SEO Company Serving Chicago and the Western Suburbs

What this is, and who it is for

SEO is the work that makes your business the one Google shows when somebody searches for what you sell. It splits into three parts that people often confuse: technical foundations so your site can be crawled and ranked at all, content so there is something to rank, and authority so Google trusts you more than the company down the road.

It suits you if you want leads that keep arriving after you stop paying, and if you can wait a few months for them to start. It does not suit you if you need the phone to ring next week — that is what Google Ads is for, and we will tell you to start there instead.

What is included

The mix shifts depending on where you are starting, but a typical program covers all of this.

• Technical audit and fixes: speed, Core Web Vitals, crawlability, indexation, schema
• Keyword research grounded in what converts, not just what gets searched
• A real page for every service you sell, written to rank
• Service area pages with genuine local content, not find-and-replace town names
• Google Business Profile management and citation cleanup
• Content written on a schedule, aimed at the questions your customers actually ask
• Internal linking so authority reaches the pages that make money
• Monthly reporting on rankings, traffic and — the part that matters — enquiries

Technical SEO, and why it comes first

There is no point writing content for a site Google struggles to crawl or that takes eight seconds to load on a phone. So the first month is usually unglamorous: fixing what is broken before adding anything new.

That means Core Web Vitals, which Google confirms it uses as a ranking signal. It means making sure every page has a unique title and description, that canonicals point where they should, that the sitemap is actually reachable, and that schema describes the business accurately. It is the part of SEO nobody puts in a sales deck, and it is the part that most often explains why a site is invisible.

AI search: ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews

A growing share of "who should I hire" questions now get answered by an AI assistant rather than a list of ten blue links. Being absent from those answers is a new way to be invisible, and it is not the same problem as ranking.

The work overlaps with classic SEO more than the hype suggests — clear, factual, well-structured content that states plainly who you are, where you work and what you do, with schema that confirms it. We track whether you are being cited and treat it as its own metric rather than assuming traditional rankings carry over.

Process and timeline

Month one is audit and technical fixes. Months two and three are the pages that should exist and do not — services, service areas, the questions your customers ask. From month four the work shifts to content, authority and iteration on what the data shows is moving.

Google Business Profile improvements can show up within weeks. New service area pages usually take two to four months to settle. Competitive head terms take six to twelve, longer in dense markets. Anyone promising faster than that is either targeting terms nobody searches or misleading you.

What it costs

SEO is priced to the scope of the work rather than sold as a single monthly number. A five-page local business and a distributor with sixty branch pages are not the same job, and quoting both the same figure would mean one of them is being overcharged.

Three things move the number more than anything else. How competitive your trade is in your market — ranking a roofer in a dense metro takes more sustained work than ranking a specialist supplier with four real competitors. How many locations or service areas you need to be found in, since each one needs its own page and its own local signals. And how much content already exists and is worth keeping, because a site with solid service pages starts a long way ahead of one that needs them written from scratch.

Rather than quote a number blind, we will look at your site, your rankings and your competitors first and tell you what the work actually involves. That assessment is free and you are under no obligation afterwards — if the honest answer is that your budget is better spent on ads or on fixing your site first, we would rather say so than take a retainer that cannot succeed.

Platforms and tools

The tooling is not the service, but you should know what the reporting is built on.

• Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 as the source of truth
• Semrush for ranking, keyword and competitor data
• Google Business Profile for local
• PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals field data for technical work
• Our own automated SEO agent, which monitors rankings on a schedule and proposes on-page changes for a human to approve

Why A&B

Fifteen years, 17 states, and a client base concentrated in trades where local search decides who gets the job. That concentration is the advantage: we have seen what works for a roofer in a storm market and for a building supply distributor trying to rank branch pages, and those are different problems with different answers.

We are also willing to tell you when SEO is not the right first move. If your site takes eight seconds to load, fixing that beats writing blog posts. If you have nine Google reviews and your competitor has two hundred, reviews beat content. The order matters more than the effort.

Where we work

In person across Chicago and the western suburbs, and remotely for clients in 17 states. Local SEO is the bulk of what we do, so being able to visit a job site, photograph real work and understand the market we are writing about is part of the service rather than a nicety.