The DIY AIEO Checklist: 12 Fixes You Can Ship This Month

You can do real AIEO work yourself. This is the exact priority order we use, trimmed to what a busy owner can ship in a month without hiring anyone.

Week 1: Entity cleanup

1. Write your canonical description: one sentence saying what you do, for whom, where. Use it verbatim everywhere.
2. Make name, phone, and address identical across your site, Google Business Profile, and top directories.
3. Kill or redirect dead pages and duplicate profiles; ambiguity is the enemy.

Week 2: Structured facts

4. Add LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService schema to your homepage.
5. Add FAQPage schema with the five questions customers actually ask you.
6. Add Organization sameAs links tying your site to your profiles.

Week 3: Proof

7. Ask your last ten happy customers for reviews that mention the specific service and city.
8. Respond to every existing review; engines read the exchange.
9. Get one legitimate third-party mention: local paper, industry directory, supplier's partner page.

Week 4: Answer-shaped content

10. Rewrite your top service page to open with a direct answer to "what does this cost and what do I get".
11. Publish one page answering the question you hear most on the phone.
12. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google your five buyer questions. Log the answers with dates. That log is your scoreboard.

If step 12 shows competitors owning your answers and you would rather not spend your evenings on steps 1 through 11, the audit is free and the fix list comes prioritized.