FAQs

Yes, and it is worth doing. Keyword-stuffed business names and addresses that turn out to be mail drops can be reported, and they do come down. It takes persistence more than cleverness.

Sometimes, but it is harder than most people expect, and it is the question where we see the most wishful thinking. Proximity is weighted heavily and we cannot move your building.

We measure this every month across our clients, so we can be specific about where the wall is. Across 18 client grids and 882 measured points this August, a business ranked in the top three at about 83% of points at its own address, roughly 40% of points two to four miles out, and about 7% at nine to twelve miles. Appearing anywhere in the top 20 held up better, around 70% out to nine miles, before falling off sharply.

So a neighboring suburb a few miles away is realistic. A suburb on the far side of the metro usually is not, at least not from your current location.

Two things change that math. Service-area businesses in less crowded categories reach much further, and we have clients ranking in the top three more than thirteen miles from their pin. And an actual address in that suburb changes the answer entirely, so if a specific suburb is worth real money to you, that may be the honest answer and we will say so rather than pretend otherwise.

What we will do is win your own area completely, push out as far as the math allows, and measure your current footprint before you spend anything so you can see exactly where you fade out.

Not necessarily. Service-area businesses can rank without a storefront, and the rules for how you set that up are specific. Getting it wrong risks suspension, which is a considerably worse outcome than ranking poorly.

Either. Most clients would rather we ran it. If you would rather keep it in-house, we will get it set up correctly and show your team what to do, and you are not stuck waiting on an agency to change your holiday hours.

We request manager access to the profile rather than your credentials. You stay the owner and you can remove us at any point.

It depends on where you are starting, and anyone who gives you a number without looking at your market is guessing. Three things decide it: your current position, how strong the businesses already in the pack are, and how broad the phrase is. Competing for “dentist” in a dense metro is a different problem than “sedation dentistry” in a suburb.

That said, the map pack usually moves faster than organic rankings. Profile and listing fixes can show up within a few weeks, because you are correcting information rather than building authority. Reviews take longer, since they arrive at whatever pace your customers do. If you are starting from a profile that has been neglected for years, the first month or two tends to produce the most visible jump.

What we can do that most agencies cannot is show you the movement instead of describing it. We run a grid of test points across your service area every month and measure where you actually rank at each one, so progress shows up as a map that changes rather than a single number in a report. That also tells us early whether a phrase is winnable at all, which saves you months chasing one that is not.

Not a problem, and it is a large part of what we do.

The first job is usually sorting out what already exists. Multi-location gets messy quickly, particularly around duplicate profiles and listings that staff created years ago without telling anyone. We audit that before we touch anything else.

From there, each location gets its own Google Business Profile, optimized and maintained individually rather than treated as one listing, and its own page on the site with content specific to that location. We also track map pack visibility separately for each one, so you can see how a specific store or office is performing in its own market, instead of an average that hides the weak ones.

Absolutely! We’ve written several blog posts about it. Your Free SEO Checklist for 2023 is our most recent, there’s an article on best On-page SEO practices, and much more in our blog. We’re also happy to give you some ideas that are specific to your site; just head over to our free SEO report card, and an expert will give you feedback on your site with zero obligation.

The most obvious sign will be a gradual increase in keyword rankings. We’ll track and report on a handful of phrases, and as they increase, other peripheral phrases will increase as well. All of this adds up to more traffic to your site.

But, that’s only half the battle. Once you get that increased traffic, our team jumps back in and makes sure engagement and conversion is happening. After all, any agency can get people to your site, but it’s what they do there that counts!

We will provide all this data to you using both a dashboard (that you can refer to anytime) as well as handcrafted, easy to understand reports.

Absolutely! Local SEO is specifically designed for businesses like yours. By focusing on location-based searches, you can attract high-quality leads that are right in your own neighborhood. Here’s why local SEO is crucial for your success:

• “Near Me” Searches are Booming: People increasingly use their phones to find businesses “near me,” especially for services like restaurants, stores, plumbers, etc. Local SEO makes sure you show up in these results.
• Beat Bigger Competitors: Large national chains often struggle with local rankings. Smart local SEO gives you a competitive edge, even with a smaller budget.
• Higher Conversion Rates: People searching for businesses nearby are ready to buy or visit. Local SEO connects you with these motivated customers.
• Builds Community Trust: Appearing in local search results and directories enhances your visibility and builds credibility within your community.

