Online presence · The story behind the Visibility Tune-Up
What a website visibility audit found on a good local site
Not long ago I ran a full visibility audit on the website of a well-run local trades business in Greater Manchester. It was a genuinely capable site: clean, mobile-friendly, professionally built, with good page titles and a real list of customer questions. On the surface, nothing looked wrong. Underneath, it was quietly losing enquiries every week. This is the audit that became the blueprint for my Visibility Tune-Up, and the business is kept anonymous throughout.
The short version
A capable local website can still leak leads. This one scored well on the basics but was held back by a call button that dialled the wrong number, a real FAQ that search and AI could not read because it had no structured data, thin trust content with no named people or reviews, and copy with nothing specific for an AI engine to quote. Almost none of it was visible to the eye, and almost all of it was cheap to fix.
A capable site that still underperformed
This matters because the site was not a bad one. It had the things a lot of small business websites are missing: keyword-rich, location-aware page titles, tidy web addresses, a mobile-friendly layout, and even a proper set of frequently asked questions written in plain English. If you judged it on looks alone, you would sign it off.
That is exactly the trap. The problems that cost you customers are almost never the ones you can see. They live in the code, the links and the trust signals, and they only show up when someone actually goes looking. So I looked.
The finding that stops you in your tracks
The single most urgent problem took about a minute to find and would have taken years to notice from the inside. The main "call us" button on the contact page dialled a completely different number, a London landline, instead of the local number printed right next to it on the page.
Think about what that means. Every customer who tapped that button on their phone, ready to buy, was either connected to a stranger or to nothing at all. The business never saw those calls, so it never knew they were being lost. On top of the lost leads, showing two different phone numbers confuses Google about which details are really yours, which weakens your local ranking as well.
This is why I always start with a diagnosis, not a rebuild. You do not need a new website to fix a problem like that. You need someone to find it.
Three lenses: SEO, GEO and AEO
A visibility audit looks at your site through three lenses, because being "found" now means three different things. There is normal Google search (SEO), there are AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity (GEO), and there is the single direct answer in featured snippets and voice results (AEO). There is a plain-English glossary at the bottom of this page if any of those are new to you.
Scored across all three, this site came out as a capable local site with the fundamentals right, but with depth, trust and structured data as the missing levers. Its SEO basics were solid. Its ability to be understood and cited by AI engines was weak. Its answer-engine foundation was good but not marked up so an engine could use it. In other words, it had done the visible work and skipped the invisible work, which is where most of the remaining wins actually are.
What was quietly holding it back
Under the bonnet, the same pattern turns up on a lot of local websites. Here is what was costing this one visibility and trust:
- A real FAQ that engines could not read. The homepage had a genuine list of customer questions, but it was not wrapped in FAQ structured data, so Google and AI could not use it. That is the single highest-value quick win on most sites, and it was sitting there unused.
- No local business structured data. There was no machine-readable markup telling engines the business name, address, phone, opening hours and the area it serves. For a local trades business, that is a big miss.
- Images with no alt text. Product and gallery images had empty descriptions, which hurts image search and accessibility and throws away easy, relevant keywords.
- A trust gap. The About page was barely a hundred words with no named people, no credentials, no years-in-trade proof, and there were no visible customer reviews anywhere. Real people and real reviews are what convince both a nervous buyer and an AI engine that you are credible.
- Copy with nothing to quote. The service pages were polished but generic: plenty of adjectives, almost no facts. No pricing guidance, materials, lead times or guarantees. AI answer engines quote specifics, so vague copy gives them nothing to cite.
- Two years untouched. The newest content was around two years old and the footer year was frozen in the past, both small signals that a site has been left to drift.
- Dead buttons and junk links. Some "get a quote" buttons did not actually link anywhere, and the body copy linked out to unrelated commercial sites that added nothing and diluted its relevance.
None of these are dramatic. Together they are the difference between a website that just sits there and one that quietly brings in work.
How a Tune-Up prioritises the fixes
A long list of problems is not much use on its own. The value is in the order. Here is how the findings get triaged, from the thing that is actively costing money today down to the easy housekeeping:
| Priority | What gets done | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Fix anything actively losing leads today: a broken or wrong click-to-call link, dead enquiry buttons, mixed-up contact details. | High |
| High | Add FAQ structured data to your existing questions and tighten each answer; add local business structured data (name, address, phone, area served, hours); add descriptive alt text to every image. | High |
| Medium | Rebuild a thin About page with named people, credentials and real reviews; deepen service pages with specifics (prices from, materials, lead times, guarantees); fix thin or missing titles and headings. | Medium to high |
| Quick win | Remove junk outbound links, make every button a real link, refresh stale dates and the footer year. | Low effort, easy |
Notice how much of the "High" impact work is "Low" effort. That is the whole point of a tune-up rather than a rebuild: the biggest gains here were cheap, they were just invisible until someone checked.
This is the Visibility Tune-Up
That process, look properly, find what is really wrong, put it in priority order, then fix the highest-impact things on your existing site, is exactly what my Visibility Tune-Up is. It is for the working site that nobody can find, or the good-looking one that quietly underperforms. If you are not sure whether you need it, the cheapest place to start is a Website Health Check, which tells you plainly what your site needs before you spend anything on fixing it.
Want to know what your own website is quietly getting wrong? I will run the same honest audit across Google, AI search and answer engines, and give you a plain-English, prioritised action plan. Based in Bolton, working across Greater Manchester. No jargon, and no selling you a rebuild you do not need.
Common questions
What is a website visibility audit?
A visibility audit checks how findable your website really is across three areas: normal Google search (SEO), AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity (GEO), and featured snippets and voice results (AEO). It scores what is working, flags what is quietly losing you enquiries, and puts the fixes in priority order.
What is the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?
SEO is being found in normal Google and Bing results. GEO is being trusted and cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. AEO is winning the single direct answer in featured snippets and voice search. A good local site needs all three, and they overlap.
My website looks fine, so why isn't it getting enquiries?
A site can look professional and still leak leads. Common hidden causes are a broken or wrong click-to-call link, no structured data so Google and AI cannot read your pages properly, thin trust content with no named people or reviews, and copy that has nothing specific for AI to quote. None of it is visible to the eye.
Do I need a full website rebuild to fix this?
Usually not. Most visibility problems are fixable on your existing site: correcting broken links, adding the right structured data, filling in trust and factual detail, and tightening your Google presence. That is exactly what a Visibility Tune-Up does. A rebuild is only worth it when the site is genuinely dated or broken underneath.
How much does a Visibility Tune-Up cost?
A Visibility Tune-Up is £399 as a fixed price, or you can start with a £149 Website Health Check, credited if you go ahead, to see exactly what your site needs first. Both give you a plain-English action plan rather than jargon.
Plain-English glossary
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
- Getting your site set up so normal search engines like Google and Bing can find, understand and rank it, through titles, headings, content, links and structured data.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
- Getting your site treated as a trustworthy source worth quoting by AI answer engines like ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini, through clear authorship, trust signals and quotable facts.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
- Structuring content so a search or voice assistant can lift one direct answer from your page, through concise answers, FAQ and HowTo structured data, and question-phrased headings.
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. The signals, like named authors, credentials, reviews and easy contact details, that show a site is credible to both people and AI.
- Structured data (schema)
- Hidden, machine-readable tags that spell out what a page is (for example a local business, an FAQ, or a product), so search and AI engines can read it precisely and show rich results.
- NAP
- Name, Address and Phone. Your core contact details, which need to be accurate and identical everywhere so local search trusts you.