Frequently asked questions
Straight answers, before you ask.
Everything clients ask in the first call — how the work runs, what SEO and AEO actually are, what we measure, what it costs and what happens if you leave. If your question is not here, send it and it probably will be.
Working together
What exactly does KEINC do?
KEINC runs the web and technology side of a small business as a single engagement: managing the website, running SEO and AEO so the business gets found in both search results and AI answers, producing one monthly report of the metrics that drive revenue, and advising on business software — what to buy, how to implement it, how to wire it together. The point is one accountable supplier instead of four who each blame the others.
Who is KEINC a good fit for?
Small businesses with roughly two to fifty people that depend on being found online, already pay for several pieces of software, and have nobody internally whose job is to own any of it. The common thread is an owner who would rather run the business than manage suppliers.
Who is it not a good fit for?
Businesses looking for the cheapest possible hosting, for a one-off redesign with no ongoing relationship, for paid-ads management as the main channel, or for SEO tactics we would not put our name to. We will say so on the first call rather than take the work and under-deliver.
How does an engagement start?
With a two-week fixed-fee audit, followed by a written, costed blueprint. The four stages are set out here. You keep both documents whether or not you hire us for the work.
What do you need from me each month?
Usually under an hour. Approve a short list of content changes, answer a few questions only you can answer about the business, and read a one-page report. Everything else is handled without you.
Will I be dealing with one person or an account manager?
You deal directly with the person doing the work. There is no account-management layer passing messages between you and whoever actually touches the site.
How quickly do you respond when something breaks?
Uptime and performance monitoring alerts us, not you, so in most cases we are already working on it before you notice. For outages we respond the same business day, and routine update requests are typically turned around within one to two business days.
Websites
Do I have to move my website to work with KEINC?
No. We start with what you have and would rather repair a site than rebuild it. If the current platform is genuinely holding the business back we will say so in writing, with the cost and the benefit, and you decide. Any move is staged so the site stays live and the search rankings carry over.
Do you build new websites, or only maintain them?
Both, but we will usually argue for repair first. Most sites we take over need a fortnight of fixes rather than six weeks of design, and a rebuild is the expensive answer to a problem that is often maintenance. When a rebuild is genuinely the right call, we price it as its own project.
Who owns the domain, the hosting and the content?
You do, from day one and in writing — domain, hosting, analytics properties, content and media. We hold delegated access, not ownership, and revoking it does not take the site down. More on the ownership terms.
What platform do you build on?
Whatever suits the business rather than whatever we prefer to sell. For most small-business sites that means a fast, low-maintenance build with no unnecessary moving parts; where a content management system genuinely earns its place, we use one. The decision is written down with its trade-offs before anything gets built.
How fast should my site be?
The working target is a largest-contentful-paint under 2.5 seconds on a mid-range phone over mobile data, with no layout shift and interaction response under 200 milliseconds. We hold managed sites to a stated speed budget and treat a regression as a defect rather than a nice-to-have.
SEO
How long does SEO take to work?
Impressions tend to move in the first one to two months, mid-intent positions from month three to six, and the commercially valuable terms between six and twelve. A new domain or a penalty history adds three to six months. The full timeline is here.
Do you guarantee a number one ranking?
No, and neither can anyone else. Rankings are set by a third party that changes its mind regularly. What we commit to is the work, the order it is done in, and honest monthly reporting on what moved and what did not.
Is local SEO different from regular SEO?
Yes, and for most small businesses it matters more. The map pack sits above the organic results and is decided by different signals: the accuracy of your Google Business Profile, your categories and service areas, consistent name, address and phone details across the web, review volume and recency, and genuine proximity to the searcher.
Do you do link building?
Not in the form it is usually sold. We do not buy links, trade links or use private blog networks, because those are liabilities with a delayed invoice. We do pursue the citations a real local business should have: licences, trade associations, suppliers, local press and sponsorships.
Will you write content for us?
Yes, drawn from what you and your team actually know rather than paraphrased from competitors. You approve everything before it publishes. We do not publish AI-generated filler at volume to pad a word count, because it is now a ranking and a trust liability.
AEO — answer engine optimization
What is AEO?
AEO stands for answer engine optimization: making a business legible, credible and quotable to systems that answer questions directly — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot — rather than returning a list of links. The goal is to be one of the two or three businesses named in the answer. How we do it.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO optimises for position in a list; AEO optimises for being extracted and quoted inside a generated answer. The plumbing overlaps heavily, but AEO adds entity clarity, extraction-ready structure and corroboration. There is a full side-by-side comparison on the AEO page.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. Conventional search still sends the majority of commercial traffic for most small businesses, and roughly two-thirds of good AEO work improves conventional rankings as well. They should be bought and run as one programme, not as rival line items.