ForeFront Web Can Help You Dominate Local Search

We specialize in tailored local SEO strategies, including:

• Google My Business optimization
• Location-specific keywords and content
• Directory listings and reputation management

Don’t miss out on customers down the street! Contact us for a free consultation and see how Local SEO can transform your business.

The answer here might be surprising, but our extensive discovery process has been honed to identify potential pitfall areas and address them before we even get to work. We talk a lot about our 20+ years of experience, and this is a key area in which it pays off. You’ll be no one’s guinea pig; we’ve been through it all with previous clients and two decades of trials and errors. We’ve created a system that provides high ROI, clear deliverables, reasonable goals, milestones, tracking and reporting, and it’s a proven formula that has withstood the test of time.

That being said, we’ll want to make sure we fully understand how your previous agency didn’t live up to expectations, and make sure we’re the right fit to get you what you need. Simply contact us to get the conversation started.

There’s more than 200 factors that Google takes into account within their algorithm, so it could be a number of things. Our experts are well-versed in isolating the issues and implementing a strategy to get your site ranking. But keep in mind that some phrases may simply be out of reach – for the time being. Depending on your site’s domain authority, you may need a comprehensive, long-term strategy to set you up for success. Other times, it’s just that your site isn’t representing the search criteria well enough, which we can fix. Contact us and we can take a look – for free.

Well, it all depends on what you mean by “fix”. If you have a small handful of bad reviews, we have a process for that, and if you have more than a handful, we have a different process. Contact us so we can take a look and determine the best course of action.

No. Most practices do not have anyone with spare time for it, and the pages that actually bring patients in are rarely the ones written by committee. You get a draft to react to, you correct anything clinically wrong, and nothing goes live without your approval. Your review matters because you know your patients and your procedures. Starting from a blank page should not be your problem.

We do, and it matters more than most businesses realize. Your Google Business Profile is a primary ranking signal for local search, and it is increasingly one of the sources AI assistants read when someone asks them for a recommendation. We optimize the profile, keep your categories, services, hours and contact details accurate, publish posts, and refresh photos on a regular schedule. For multi-location businesses we manage each profile individually rather than treating them as one listing.

Our plans usually combine tactics that work on different clocks. Paid search can produce visits almost immediately. On-page and local SEO typically start showing movement within about 30 days. Link building and content authority take longer and compound over time. In general, clients start seeing a return around month three and sometimes sooner, and for urgent care the local search work is usually what moves first.

Yes, and it should never be treated casually. HIPAA touches more of your marketing than most practices realize, including analytics and advertising tools that can transmit patient information without anyone intending it. Tracking pixels on a page where someone books an appointment are a common and expensive mistake.

Healthcare is the vertical we work in more than any other, and we have people who understand what HIPAA means specifically for digital marketing, which is a narrower and more practical question than general compliance. That said, we always recommend having your own attorney review anything you are doing in this area, no matter which agency you work with.

For more information, be sure to check out our HIPAA compliant web design page.

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If you need your site updated and optimized for local search, that can be a one-time project priced on the number of pages involved. If you need an ongoing program that combines SEO, local search, paid media or more, our monthly plans start at $1,500.

The more useful question is usually what a new patient is worth to you. If an urgent care visit averages a few hundred dollars in revenue, and a plan brings in even a handful of extra visits a month, the math tends to answer itself. We will run that calculation with your numbers before you commit to anything.

Your site needs updating that week, not next quarter. A provider page still listing a doctor who left six months ago costs you trust with the exact person who was about to call. On an ongoing program that is handled for you. If you would rather your own team own it, they will be shown how, so nobody is waiting on an agency to make a name change.

Any part of the site where a patient can send you information has to be built for it, which means contact forms, appointment requests, chat and intake. Those get built with HIPAA in mind from the start rather than reviewed at the end. You will also get a straight answer about which third-party tools are safe to add later and which ones will create a problem. If you already have a site, we can audit what is there and show you where the gaps are.

Often, though it depends which one you run. Some publish a way to connect and some do not. Before anyone promises you an integration, your specific system gets checked, because sometimes the honest answer is that a clean handoff to your staff beats a fragile connection that breaks the next time the vendor updates something.

