How long does SEO take to work?

Months rather than weeks, and anybody giving you a date is guessing. The technical foundation lands the day the site goes live, so the crawling and indexing problems are fixed immediately. Earning trust for competitive local searches takes longer, especially for a new domain. What you should expect early is that your pages get indexed and start showing for your own business name and for specific, long-tail questions.

Do I need SEO if I already get work by word of mouth?

Maybe not urgently, and I would rather tell you that than sell you something. If you are full and your referrals hold, the automations that stop you doing admin at night are worth more to you than ranking. Search matters when the phone goes quiet, when you want to choose better jobs instead of taking whatever comes, or when you are trying to replace a retiring source of referrals.

Is this a monthly retainer?

The foundation is built into the site, not rented. Ongoing work only makes sense if there is ongoing work to do, which usually means publishing pages that answer real customer questions. If there is nothing worth publishing in a given month, I would rather tell you than invoice you for a report.

Can you fix the SEO on my existing site?

Sometimes, and it depends on what it is built on. The foundation work applies to any site: sitemap, canonicals, schema, headings, page speed, answer-first rewriting. If the underlying build is slow or the text lives inside images, fixing it can cost more than rebuilding, and I will say so rather than bill you to polish something that cannot get there.

Do you do SEO outside Halifax?

Yes. The work is remote, so the location only matters for the local signals themselves. I work with trades across Nova Scotia including Dartmouth, Bedford, Lower Sackville, Truro and Liverpool, and the local layer gets built around whichever towns you actually serve.

What does SEO actually do for a trades business?

SEO, AEO and GEO for plumbers, electricians and trades in Halifax, Dartmouth and across Nova Scotia

SEO for a trades business means making sure that when somebody nearby searches for the work you do, you are what they find, and that what they find answers their question well enough to get a call. For a plumber, electrician or any trade in Halifax that comes down to three things: a site Google can actually read, local signals that prove you are a real business in a real place, and pages that answer the questions customers ask out loud. I build all three into the site rather than selling them back to you as a monthly retainer for work that never ships.

What actually moves the needle for a trades business?

The unglamorous half, mostly. A site that loads fast on a phone, real HTML text instead of words baked into images, clean heading structure, a sitemap that exists, canonical tags so Google is not guessing which version of a page is real, and structured data that states plainly what the business does and where it works.

Most trades sites in Nova Scotia fail on those basics. No sitemap, no schema, a phone number that only exists inside a picture, and a homepage that never says which towns are served. That is not a content problem or a budget problem. It is a foundation problem, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.

After the foundation comes the local layer: consistent name, address and phone everywhere they appear, a Google Business Profile that matches the site exactly, and the service areas written out in plain text. Google cross-checks those against each other. When they disagree, it trusts none of them.

What is AEO, and why does it matter now?

Answer engine optimisation means writing the page so it answers the question in the first two sentences, phrased the way a person would actually ask it. Not a hero image and three paragraphs of throat-clearing before the point.

It matters because the search result increasingly is the answer. Google shows an AI summary above the links, and a growing share of people ask an assistant outright instead of scrolling. Both of those pull from pages that answered plainly. A page that buries the answer under branding gets skipped in favour of one that did not.

In practice it means question-shaped headings, short factual blocks, and a real FAQ built from questions customers genuinely ask rather than ones invented for keywords. Every page on this site is written that way, which is the easiest way to check whether I believe it.

What is GEO, and is it different from AEO?

Generative engine optimisation is the newer and more technical half: making sure the AI systems can reach your site at all, and that what they find is consistent enough to repeat with confidence.

That means letting the AI crawlers in on purpose rather than blocking them by accident, which a surprising number of sites do without knowing. It means an llms.txt that states in plain language what the business is, who it serves and where. It means the same facts about you appearing identically on the site, in the structured data, and on your Business Profile, because an assistant that finds three versions of your hours will not quote any of them.

AEO is about how the page is written. GEO is about whether a machine can find it, read it and trust it. You want both, and they are cheap to do together and expensive to retrofit separately.

How is this different from the SEO calls I get every week?

One plumber told me I was the tenth person that month to ring about his website. I believe him, and most of those calls are selling a monthly retainer with a report attached and no work underneath it.

The difference is that the foundation ships on day one and you can check it yourself. The sitemap either exists or it does not. The schema either validates or it does not. Your pages either answer the question in the first two sentences or they waffle. None of that requires you to trust a dashboard.

What I will not do is promise you page one by a date. Nobody controls that, and anybody who says otherwise is either guessing or counting on you not checking.

What do you actually do, in order?

First the technical foundation: sitemap, robots rules that name the AI crawlers explicitly, canonical tags on every page, and structured data describing the business, the services and the service areas.

Then the entity layer: name, address, phone and hours stated identically on the site and in the schema, a Business Profile that matches, and the towns you serve written out as text rather than implied.

Then the pages themselves, rewritten answer-first, with question-shaped headings and FAQs taken from the questions you get on the phone. Then, if it fits, the automations that catch what the site brings in, so a lead that arrives at 11pm is answered before you wake up.

Straight answers

What people ask before they hire someone for this.

How long does SEO take to work?: Months rather than weeks, and anybody giving you a date is guessing. The technical foundation lands the day the site goes live, so the crawling and indexing problems are fixed immediately. Earning trust for competitive local searches takes longer, especially for a new domain. What you should expect early is that your pages get indexed and start showing for your own business name and for specific, long-tail questions.
Do I need SEO if I already get work by word of mouth?: Maybe not urgently, and I would rather tell you that than sell you something. If you are full and your referrals hold, the automations that stop you doing admin at night are worth more to you than ranking. Search matters when the phone goes quiet, when you want to choose better jobs instead of taking whatever comes, or when you are trying to replace a retiring source of referrals.
Is this a monthly retainer?: The foundation is built into the site, not rented. Ongoing work only makes sense if there is ongoing work to do, which usually means publishing pages that answer real customer questions. If there is nothing worth publishing in a given month, I would rather tell you than invoice you for a report.
Can you fix the SEO on my existing site?: Sometimes, and it depends on what it is built on. The foundation work applies to any site: sitemap, canonicals, schema, headings, page speed, answer-first rewriting. If the underlying build is slow or the text lives inside images, fixing it can cost more than rebuilding, and I will say so rather than bill you to polish something that cannot get there.
Do you do SEO outside Halifax?: Yes. The work is remote, so the location only matters for the local signals themselves. I work with trades across Nova Scotia including Dartmouth, Bedford, Lower Sackville, Truro and Liverpool, and the local layer gets built around whichever towns you actually serve.

Related field notes

Questions this raises, answered.

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