Local AEO Checklist for Hertfordshire | Step-by-Step AI Search Setup

A carpet cleaner in Baldock rang me on a Monday morning. Proper panicked. He'd been chatting to his nephew over the weekend, the nephew had typed "best carpet cleaner near Baldock" into ChatGPT, and some bloke from Stevenage came up. Not him. A competitor he'd never even heard of.

"I've been doing this for fourteen years," he said. "How does a machine not know I exist?"

Honest answer? Because nothing about his online presence gave any AI a reason to know. His website was fine for humans. For AI? Completely invisible.

So I put together a checklist for him. Same one I now give to pretty much every service business across Hertfordshire that walks through our door. Here it is.

First things first: your Google Business Profile

You've got one. I know you've got one. You set it up years ago and you think it's sorted.

It isn't.

Go look at it right now. Properly look. I'll wait.

Here's what I find wrong with about seven out of ten profiles I audit for businesses in Hitchin, Letchworth, Royston, and the surrounding towns:

• Service areas either blank or set to something vague like "Hertfordshire" with no specific towns listed
• Business description that reads like it was written by a robot in 2019 (ironic, given we're trying to get actual robots to recommend you)
• Photos that are either non-existent, ancient, or stock images of someone else's work
• Categories wrong or incomplete
• Opening hours that haven't been touched since before COVID

AI tools treat your Google Business Profile like a reference card. If the card is half blank, they skip you. Simple as that. They don't guess. They don't assume. They find someone with a complete card and recommend them instead.

That carpet cleaner? His profile listed his service area as "England." England! Narrowed it down a bit, hasn't he.

We fixed his profile in about forty minutes. Listed every town he actually covers. Wrote a description that sounds like a real person. Added photos of actual jobs he'd done the previous month. Nothing fancy.

Make your information match everywhere (yes, this is boring, do it anyway)

Right. This is the bit where people's eyes glaze over. I get it.

Your business name, address, and phone number need to be identical everywhere they appear online. I mean letter-for-letter, comma-for-comma identical. Your website footer. Your contact page. Google. Facebook. Yell. Checkatrade. That random local directory you signed up to in 2021 and forgot about.

Why? Because AI cross-references you across sources. If it finds three slightly different versions of your business name, it doesn't know if you're one business or three. And when it's confused, it recommends nobody. Or worse, it recommends your competitor who got this right.

I had a decorator in Hitchin listed as: - "M. Taylor Decorating" on his website - "Mark Taylor Painting and Decorating" on Google - "Taylor's Decorating Services" on Checkatrade

Three names. Same bloke. AI couldn't connect the dots.

Thirty minutes of boring admin. That's what it took to fix. And within a couple of weeks, he started appearing in AI recommendations for decorators in Hitchin. Thirty bloody minutes.

Your website needs to answer questions, not just describe services

People don't type keywords into ChatGPT. They ask questions. Full, conversational questions.

"How much does it cost to get carpets cleaned in a three-bed house?" "Is it worth getting curtains professionally cleaned or should I just buy new ones?" "Who does end-of-tenancy cleans in Stevenage that landlords actually accept?"

If your website answers those questions directly, with the actual question as a heading and a straight answer in the first line or two, AI will find you. If your website just says "We offer professional cleaning services across Hertfordshire" ... nothing. You're wallpaper.

We wrote a whole piece on how to write FAQs that ChatGPT actually pulls from if you want the detail on this. But the short version is: think about every question a customer has asked you in the last month. Write each one down. Answer it on your website like you'd answer it on the phone. Done.

Location pages (but not the rubbish kind)

If you work across multiple towns, you need pages for each one. But here's where people go wrong.

They create a page for Hitchin. Copy it. Replace "Hitchin" with "Letchworth." Copy again. Replace with "Baldock." And so on. Same text, different town name dropped in.

AI sees through this instantly. It's not stupid.

A proper location page for Royston should talk about things specific to Royston. The types of properties there. The common issues you deal with. Maybe mention the newer builds off the Barkway Road where you've done a dozen jobs, or the older terraces near the high street that always need extra work.

That's not keyword stuffing. That's being genuinely local. And that's exactly what AI is looking for when someone asks "who's the best [whatever] in Royston."

Reviews that actually tell AI something useful

OK so here's something most people don't think about.

"Great service, 5 stars" is lovely for your ego. Useless for AI.

Compare that with: "Called him about a grease stain on our living room carpet. He came out to our place in Letchworth the next day, spent about an hour on it, charged us eighty quid. Stain's completely gone. Really pleased."

The second review contains service type, location, response time, duration, price, and outcome. That's a goldmine for AI. It can use every single piece of that to decide whether to recommend you.

So when you ask for reviews (and you should be asking after every single job), give people a nudge. "Would you mind mentioning what the job was and where you're based?" Most people are happy to. They just don't think to include that stuff unless you ask.

And reply to every review. When you reply, add context. "Glad we could help, those old carpets in the Letchworth Garden City houses can be tricky but they usually come up brilliant." More data points for the AI. More local relevance. Free.

We've got a deeper piece on how reviews help AI recommend your business if you want to go further with this.

Schema markup

Sounds technical. It sort of is. But it matters.

Schema markup is code that labels things on your website so machines can read them properly. Think of it like putting sticky notes on everything saying "this is the business name", "this is the phone number", "this is a service we offer."

For a local service business, you want LocalBusiness schema on your homepage, Service schema on your service pages, and FAQPage schema on any FAQ content. Most website builders have plugins that handle this. If yours doesn't, any half-decent developer can sort it in an afternoon.

One-time job. Keeps paying off.

Keep your website alive

Bit of a tangent but I was looking at a joiner's website in St Albans the other week. Last blog post: August 2023. Last photo update: sometime during lockdown. Copyright in the footer still said 2022.

Would you trust a business whose shopfront looked abandoned? Neither would AI.

You don't need to blog every week. But update something. Add a photo from a recent job. Swap out your seasonal content. Post about something you've been working on. Even updating a single page every month sends a signal that someone's home.

The businesses I see doing well with AI search across Hertfordshire are the ones that treat their website like a living thing, not a brochure they printed three years ago.

If this checklist feels like a lot

Pick one thing.

Seriously. Just one. I'd start with getting your business information consistent across every platform. That's the foundation. Everything else in this local AEO checklist builds on it.

Then chip away at the rest. A bit each week. It adds up faster than you'd think.

Or if you look at this list and think "sod that, I've got carpets to clean" (fair enough), give us a shout. We do this for service businesses across Hertfordshire every day. You can see what that looks like on our North Hertfordshire AEO page.