In most cases, we can take over the management with minimal effort.

Our initial task is to do a health check of the existing campaigns. Once we complete an audit, we’ll be able to determine if we can simply optimize the foundation of the campaigns that have already been created, or if there is an opportunity to maximize performance by building the campaigns from the ground up.

Not at all. We are a certified Google Ads partner, but our crew is equally adept at all facets of paid search. This includes:

• Social Media ads – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.
• Display Ads
• Google Shopping
• Native Ads
• Local service ads
• Remarketing/Retargeting
• Video ads

Contact us to learn more.

Yes, the majority of our clients are not local to Columbus. We serve businesses across the U.S. and have done international work as well. We’re based in Dublin, Ohio, but our work has never been limited to our backyard.

We work backward from what you are trying to achieve rather than starting with a number.

That means understanding what a new customer is worth to you, how many you need, what it currently costs you to acquire one, and what the competition in your market is spending to reach the same people. Those numbers tell us what it will realistically take to move the needle. Sometimes the answer is less than a client expected. Sometimes it is that the goal is not reachable at the budget they had in mind, and we would rather say so up front than take the money and underdeliver.

Our philosophy is to find the budget that produces the return you are after. Once clients start seeing that return, we frequently get asked to increase it, which we take as the best compliment there is.

It depends on the mix, because different tactics work on different clocks. Paid search can produce leads almost immediately. On-page and local SEO usually start showing movement within about 30 days. Content and link building take longer and compound over time. In general, our clients start seeing a return around month three and sometimes sooner.

What we will not do is ask you to wait six months on faith. You should see measurable movement in rankings and visibility well before the revenue shows up, and our reporting is built to show you that early progress, so you can tell the difference between a program that is working and one that is not.

Nothing. We’ll take a real look at what your site needs and give you an honest assessment — whether you end up working with us or not. No follow-up harassment, no drip campaign, no sales pressure. Just a clear picture of where things stand. Simply contact us to get started.

It already has, and it has been happening for a while. Some of it is obvious, like the AI overviews now sitting above the results on a large share of Google searches. Some of it is subtler, like whether your business gets mentioned at all when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation in your category.

The practical effect is that ranking is no longer only about your position on a page. It is also about whether you are one of the sources these systems reach for. Much of what earns that is the same work that has always earned rankings: clear, accurate, well-structured content and a credible business footprint. What is new is that you should be measuring it. We track visibility across the major AI assistants for our clients, because you cannot manage what you are not watching.

You can get much more in-depth with our AI and SEO blog post.

Both work, and any agency that tells you one is universally better is selling whatever they happen to do.

Paid search is immediate, precisely targeted and fully measurable. You control the audience, the timing and the budget, and you can be live this week. The catch is that the traffic stops the day you stop paying.

Organic takes months to build, but it generally converts better and costs less per lead once it is working, and it keeps working after you stop actively investing in it. The catch is that there are competitive phrases where a top organic ranking is not realistic in a reasonable timeframe, and you should be told that up front rather than after six months of billing.

When we run a full campaign we usually incorporate both, with paid covering the terms organic cannot reach yet. But we do it with an eye to eventually dialing back the paid spend as the organic rankings take over, increasing your ROI year after year.

We manage both in house, which means the two strategies, and the two strategists, actually talk to each other.

Absolutely — this is actually one of our most common arrangements. We work well with internal teams, often stepping in to handle the pieces they don’t have the bandwidth or specialization for. We can also train your staff if that’s the better long-term play. The goal is always whatever actually works best for your business.

If your SEO is being done right, most of the groundwork is already there. AI visibility adds a layer on top: schema markup, content restructured for extraction, stronger authority signals and ongoing monitoring across AI platforms. We fold that into your existing plan rather than treating it as a separate product with a separate invoice.

There’s no single lever. It’s a combination of restructuring key pages so AI tools can extract clear answers, adding proper schema markup, strengthening the authority signals (author bios, credentials, third-party citations) that these tools weigh when deciding what to trust, and then monitoring how your brand actually shows up across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity so we can adjust. Anyone promising a guaranteed spot in a specific AI answer is overselling it.

We run consistent prompts across the major AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) tied to your industry and services, and track whether, how, and in what context your brand gets mentioned. It’s newer territory than traditional rank tracking, so we’re upfront about what’s measurable today versus what’s still catching up.

