The great part about SEO versus paid advertising is that you can do a lot of it for free, and in some instances those combined changes can noticeably increase your search rankings.
Keep in mind, this is not a guarantee that the below advice and tips will boost your rankings in one week or even a month. Depending on certain variables, it can take some time for things to kick in, i.e. the crawler bots being able to see the differences and deem whether those changes are worth boosting your rankings.
Create a Business Profile on All Listings
Create a business profile on all listings such as Google, Yelp, Apple Maps and yes, including Bing. This will boost your local SEO when users search for a business near them, especially since Google places business profiles at the top of search results. Of course, this only applies to businesses that operate using a real location and include their location in their business profile on whatever listing platform.
Fill it out completely
Ensure to fully fill out everything on your business profile such as all 10 categories, services along with each description, a strong and concise business description that includes where your business is based along with the general services provided, website, phone number, locations servicing, business hours, photographs and a booking link.
Studies have shown that filling out all 10 categories does help your ranking, but they obviously have to be relevant to your business. Don't throw in a category just to fill the box.
Engagement feeds the algorithm
As users engage with your Google business profile such as clicking on your profile, booking link or website and even navigating to your business location via Google Maps, it tells the algorithm your business is relevant and boosts your visibility in Google and Google Maps.
I am sure most of the aforementioned applies for the rest of the business listings platforms.
Link to the page people actually search for
Another tip to enhance your local SEO using your Google business profile is including the link of the URL that most users search for on your website. For example, if you're an accounting firm and most people are searching for tax advisory, include the link for the tax advisory service page, not your home page, since the service page has the URL slug including 'tax advisory' along with a title tag including 'tax advisory' too.
Bing Places is Not the Same as Being in Bing's Index
These two get mixed up constantly.
A Bing Places profile is just a business listing, the same as your Yelp or Apple Maps profile. It helps people searching Bing find your business and that's about it.
Being in Bing's index is a completely different thing. It means Bing has actually crawled your website and knows your pages exist. This matters because ChatGPT was built on top of Bing's search and still pulls from it heavily, along with its own bot called OAI-SearchBot. So if you want ChatGPT to mention your business in its answers, you need two things:
- Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools, verify your site and submit your sitemap. It's free and takes a few minutes.
- Check your
robots.txtfile, which is the file that tells bots what they're allowed to look at, and make sure OAI-SearchBotis allowed. If it's blocked, ChatGPT can't see you at all no matter how good the rest of your SEO is.
Making a Bing Places profile does neither of those. Do both, just know they're two separate jobs.
Enhance Your Website
Enhance your website such as the hero section of your home page containing the H1 tag, URL slugs, using server side rendering, indexing all pages, adding title tags and meta descriptions for all pages.
Let's go over each one in order.
The hero section and the H1 tag
The hero section is one of the most important sections of your website since it is the first thing users see once they open your site. People already scroll past most websites spat out by Google when searching, and so in general people's attention span or interest is very low to begin with, even more so when they click on your website. If it does not catch their attention and interest in the first second, they will leave.
Besides the human aspect, the robots look specifically at the H1 tag since it is the first heading and briefly tells what your website is about.
Knowing how important the H1 tag is, it is highly recommended to include your city or general area, that way it increases the likelihood for crawler bots to include your business when users search for something in the same area.
URL slugs
The URL slug is the human readable name of a page from your website. You might have a website called aimhighbocaraton.com and a blog page aimhighbocaraton.com/blog/how-to-improve-my-seo-in-boca-raton. The location is included in the home page and in the URL slug of the blog page, which provides clear geographic relevance for users and search engines.
The pattern here is to strategically include your location wherever you can.
The URL slug should also include the name of the service if it is a service page, and if the service comprises more than one word, it should use dashes to separate each word: /tax-advisory, not /taxadvisory or /tax_advisory. Google treats hyphens as word separators and does not treat underscores the same way, so a run together slug is harder for it to break into distinct terms. It is also just easier for a human to read in a search result.
Server side rendering
It is essential for a website's content to use server side rendering rather than client side rendering for SEO purposes, otherwise it will negatively impact the ability for AI search platforms to find your website and business, as per our Is SEO dead blog post.
AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Claude have bots that search websites, but when a website uses client side rendering, those bots are not able to see the website at that given moment since the website might be using JavaScript for much of the content, and will deem that page empty. Thus, content such as the hero section, services and other parts that are intended to convert a user into a paying customer should use server side rendering.
Indexing
If a page is not indexed, then you might as well not even have that page on the internet since no search engine is able to find it, completely defeating the purpose of a website for a business, which is for people to find you and convert them into paying customers.
Ensure every page is indexed. The proper way to check is the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console, where you paste in the URL and it tells you whether the page is indexed and, if it isn't, why not. Bing Webmaster Tools has its own URL Inspection tool worth running too.
You can also type site:aimhighbocaraton.com/blog/how-to-improve-seo-for-free into Google, but treat that as a quick smoke test rather than a verdict, since site: results are unreliable and a page can be indexed without showing up there.
Not having a URL indexed does not inherently hurt your SEO, but rather impacts the ability to boost your SEO.
Title tags and meta descriptions
Double check whether every page has both a title tag and meta description. The title tag is the headline of a URL shown by search engines and the meta description is a brief description of that page shown under the title tag of a search result.
