Ten checks. Each one is either about a fact being present on your page or about that fact being readable by a machine, because those are the only two reasons an assistant recommends a business or skips it. Nine of these you can do yourself on any website, today. One of them depends on how your site was built.
| # | The check | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your homepage says what you sell and what town you are in, in plain words | You, 20 minutes |
| 2 | Hours, address and phone are on the page as text, not inside an image | You, 30 minutes |
| 3 | Each service or product has its own page or clearly labelled section | You, an afternoon |
| 4 | At least some real prices, not only "call for pricing" | You, 20 minutes |
| 5 | Your hours are correct right now, including holidays | You, ongoing |
| 6 | The site sits on your own domain | You, once |
| 7 | Your site publishes a summary machines can read | Your platform. Automatic on Vivreal |
| 8 | Your address is filled in, so the site reads as a local business | You fill it in once, Vivreal does the rest |
| 9 | Somebody other than you says online that you exist | You, ongoing |
| 10 | You can change any of the above yourself in under five minutes | Your platform |
Start free, no credit card. Setup in about two minutes.
1. Say what you sell, and where
An assistant matches the words a customer uses. "Trusted craftsmanship since 2004" matches nothing. "Kitchen remodeling in Sacramento" matches the actual question. Put the job and the town in the first paragraph of your homepage, in the words a customer would say out loud.
2. Facts as text, not pictures
A photo of your hours, a graphic with your phone number, a menu saved as an image. People read them, machines get nothing. Every fact you want an assistant to repeat has to exist as text on the page. Keep the graphic too if you like it.
3. One page or section per thing you do
If roofing, gutters and siding all live in one paragraph, an assistant cannot confidently tell a customer you do gutters. Separate pages or clearly labelled sections let it answer the narrow question, which is usually the question that turns into a call.
4. Put real prices on something
Prices are among the few facts an assistant will repeat with confidence, and "call for pricing" reliably gets you left out of the answer. You do not have to price everything. A starting price or a range on your main services is enough to be included.
5. Keep your hours honest
This is the one that hurts. An assistant confidently telling a customer you are open when you are closed costs you more goodwill than never being mentioned. Holiday hours are where most businesses fall down. If updating your site is a phone call to someone else, this check is already failing.
6. Use your own domain
A free subdomain works, but your own address is what makes you look like a business rather than a page. It also matters mechanically: a Vivreal site only hands assistants and search engines the full list of its pages once it has its own domain attached, so this one check quietly improves how much of your site gets read.
7. The summary machines read (the one you cannot write yourself)
Alongside the page a person sees, a website can publish a short plain description of the business for machines: name, address, phone, and for each item what it is and what it costs. This is the check almost nobody knows to ask about, and you cannot tell whether your site does it by looking at it.
On Vivreal, every page publishes it automatically. If you are on another builder, ask which page types are covered, because coverage varies a lot even between products that both claim to handle it.
8. Fill in your address
Related but separate, and worth its own line because it is a switch you throw. Once your address is in your business details, a Vivreal site stops describing itself as a generic organization and starts describing itself as a local business, with your street, town, phone and hours attached in the form assistants read. It takes about a minute and it is the single highest-value minute on this list.
9. Get vouched for somewhere else
Assistants weigh third-party mentions heavily, because a business describing itself proves little. Claim your listings, ask your happy customers for reviews, and be genuinely present where your customers talk. This is the slowest item here and the one competitors cannot copy from you.
10. Can you actually maintain all this?
Read checks 1 through 5 again and notice that most of them are not one-time jobs. They are things that go stale. If every change means emailing someone or waiting a week, your site will drift out of date and every other check on this list will quietly fail with it.
That is the real reason we build the way we do. A Vivreal site is one you change yourself, from your phone, between customers, in about a minute, and the whole portal installs on your phone or tablet like an app. The checklist stays passed because keeping it passed is easy.
How to use this
Run checks 1 to 6 on your current site right now, whatever it is built on. Most owners find three or four failing, and fixing them is an afternoon of typing, not a project. Then ask your platform about check 7. Then start on check 9, because it compounds and it takes the longest.
If you want the reasoning behind all of this, the hub is here: how to get your small business found by AI search. If you already tried asking an assistant about your business and got nothing, start here instead.