Some of what’s being sold under those labels is hype. But the underlying shift is real: a meaningful share of searches now end in an AI-generated answer instead of a list of links. Getting cited in those answers now, while the space is still forming, is a real head start. We’d rather help you build that groundwork early than watch you play catch-up in two years.

Pretty much, yes. “AI SEO” is the plain-English umbrella term most people search for. AEO and GEO are the more technical names for two specific pieces of it: structuring content so it gets pulled into a direct AI answer (AEO), and earning a spot as a cited source inside a longer AI-generated response (GEO). We use all three terms because that’s genuinely how the industry talks about it right now, but it’s one connected service, not three.

Concerned enough to have a plan, yes. Panicked, no.

Google is not going anywhere in the near term. But a meaningful share of the questions that used to start a search now get answered without one, and that share is growing. When someone asks an assistant who the best option in their area is, the businesses named in that answer get the consideration and everyone else effectively does not exist for that query. It is valuable real estate and it is being allocated right now.

The encouraging part is that it is measurable and it is winnable. The work overlaps heavily with good SEO, and the field is young enough that most of your competitors are not paying attention to it yet.

SEO focuses on ranking your pages in traditional search results. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is about structuring content so AI tools can pull it out as a direct answer. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about earning a spot as a cited source inside a longer, AI-generated response. In practice, all three build on the same foundation: clear, credible, well-structured content. We treat them as one connected strategy, not three separate budgets.

No. The work overlaps heavily. Clear writing, solid technical SEO and real expertise help you in both traditional search results and AI answers. We’re not pulling resources away from your existing SEO, we’re extending the same strategy to a few new platforms.

When it comes to digital marketing tactics, the answer is most likely “yes”. We offer a full suite of digital marketing services, provided by our in-house talent right here in our Columbus HQ (no offshore outsourcing). In the rare instance that it’s something we don’t do ourselves, we typically have a trusted, fully-vetted partner that we work with – and we’re always transparent about that.

Just reach out and ask, we’re always happy to answer any questions, and we love talking about what we do.

Most agencies avoid this question and hide behind the old, “every company is different, contact us for pricing” excuse. And while that is true, and we would never just offer a blanket cost with a “buy now” button, we can certainly give you some idea of our rates.

Unless it’s a hyper-local campaign, we generally start our Success Plans out with a budget of $1750 or greater. We’ve found that a spend less than that usually provides results a little too slowly for most. Getting results is a major budget factor (the bigger the spend, the quicker we can produce results), but other factors can include:

• Size of market – local, regional, national, international?
• Quantity and quality of competition
• Target demographics
• Conversion expectations

For a more in-depth look at this topic, see our blog article on digital marketing costs.

One of the biggest things is the fact that we were doing SEO work before that acronym was really even in use. To say we are experienced is an understatement. We’ve lived through every major algorithm update, watched entire tactics come and go, and built a playbook based on what actually holds up over time. That history matters because it tells you what we don’t do: chase trends, cut corners, or hand your account to someone two years out of school with a certification and a template.

But what sets us apart isn’t just longevity — it’s the approach. Every campaign is completely bespoke, with a disproportionate amount of real, physical time invested by senior people. Most clients end up feeling like they got more than they paid for. That’s not an accident.

This is a tough one to answer succinctly. There are so many factors involved; and it’s a little like asking how much a house costs.

We have a full blog article on this, which you can find here. But here’s an excerpt that might help:

…but bear in mind that there are many factors that can skew these numbers!

Small website: ~ 10 pages, custom design
$5,000 – $10,000

Business website/basic eCommerce website: ~ 30 pages, custom design, mobile optimized, on-page SEO
$15,000 – $30,000

Professional website: ~ 40+ pages, custom design, content strategy, SEO
$35,000 – ?

Just about all content management systems add a LOT of code, which in turn slows down the site. Add a feature-heavy theme and your site will likely fail the Core Web Vitals tests. That will have a huge negative effect on your SEO.

A headless CMS separates all that heavy code from what is actually being pushed to the web. So you get all the convenience of a CMS without any of the slow speeds and code bloat. Here at ForeFront we spent over a year developing our own headless CMS system, and it’s crazy fast. This site was built using it, feel free to test it out!

Contact us for your headless CMS website.