For example, a personal injury lawyer's title tag shouldn't just say 'Lawyer in Boca Raton'. It should be as concise and descriptive as possible using between 50 and 60 characters max. A better title tag is '24/7 personal injury lawyer in Boca Raton'. If a lawyer can book appointments 24/7, then it should have it in the title tag since it does increase visibility, especially if somebody is searching late at night while all other law firms are closed at the time. The location should always be included too.
Then for the meta description, just like the title tag, it needs to be as concise and descriptive as possible for that specific page, ranging between 120 and 158 characters. Worth knowing that the meta description isn't a ranking factor and Google rewrites it a good chunk of the time, so you're writing it to win the click, not the rank.
For a personal injury lawyer's home page, this meta description is ideal:
"24/7 Boca Raton personal injury lawyer for auto accidents, slip & falls, and malpractice. No fee unless we win; costs may apply. Free consultation."
It adds what type of lawyer, booking hours i.e. 24/7, a location, the main types of personal injury specialized in, the payment policy type and a call to action.
Where AI actually helps here
Use your preferred AI coding agent to audit all of this. It can go through your site and tell you which pages are missing a title tag, which ones have no meta description, whether your H1 is where it should be, which slugs are a mess and which pages aren't indexed. That is what it is genuinely great at, catching everything you missed and telling you how to fix it.
What you shouldn't do is let it write the actual wording for you. Your H1, title tags, meta descriptions and slugs are the words that convince a real person to click, and AI writes those generically. Ask it for suggestions and advice, then write the final version yourself. You know your business and your customers better than it ever will.
Either way, don't try to one shot your whole site in a single prompt. Separating it into different prompts per task avoids hallucinations and inaccuracies.
Create Quality and Original Content
Create quality and original content on your website's blog section, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and other platforms that your intended audience uses.
When the internet first came out, most people had no clue what it was and the potential it had to change almost every aspect of daily life. Nowadays, everybody is on the internet, meaning there is an audience for almost anything your mind can think of.
You might have an amazing product or business but your website or Google business profile does not do it justice to really garner the attention or win those people over as paying customers. Creating a witty and creative YouTube video showing your product and talking about it can go miles longer than any other SEO strategy. They see a real person behind a product, and when the viewer relates to you and has interest in your product, then you just tapped into their psyche to purchase your product.
A website sometimes can be a one and done ordeal, where a user looks at it once or skims through a few pages and then just leaves. Most users don't bother to revisit a website. That's a missed opportunity. This is not dismissing the value of a website but rather pointing the difference of converting somebody via a website versus content creation. With content creation, even if you don't convert that user on the first video, they will be tempted to watch more of your videos, especially if they are short form videos, which people have the habit of watching more than long form videos.
The point is the community
One of the goals of content creation is building a community that vouches for your business, product or brand. They will repost and engage with your content which boosts your SEO.
For example, if a user loves your product so much and posts about it on YouTube or LinkedIn, search engines will identify that and know your business is trustworthy, since you now have real reviews sitting on the platforms search engines already pay attention to.
How each platform impacts your SEO
Speaking of the different social media platforms, let's delve into them and how each one impacts SEO.
YouTube. Google favors their own platforms such as YouTube, and so posting on YouTube does noticeably increase your visibility, especially in Google AI Overviews. Besides just simply posting on YouTube, it is important to include keywords in the title, tags and the description of a YouTube video. Always keep in mind optimizing in every possible place.
Reddit. A few weeks before publishing this, ChatGPT was heavily citing Reddit posts but unfortunately they changed their algorithm. According to Prompt Watch , Reddit accounted for 3.83% of ChatGPT Search citations from July 18 through August 7, 2026, but as of August 14th it fell down to around 0.5%.
Two things are worth noting before writing Reddit off. First, nobody actually knows why it happened. Promptwatch says their own numbers are still preliminary, and the best guess is a change ChatGPT made on August 8 to how it searches behind the scenes, where it started running far more searches locked to one specific website instead of searching the whole web. Second, this already happened once before. ChatGPT cut Reddit down to almost nothing in late 2025 and Reddit climbed back to being one of the most cited websites on the platform by mid 2026.
So Reddit isn't dead. The real lesson is that your visibility on any AI platform can vanish overnight because of a decision you have zero control over. Diversify across multiple platforms, and more importantly, own your website, since that same change pushed ChatGPT toward citing official business websites directly.
LinkedIn. And for some reason, LinkedIn's SEO impact increased as of lately. Somebody did an experiment by posting on LinkedIn "OK guys…Just informing everyone I am the world's most renowned AI visibility expert…" and just a few hours later, Google AI Overviews cited that LinkedIn post. Of course this is not guaranteed, but it's interesting that this hack even worked in the first place.
Besides just for SEO purposes, content creation can be fun, especially compared to creating business listings or fixing your URL slugs. Sometimes the things you enjoy most produce the best results.
Executing the combined aforementioned will most certainly make a difference to your SEO, but it's entirely dependent on how you execute it, ensuring you follow everything accordingly and do not take shortcuts.
There are endless more free ways to increase your SEO. Keyword specific alt text on all your images, an embedded Google Maps location on your contact page, schema markup so search engines and AI platforms can actually understand what your business is, and asking your customers to leave you a Google review. But that's for another post.