There is a particular kind of small-business homepage that looks, at first glance, completely fine. The design is clean. The photography is warm. The copy speaks of trust, of expertise, of being there when it matters. And yet the same site sits on page three of Google for the terms that should be sending it customers. The owner is mystified. The web designer shrugs.
Most of these homepages are making the same three mistakes. They sit in plain sight, and once you know what to look for, you cannot unsee them. Better still, they can be fixed in a single afternoon.
Mistake one — the H1 that says everything and nothing
Open your homepage. Look at the largest piece of text on the screen, usually right under the navigation. That is your H1. It is the single most important on-page signal you send to Google about what this page is and who it serves.
Now, what does it say? If it reads something like one of these, you have a problem:
- "Clear, trusted guidance when you need it most."
- "Helping families move forward with confidence."
- "Your partner in success."
These are not headlines. They are mood boards. They tell Google nothing about what you do or where you do it. They tell ChatGPT and Perplexity nothing they can use to recommend you when somebody asks for help in your city.
Compare that to an H1 like this:
- "Vancouver Family Lawyers — Stride Law"
- "Calgary Tankless Water Heater Repair — Maple Plumbing"
- "Brooklyn Pediatric Dentist — Park Slope Smiles"
These name the service, the city, and the business. A search engine understands, in less than a second, what query this page is the answer to. An AI system summarising local options has a clean, citable anchor to work with.
The fix. Open your CMS. Find the H1 on your homepage. Rewrite it using this template:
<h1>[City] [Primary Service] — [Business Name]</h1>Keep the warm, aspirational copy — it has its place. Move it to the H2 immediately below, or into the hero subheading. The H1 is not where you tell your brand story. The H1 is where you tell Google, in the clearest possible terms, what this page is.
If you serve a region rather than a single city, name the region. If you serve nationally, name the country or the specialisation instead. The principle is the same — be specific about what you are and who you serve.
Why a vague H1 hurts both Google and AI search
A few years ago, you could get away with a creative H1 because Google had other signals to lean on — anchor text from inbound links, exact-match domain history, the title tag. Today, Google's helpful content systems, and the AI search layer sitting on top of them, increasingly look at whether your page directly answers a query. The H1 is the loudest answer you give them.
And here is the part most owners miss. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews do not just use your H1 to rank you — they use it to cite you. When an AI system constructs an answer like "the top family law firms in Vancouver include Stride Law and others," it is pulling those names from pages whose H1s make the city-and-service connection explicit. A homepage whose H1 says "Trusted guidance when it matters" is invisible to that process.
Mistake two — no LocalBusiness schema, or schema that is wrong
Open your homepage in a browser. Right-click and choose "View page source." Press Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F) and search for application/ld+json. What do you find?
If you find nothing, your homepage has no structured data. Google and the AI systems built on top of it are reading your page as plain HTML and guessing about the rest — your address, your hours, your phone number, the category of business you operate. They will sometimes guess correctly. They will sometimes guess wrong. They will sometimes not guess at all, and you will simply not appear.
If you find a block of JSON-LD but it is for WebSite or Organization only, you are halfway there but missing the local part — the part that tells Google "this business is a physical entity in a physical place, with hours and a phone number a customer can call." For a local business, that is the single most important piece of structured data you can publish.
The fix. Add a minimal, correct LocalBusiness JSON-LD block to your homepage's <head>. Here is a clean template you can adapt:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Stride Law",
"image": "https://stridelaw.ca/images/office.jpg",
"url": "https://stridelaw.ca",
"telephone": "+1-604-555-0142",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "1234 Burrard Street",
"addressLocality": "Vancouver",
"addressRegion": "BC",
"postalCode": "V6Z 2K8",
"addressCountry": "CA"
},
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 49.2827,
"longitude": -123.1207
},
"openingHoursSpecification": [{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
"opens": "09:00",
"closes": "17:00"
}],
"sameAs": [
"https://www.linkedin.com/company/stride-law",
"https://www.google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:YOUR_GBP_PLACE_ID"
]
}A few things to notice. If your business has a more specific type (LegalService, Plumber, Dentist, Restaurant), use that instead of LocalBusiness — more specific types carry more semantic weight. The sameAs array should include your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and any authoritative directory — this is the connective tissue that helps Google match your website to your real-world business entity.
