A GEO Checklist for Service Businesses: Thirty Checks in Six Groups

A checklist is not a strategy, but it stops you skipping the dull steps that decide most outcomes. This one is written for a service business, such as an IT company, clinic, consultancy or agency. It matches the order we use on real projects.

Group 1: Access

1. Googlebot can fetch your key pages, and none carry a noindex tag by mistake.
2. Your robots file does not block search bots from OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity unless you chose that. See our crawler guide.
3. Your CDN or firewall does not challenge those bots.
4. Important content is in text on the page, not only in images or a script.
5. Your pages load fast on a mid range phone.
6. An XML sitemap lists your canonical pages.

Group 2: Pages

1. Each service has one page that owns it, with no near duplicates.
2. The page opens with a two or three sentence direct answer.
3. It states who the service is for and who it is not for.
4. It gives a price range or the factors that set the price.
5. It explains how it works in steps and how long it takes.
6. It answers the follow up questions a buyer asks next.

Group 3: Entity facts

1. Your legal name, address, phone and services are the same on every page and listing.
2. An about page names the people and what they have done.
3. Organization and Service markup match the visible text.
4. Your profiles on LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and key directories are complete and linked.
5. One facts page states the basics plainly.

Group 4: Outside proof

1. You have real reviews on at least two independent platforms.
2. You are listed in the directories your buyers use.
3. You have published something others can cite, such as original data or a method.
4. Press or partner pages mention you accurately.
5. You do not buy links, reviews or mentions.

Group 5: Measurement

1. You have a list of fifteen to thirty real buyer prompts.
2. You run them monthly in two or three engines, three runs each.
3. You log mentioned, cited and described correctly.
4. You track clicks and impressions in Search Console, knowing AI feature traffic sits inside the Web type.
5. You record every site change with a date.

Group 6: Conversion

1. Every service page has one clear next step.
2. A new enquiry gets a reply within minutes, not a day.
3. There is a rule for when a person takes over.
4. The enquiry lands in your CRM with the fields a rep needs.
5. You review a sample of enquiries each month for quality.

How to score yourself

Count the boxes you can honestly tick. Below twenty, start with Groups 1 to 3 and ignore everything else for a month. Between twenty and twenty five, the gap is usually proof or measurement. Above that, you are doing better than most, and the gains come from content depth and speed of reply.

If you want us to run it for you, that is the visibility audit. If you prefer to do it yourself, start with what GEO is and come back here.