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Business Articles

Practical thinking for owner-run businesses on pricing, inventory, cash, customers and getting found, and on making better decisions with the data you already have.

8 articles on Getting found, A to Z

How Do You Set Up a Google Business Profile?

Getting found6 min

The mechanics take an evening; the four decisions are where profiles go wrong. Exact name, true category, honest hours, and a description that follows Google's rules — walked through on our own profile, including the step we skipped.

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Getting found6 min

How Do You Show Up in AI Search Results?

AI models quote what they can extract, attribute what they can identify, and skip what they can't parse. When we first measured our own site it ranked 22nd for its own name and an AI mixed us up with a British firm. The fixes were ordinary; measuring them is the hard part.

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Getting found6 min

How to Set Up an Online Presence for a New Business

Four phases, mostly free, an evening per item, order mattering more than speed. We stood up our own presence this year and kept the receipts — the address that leaked for months, the profile seen three times, the 250 spam links, and the AI summary that confused us with a British firm.

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Getting found5 min

Should Your Website Use www or Not?

Neither form is better, and the split matters anyway. To a machine your www and bare addresses are two different websites, and everything your site earns is credited to whichever one your configuration testifies for.

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Getting found5 min

What Analytics Does a Small Business Website Need?

Three free tools, and one matters more than the others. Search Console is the report card nothing else can produce, GA4 is the census, and Clarity is the camera. What each answers, the setup decisions that matter, and where all three go blind.

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Getting found6 min

What Is a Good Customer Acquisition Cost?

Every benchmark answer dodges the real question. Your margin and your payback window set the ceiling on what a customer can cost you. This is that math, walked slowly, with the calculator ready when you want your own number.

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Getting found5 min

What Social Media Profiles Does Your Business Need?

Fewer than you fear. At the baseline a profile is not a marketing channel but a public record that vouches for your identity, to customers and to machines cross-checking it. What to claim, what to keep consistent, and the preview card almost nobody checks.

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Getting found4 min

Why Isn't Your Website Contact Form Working?

A broken form is the quietest failure a website can have. The five ways forms die silently, the two-minute monthly test that catches all of them, and what our own contradictory records taught us about trusting a form nobody has tested.

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