Validate the block at the Schema Markup Validator and Google's Rich Results Test. If you want a deeper walkthrough, our piece on Schema markup for small business in 15 minutes covers the essentials, and the LocalBusiness schema guide goes deeper on the local-specific properties.
Why missing LocalBusiness schema hurts AI search even more than Google
Google can, with effort, infer a local business from a homepage even without schema. It has crawled the web for decades and has plenty of heuristics. AI search systems are different — they are extracting facts to build answers, not crawling pages to build an index. Structured data is the cleanest source of those facts.
When somebody asks ChatGPT, "Who is a good family lawyer in Vancouver?" the system builds an answer from extractable facts — name, location, services, hours, phone. A homepage with LocalBusiness JSON-LD hands those facts over on a plate. A homepage without it forces the AI to reconstruct them from prose, and it will sometimes simply skip your business in favour of one whose data is easier to extract.
Mistake three — not a single FAQ block on any service page
When somebody types a question into Google in 2026 — "how much does a family lawyer cost in Vancouver," "do plumbers charge to come out," "is invisalign covered by insurance" — Google is no longer just returning blue links. It is constructing an answer, often pulling sentences directly from pages that have laid it out in a clean question-and-answer format.
If your service pages have no FAQ block, you are not in that pool. You can have the best service in the city and still lose the customer to a competitor whose page answers the question on screen.
The fix. On each of your top service pages (and your homepage if it serves as a service page), add a section of three to six real questions with real answers. Not made-up questions. Real ones — the questions your existing customers ask in the first five minutes of a consultation. Then mark them up with FAQPage JSON-LD so search engines and AI systems can extract them cleanly:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "How much does a family lawyer cost in Vancouver?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Most family lawyers in Vancouver bill hourly, with rates that vary based on experience and case complexity. We provide a written fee estimate after the initial consultation so there are no surprises."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "Do I need a lawyer to file for divorce in British Columbia?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "You are not legally required to hire a lawyer to file for divorce in BC, but most contested divorces — and any case involving children or significant assets — benefit from legal representation."
}
}]
}Two rules. First, the questions in the JSON-LD must match the questions visible on the page — Google checks. Second, do not disguise marketing copy as Q&A. "Why are you the best lawyer in Vancouver?" is not a real question, and it makes the whole block look manipulative. Real questions, written answers, plain language. Our piece on how to write website content that actually ranks walks through the underlying principles.
What "one afternoon" actually looks like
Here is the order I would suggest, if you were sitting down today to do this:
- First thirty minutes — rewrite the H1 on the homepage and on every primary service page using the city-service-business template. Save and publish. This costs nothing and takes effect the next time Google crawls.
- Next ninety minutes — draft and add the
LocalBusinessJSON-LD block to your homepage's<head>. Validate it. If your CMS makes head injection difficult, most platforms now have an SEO plugin (Yoast, RankMath, Astro's integrations) that gives you a clean field for it. - Final ninety minutes — write three to six real FAQs for your top service page. Add them to the page visibly. Mark them up with FAQPage JSON-LD. Validate.
That is one afternoon. The reason most small businesses never do it is not that it is hard — it is that nobody has told them, clearly, that these three things are the difference between being the answer and being invisible.
FAQ
How long until Google notices the changes? For an established site, Google typically recrawls the homepage within days. The new H1 and schema usually show up in Search Console within one to two weeks. AI systems refresh on their own cadence.
Do I need to do this on every page, or just the homepage? The H1 fix applies to every important page. The LocalBusiness schema generally lives on the homepage (and on dedicated location pages if you have multiple locations). The FAQ block should appear on every primary service page, with questions specific to that service.
What if my CMS does not let me edit the H1 or add JSON-LD to the head? Most modern CMSes do allow it, often through an SEO plugin. If yours genuinely does not, that is a platform-level limitation worth solving.
Will FAQ schema get me a rich result in Google? Possibly, but Google has narrowed FAQ rich results in recent years to mostly authoritative sites. Even without the visible rich result, the structured data still helps Google and AI systems extract and cite your answers.
Is it safe to use a schema generator instead of writing JSON by hand? Yes, provided you validate the output. The shape of the JSON is what matters.
Want to know which of these three your site is doing wrong? Run the audit at licheo.com/seo-standings — sixty seconds, no email required.