You asked ChatGPT, Google's AI answers, or Perplexity for a plumber, an HVAC company, or a roofer in your city. Your name was not there. A larger company was, or the tool declined to name anyone, or it named a business you cannot find. Treat that last one as a guess. These tools are not a directory of licensed contractors.
They repeat what they can read, and they prefer a fact that shows up the same way in more than one place. If your name, your phone, and your towns live on a truck and a Facebook page, there is nothing stable to repeat. A paid ad is not a citation. It disappears when you stop paying.
The check is seven items. None of them requires a new vendor. Score yourself in the browser. The score stays on that page. It is not saved, and it is not sent anywhere.
Use one name, one city, and one phone
Use the name that is on the license and the bank account. Put that spelling on the website, the Google listing, the invoice, and the truck. "Smith Plumbing" on the site and "Smith Plumbing LLC" on the listing are two businesses to a machine that matches strings. Pick one phone number. The door magnet, the voicemail, and the site should all use it.
If customers can walk into a shop, that street address belongs on the listing, and it has to be a place you control. If you drive to the customer and you do not have a public shop, do not rent a mailbox and call it an office. Say the city you are based in, and list the towns you serve.
A ServiceBase page repeats the name, the city, and the phone you type. They show up in the header, on the call button, in the contact block, and in the structured data. Signup does not ask for a street address, and the page does not invent one.
Publish a page that names the work and the towns
An answer engine cannot recommend a company it cannot open. A Facebook profile, a link in a bio, and a PDF on a shared drive are weak substitutes for a website. The page has to name the services in words a homeowner uses, and the service area in towns you will actually drive.
"Quality plumbing services" is not a service. A slab leak, a water heater, a drain, and a sewer are services. "The greater metro area" is not a service area. The neighborhoods on the route are. The same rule fits HVAC and roofing. No-cool and no-heat are different jobs. A leak visit and a replacement are different jobs. If you do not do one of them, say so.
That is what the plumbing pages, the HVAC pages, and the roofing pages describe, city by city. A plumber in Austin, an HVAC company in Houston, and a roofer in Las Vegas do not share a paragraph. The structure does. Create the free site and the services you list become the services on the page, with a service area made of the towns you enter. The sample plumbing site is the shape of it.
Answer the real questions in text a crawler can read
People ask the same things before they call. Do you cover this town. Are you licensed. Do you pull a permit. Is this a repair or a new system. Do you work on weekends. If those answers live only in your head, or only in a photo of a flyer, a tool that reads the page has nothing to quote.
Write the answers as text on the page. A heading and a sentence. A scan of a brochure does not count. A chat bubble that loads after a click and never appears in the page source does not count. The guides on this site, and these notes, publish questions and answers as text, with FAQ structured data. That is the pattern.
A customer site from ServiceBase does not add a separate FAQ block in this version. The services, the service area, and the about section are HTML, and you can edit them. Put the answer there. If a town is a yes, name it. If a job is a no, say the no.
Reviews have to be real, and specific
A useful review names the job, the neighborhood, and what happened. A review that only says the service was great could be any trade. Ask after a job you finished cleanly. Ask the customer to mention the work and the town. Do not buy reviews. Do not write them from the office. Do not offer a discount tied to a star count. A stack of reviews posted on one afternoon looks purchased, and it should.
A new ServiceBase site starts with sample quotes so the layout is not empty. They are labeled as sample reviews until you replace them. Leave that label on until the quotes are real, then turn it off. Sample quotes are not a reputation. Reviews on the Google listing matter here because that listing is public and the website can agree with it. The website quotes should be real once you have them. They do not replace the Google reviews.
Put the same facts in structured data
Structured data is text in the page, written for software, that repeats the name, the phone, the city, the areas, and the services. If it disagrees with what a person can read, the disagreement is what gets repeated. It is not a ranking trick.
A published ServiceBase page includes a HomeAndConstructionBusiness block with the name, the phone, the email, the city, the areas you listed, and each service. You do not paste any of that in yourself. If you change a service in the editor, look at the public page once and confirm the visible words and the facts still match.
Write so a summary would be obvious
This marketing site publishes llms.txt, a plain file that says what ServiceBase is, what it does not do, and where the useful pages are. A customer site in this version does not get its own llms.txt file. Do not wait for one.
Write the page so a summary would be boring. Who you are. The trade. The city. The jobs you want. The towns. The phone. If a sentence could sit on a competitor's site in another state, delete it. The file is one way to be that plain. The page still has to be plain without it.
Match the Google Business Profile to the site
ChatGPT and Perplexity are not Google. The Google Business Profile is still one of the public pages those tools can read, and it is the listing a local search already shows. Use the same name and the same phone. Set the primary category to the trade you want to be found for, and add another category only when you really do that work. Set the service area to towns you drive, not the state. Put the website URL on the profile. Set the hours you actually answer. Google's Business Profile help is the instruction for the product. ServiceBase does not log in to Google for you. It gives you a URL and a page that match the facts you should copy there.
The map listing, and how a smaller company competes with a bigger one, is covered in how to win the map pack.
What this will not do
None of this puts your name in ChatGPT tomorrow. A national brand with years of reviews will still be the easy citation for a vague question. You are trying to be the obvious citation for the job and the town you actually serve. That is a smaller target, and it is the one a one-truck company can hit.
If the phone rings and you miss it, the recommendation did its job and the missed-call calculator is the next question. If you want the seven items as yes, partly, or no, use the checklist. Then publish the page.