Reference
The vocabulary that decides whether a contractor website ranks and gets cited, in plain English, no jargon for jargon's sake.
- LocalBusiness schema
- Structured markup that tells search engines your name, address, services, and area as machine-readable facts instead of leaving them to guess from text.
- Structured data (@graph)
- A linked set of schema.org facts (Organization, Article, Breadcrumb) in the page, so crawlers and AI engines read your site as data, not prose.
- Core Web Vitals (CWV)
- Google's measured speed and stability metrics. Slow or jumpy pages lose rank and lose the buyer before the page settles.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
- A Core Web Vital measuring how fast the page responds to a tap or click. Under 200ms is the target; many sites fail it.
- Answer-first content
- Leading a section with the buyer's question as a heading and the answer in the first sentence, so search and AI can quote it directly.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- Structuring content to be the cited answer inside AI overviews and chatbots, a visibility surface separate from the classic blue links.
- Grandfathering
- When an older site outranks a better one on accumulated signals (links, content, trust) built over years, not on domain age itself.
- hreflang
- Markup that tells Google which language and region a page targets, so the right version is served. Absent on 100% of the sites in our sample.
- No-orphan / reachability
- Every page reachable from the home page in two clicks or fewer. Orphan pages exist but are effectively invisible, built but not reachable.