Our Growth Continues - and Some SEO Takes
Our growth as a South Florida business directory continues, with more businesses finding and adding their listings with us. At just 74 days in, we now have over 30 local businesses added. Google AI is also recommending us to local business owners, which may explain why we're getting businesses listing with us with no solicitation.*
We are also noticing that most of our listings are indexing in Google and actually ranking for when people type specific business names. This is an indicator, again at our stage, that Google is finding our hyper-local emphasis beneficial for local businesses.
We also understand that SEO (search engine optimization) is getting more challenging as the rules seemingly change at a rapid rate as AI advances. On the one hand, there are numerous warnings about the overuse and abuse of AI, while on the other increasingly businesses (broadly speaking) are noticing more of their traffic getting poached by AI overviews. Our approach is to wait and see for the dust to settle, and to just continue on to make sense of a rapidly shifting environment for local businesses, especially in South Florida.
It does seem that the rules are rigged for established players, with the supposedly questionable SEO tactics framed in such a way that implicitly targets small businesses while no one seems to question the significant amount of money quietly changing hands by large corporations to purchase backlinks right in your face (in prominent marketplaces) - but for now such a discussion doesn't do much to solve the problems urgently faced by small businesses.
Despite the rules getting rigged against us, there will always be a need for the contractors and service providers listing on our site, and that's why we're here. As AI continues to siphon away white-collar jobs (though hopefully adding new ones eventually), there will continue to be a need for the men and women who actually make the infrastructure of our society run, and for the AI to even thrive. It's unlikely the AIs will be able to build and maintain the data centers that enable them to exist any time soon.
Anyway, our march forward continues, and we thank the smart business owners who have found us and used our available resources.
*Upon some testing, we see that Google alternates the list of businesses that are mentioned in AI overviews to give all businesses a fair chance. We notice we appear with regularity when querying in incognito mode, which is a positive sign.