The one-paragraph test

Start with a deceptively simple exercise: write one paragraph that completely describes your business, the way you would want an AI to repeat it. Five ingredients, in order: name (exactly as customers should see it), category in the buyer's words (not your industry's jargon), place (city, neighborhood, or service area), specialty (the specific thing you are the obvious choice for), and proof (a true, checkable claim — years in business, a certification, a number you can stand behind).

A worked example. Weak: “Sunshine Solutions is a full-service provider of innovative comfort systems for residential and commercial clients.” That paragraph could describe anyone and therefore describes no one. Strong: “Rinaldi Heating & Air is a family-run HVAC company in Columbus, Ohio, known for same-day furnace repair and transparent flat-rate pricing. Founded in 2009, it holds an A+ Better Business Bureau rating and services all major brands.” Same length. One of them gives an answer something to say; the other gives it fog.

Why this paragraph matters so much: it becomes the master copy for everything in this module. Your About page opens with it. Your Google Business Profile description is built from it. Your social bios, directory listings, and press boilerplate all descend from it — same name form, same category words, same specialty, same proof. Repetition of this paragraph's facts, in your words and then in others', is precisely what entity strength from Module 1 is made of.

Two disciplines while you draft. First, use the words buyers type into the tools, not the words your trade uses among itself — customers ask for a “wedding photographer,” not a “visual storyteller.” Second, every claim must survive being checked: the moment your paragraph promises something a review or a regulator contradicts, you have built an entity with a crack in it. Write the paragraph now in the worksheet below. The rest of this module is distribution.

Your website is the source of record

When the sources disagree about you, the tools look for a tiebreaker — and your own website is the closest thing to an official record. That only works if the record actually exists in readable form. Audit your site the way a retrieval system experiences it: as text, page by page, asking of each page “if this were the only page read, what would it conclude we do?”

The essentials, in order. An About page that opens with your master paragraph and then expands it — history, team, service area, credentials — in plain text on the page, not baked into images. A page per service, each named the way buyers name it (“Furnace Repair”, not “Comfort Solutions”), each stating who it is for, where, and what it costs or how pricing works. A contact page with name, address, phone, and hours as visible text. And your name written the same way everywhere on the site — if your header says “Rinaldi HVAC,” your footer and About page cannot say “Rinaldi Heating & Air Co.”

The silent traps are worth hunting specifically. Facts trapped in images and PDFs are half-invisible: menus, price lists, and brochures uploaded as graphics often never make it into what systems read — retype the important facts as page text. Pages built entirely by scripts that render nothing until a browser runs them can look blank to simpler crawlers; if your site is a single-page app, check what its raw HTML actually contains. And the classic: a service you still advertise on the site two years after dropping it, teaching every answer that you offer it.

None of this is redesign work. It is a weekend of editing text you already have, guided by one question per page — does this page, read alone and literally, describe the same business as my master paragraph? When every page answers yes, your site stops contradicting itself, and the tiebreaker starts breaking ties in your favor.

Same facts everywhere: profiles, listings, and directories

Your website is the record, but the tools do not take your word alone — they triangulate. Your Google Business Profile, your social profiles, review sites, industry directories, local listings, and the occasional article are read as witnesses. Witnesses who agree create confidence. Witnesses who disagree — three addresses, two founding years, a phone number that rings a fax machine — create the blur from Module 1, and answers quietly route around blurry businesses.

The audit is mechanical: make a list of everywhere your business appears (search your own name in quotes and go five pages deep; check the big directories and your industry's specific ones), then open each and compare the core facts against the master paragraph: name form, category, address, phone, website, description, hours. Fix the mismatches, close duplicates — duplicate listings are a classic, especially after a move or a rename — and claim the profiles you have never touched, because an unclaimed profile is still describing you, just with whatever data a scraper guessed.

Pay special attention to category fields. Most profiles force a category choice, and it is the single strongest sentence in the listing — stronger than your description, because it is structured. A bakery listed as “Cafe” on one platform and “Bakery” on another is telling the record two different stories about what questions it belongs in. Pick the primary category a buyer would use, align it everywhere the platform allows, and use secondary categories for the rest instead of splitting the difference.

Work the list top-down by authority: Google Business Profile first (it feeds Google's answers and maps directly), then the major review platforms for your trade, then social profiles, then directories. You will not finish every long-tail listing site on the internet, and you do not need to — the witnesses that matter are the ones the tools actually read, and those are the same big names a customer would check. A clean top twenty beats a claimed top two hundred with errors in it.

• Googled my business name in quotes, five pages deep, and listed every profile I found
• Name, category, address, phone, and website match the master paragraph on Google Business Profile
• Same check done on my top review platforms and social profiles
• Duplicate listings found and closed or merged
• Primary category is the buyer's word for what I do — identical everywhere
• Every wrong fact from my Module 1 baseline traced to a source and corrected

Schema: name tags for machines

Everything so far has been about writing facts clearly for readers — human and machine alike. Schema markup (also called structured data) is the one place you state the facts in a format written only for machines: a small block of code, invisible to visitors, that labels things explicitly — this is the organization's name, this is its address, this is its phone, these are its profiles elsewhere. Think of it as a name tag worn to a conference where half the attendees are robots.

The highest-value tags for a local or service business are few. Organization or LocalBusiness schema on your homepage: name, description (your master paragraph again), address, phone, opening hours, and the area served. SameAs links inside it: the URLs of your official profiles — social, review platforms, directories — which tells systems “all these witnesses are the same entity,” stitching your scattered profiles into one identity. And FAQ schema on pages with real questions and answers, which matches the question-and-answer shape of what the tools produce.

Set expectations honestly: schema does not rank you, cite you, or rescue bad content. A business with perfect markup and a muddled website is a muddled website with labels. What schema does is remove ambiguity at the margin — it confirms the facts your pages already state, in a form that needs no interpretation. When the record is clear and consistent, that confirmation is the difference between the tools describing you confidently and hedging toward a competitor.

Adding it is a small, one-time job: most website platforms and SEO plugins generate the basics from fields you fill in, and free generators will produce the code block to paste into your homepage template if yours does not. Fill the fields from the master paragraph — never from memory, never with a different name form — and validate with Google's Rich Results Test, a free checker that reads your page and reports what it found. Twenty minutes of form-filling, checked once, and the name tag is on.