bad technology day eventually. The internet drops, a computer won’t start, a file disappears. What separates a bad hour from a lost week is usually a few decisions made ahead of time. As Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, I oversee managed IT for small and medium-sized businesses. These are the three areas I’d look at first, each with a full article if you want the details. Your backups Know what gets backed up, where the copy lives, how you’d find out if it stopped, and whether anyone has ever restored a file from it. The four questions are in Backups: Four Questions Every Small Business Owner Should Be Able to Answer . Your internet connection Decide now where your calls go, how you take payments and who tells customers when the connection is down. I walk through it in Five Questions to Answer Before Your Business Internet Goes Down . Who is watching Managed IT means someone is responsible for keeping your systems healthy before they fail, not jus...
Read more

Your Business Phones: What to Check Before, During and After a Switch

Most small business owners only think about their phone system twice: when they sign up, and when something goes wrong. The time in between is when a little attention saves the most money. In my work overseeing managed VoIP and telecommunications services at DirecTech Connect, the same few questions come up again and again. Here is the short version, with links to the full articles. Before you sign anything Price per line is the easiest number to compare and the least useful. Ask who answers when something breaks, what happens to your calls during an outage, and what it costs to leave. I go through all six questions in Before You Switch Business Phone Systems, Ask These Six Questions . When you move providers Your number can come with you. The biggest mistake is canceling the old service before the new provider confirms the move. The step-by-step order is in Switching Phone Providers Without Losing Your Business Number . Every day after that A missed call rarely shows up as an error me...
Read more