Which AI engines do you optimise for and monitor?
ChatGPT and OpenAI search, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot. We agree a set of twenty to fifty prompts phrased the way your customers actually ask, run them on a schedule, and log whether you were named, in what position, what was said, and who was named instead.
How do you measure whether AEO is working?
Three ways: citation frequency across the agreed prompt set, share of answers compared with named competitors, and referral traffic and enquiries arriving from assistant surfaces. Answers vary between runs and users, so we report trends across the whole prompt set rather than a single screenshot.
Can AI answers be gamed?
Not durably, and attempting it is a poor trade. What holds up is the unglamorous version: a consistent entity, structured data that matches the visible page, specific checkable claims, named expertise, and corroboration elsewhere on the web. Prompt-injection tricks and hidden text get caught and cost you credibility with the same systems.
Should I block AI crawlers instead?
That is a strategic choice and it depends on the business. If your value is in content people pay for, blocking can make sense. If customers find you by asking for a recommendation, blocking removes you from the answer entirely. For most small service businesses the right move is to allow the major AI crawlers and make sure they see an accurate description of you.
What is llms.txt and do I need one?
It is a plain-text file at the root of a site describing the business and pointing to its most useful pages in a form cheap for a language model to read. It is a convention rather than a standard, so no engine is obliged to honour it, and it will not rescue an otherwise unreadable site. It costs almost nothing, so we add one to the sites we manage — including this one.
Reporting and measurement
Which metrics will you report on?
Five to seven, chosen for your business and tied to revenue. The sample report shows exactly what lands in your inbox, including what we deliberately leave off.
Can you tell me which marketing actually produced a customer?
That is the point of the attribution work. Every form, phone number, booking link and email address is instrumented so the source survives the click; enquiries land in one place with the source attached; you flag which became a quote and which became an invoice. The report then shows revenue by channel rather than visits by channel.
Do you use tracking cookies or Google Analytics?
Only where it genuinely earns its place, and never by default. This site runs with no tracking cookies at all. For client sites we prefer privacy-respecting, cookieless measurement and will tell you plainly what any tool collects before it goes on.
Will I get access to the dashboard, or just the report?
Both. The dashboard is a property in your name that you can open whenever you like; the monthly one-pager exists because almost nobody opens a dashboard. If you leave, the dashboard stays with you.
Technology and tools
Can you work with the tools I already pay for?
Yes, and that is the usual outcome. Most small businesses already own more capability than they use. The audit maps every tool you pay for against what it actually does for you, then we consolidate, connect and configure before recommending anything new.
Do you take commission from software you recommend?
No. We take no referral fees, reseller margin or commission from any platform we recommend, and that is stated in the engagement terms. It is also why the recommendation is sometimes to keep what you have and cancel two other subscriptions.
Will you migrate our data from an old system?
Yes, with a reconciliation check so you can see that nothing was lost, a period of running both systems in parallel, and a rollback plan written before cut-over rather than improvised after it.
What if the problem turns out not to be the website?
Then we say so. It is a common finding: the site is doing its job and the enquiries are being lost after they arrive — no follow-up, no owner, no system. Fixing that is cheaper than more marketing, and it is what the technology consulting side exists for.
Commercial terms
What does it cost?
The audit is a fixed fee quoted up front; build work is quoted line by line from the blueprint; ongoing management is a flat monthly retainer against a written scope rather than hours on a timesheet. Why there is no public price list.
Am I locked into a long contract?
No. After the initial audit and build, engagements run month to month with thirty days' notice. You own your domain, hosting, content and data throughout, and you can take all of it with you.
Are hosting and subscription costs included?
Hosting and third-party subscriptions are billed to you at cost on your own accounts, with no markup. You can see exactly what the software costs and what the service costs, separately.
What happens if we stop working together?
You get a written handover document, a full export of anything we hold, and continued access to every account — because they were always in your name. Nothing is held hostage and no exit fee applies.
Where are you based, and who do you work with?
KEINC works remotely with small businesses across Canada, in English. Everything is run over email, shared documents and short calls, so location rarely matters.
Next step
Still got a question?
Send it. Questions that come up more than once end up on this page, which is how most of it got written.