During the SBS website copy review session, a clear gap emerged: the current SBS site is not being surfaced by AI-powered search engines, and the keyword geography skews too heavily toward "Brookfield" rather than the broader "Milwaukee" metro area. The team aligned on a deliberate strategy to increase Milwaukee keyword density across the new site before the early April launch.
This article captures the rationale, approach, and planned execution for SBS's local SEO keyword strategy.
SBS's existing site is effectively invisible to AI-driven search. When the team ran live tests during the call — querying tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI-enhanced search for commercial roofers in the Milwaukee area — SBS did not appear. Competitors like WeatherPro, Infinity, and U.S. Roofing were surfaced instead.
Two contributing factors were identified:
"AI is going to be the first to read this, to direct the person to the site." — Brandon Aman
Replace or supplement "Brookfield" references with "Milwaukee" throughout the site. The goal is not to eliminate Brookfield or Southeastern Wisconsin — those terms still carry value — but to ensure "Milwaukee" appears with enough frequency and prominence to register as a primary geographic signal.
Rationale: Users searching for commercial roofing services in the metro area are more likely to type "Milwaukee" than "Brookfield." Phone-based searches ("roofer near me") rely on device location, but typed searches skew toward the major city name.
Approach:
- Audit every page for geographic references
- Where "Brookfield" appears alone, add "Milwaukee" or replace with "Milwaukee area" / "Milwaukee and surrounding communities"
- Ensure "Milwaukee" appears in page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and body copy
- Maintain a natural spread: Milwaukee + Brookfield + Southeastern Wisconsin all contribute to coverage
Blog posts are a primary vehicle for keyword-rich content. The team confirmed that blogs should be substantive (targeting ~2,000 words where possible) to maximize organic search value. Each post should naturally incorporate Milwaukee-area geographic references.
Blog posts already in progress will be built out and published as part of the launch push.
Paid search (Google Ads) was identified as a next step but is explicitly not part of the launch scope. A dedicated strategy session with the broader team (including Mark) is planned post-launch to develop a Google Ads roadmap.
The team noted that Google Search is now AI-driven, and that AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.) are increasingly used as the first step in finding local service providers. This makes on-page content quality and keyword specificity more important than ever — AI summarizes and recommends based on what it can read, so a content-thin or geographically vague site simply won't be recommended.
The new site's launch is treated as urgent partly for this reason: every week on the old site is a week of lost AI-search visibility.