A companion to the search opportunity report. The findings there set the sequence here: measurement before spend, internal links before headings, profile before local content. Every item is something that can be checked as done or not done.
Six things are needed before week one can begin. The 120 days are counted from the day these arrive, not from the date the quote is signed, because none of the work below is possible without them.
| What we need | Why it blocks the work | Held by |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress admin, hosting, and a staging copy | No staging means no safe plugin work and no way to rehearse a change before it is live. | Obviam |
| A confirmed, restorable backup | Verified by file count and size, not just reported. If a backup cannot be confirmed, work stops. | Shared |
| Google Ads: manage access and billing | Campaigns are promised live in month one. Read only access cannot deliver that. | Obviam |
| Google Business Profile ownership | The profile is actively maintained by someone. We need admin rights, not a new listing. | Obviam |
| Google Analytics admin | We currently hold view only. Conversions and custom parameters cannot be created without admin. | Obviam |
| Written position on the current provider | If two agencies are changing the site at once, no measurement taken now can be trusted at month four. | Obviam |
If the site changes before the baseline is frozen, there is nothing credible to measure against at month four.
Ads pointed at a site that cannot count a conversion is money spent blind. Tracking is proven with a real submission before budget scales.
The eight industry pages are orphaned. Adding headings to pages nothing links to would have produced no result and consumed a month.
Security service plus city searches are tiny here: cybersecurity cincinnati runs 110 a month and nobody holds it. The volume that does exist is managed IT phrasing, which is a positioning question for Obviam. Either way local visibility comes from the map pack first, so category and reviews come before any local page work.
The heaviest month. Everything that follows depends on it, so it is split into what must happen, what follows inside the same month, and what waits on a decision.
| Item | Detail | When |
|---|---|---|
| Freeze and date the baseline | Everything in the accompanying report, captured and dated before a single change is made. This is what month four is measured against. | Week 1 |
| Make leads countable | Mark the real lead form as a conversion, add phone tap tracking, and register the form parameters that identify which form was used. Thirteen months of submissions were recorded and never counted. | Week 1 to 2 |
| Filter bot traffic out of reporting | Around 5,100 sessions from China and Singapore, averaging under two seconds, currently sit inside every number the business looks at. | Week 2 |
| Link the eight orphaned industry pages | Financial services, healthcare, higher education, insurance, K-12, law firms, manufacturing and retail. No link on the site points to any of them, even after JavaScript runs. Internal links come first; headings alone would not have worked. | Week 2 to 3 |
| Add headings to the pages missing them | Twenty three pages have no H1, including every webinar page and the About page. | Week 3 |
| Correct the Google Business Profile category | Currently Business to business service. The seven businesses at the top of this pack are all filed under computer categories, and Cequence Security outranks Obviam from the same street on Computer security service with three reviews. This is the single cheapest ranking change available. | Week 1 |
| Complete the profile: services, categories, photos, description | Obviam lists 0 services, 0 additional categories and 1 photo, against competitors listing up to 60 services and averaging 64 photos. Google draws the services list from the categories chosen, so the category fix comes first because the services vocabulary follows it. Its description runs 656 characters, uses the words "national reach" and names none of the places it serves. | Week 1 to 2 |
| Start the review program, on a cadence | Obviam has zero. The target is a rhythm rather than a total: one review a fortnight. Intrust IT leads the pack on 113 reviews and has had 1 in a year, its most recent 271 days ago, so recency is winnable here even where volume is not. | Week 2 onward |
| Ask Modern Office Methods to link and describe Obviam | momnet.com holds 500 referring domains against Obviam's 59 and links to Obviam twice, both from blog posts. Its homepage, services and about pages carry no link and never use the word. A link plus a plain description of what Obviam sells, on the parent's structural pages, is the highest authority link available at no cost. Obviam's call, not ours. | Week 2 |
| Google Ads live on commercial terms | Not the informational terms owned by Gartner and CrowdStrike. The vCISO, penetration testing and compliance set, where the buyer is already shopping. | Week 3 to 4 |
124 pages have none. The roughly twenty pages that sell come first; the rest follow in month two.
A capitalised /Resources/ path runs alongside /resources/, and four pages share one title.
obviam.com is already in Bing's index, but it has never been registered in Bing Webmaster Tools, so nobody can see its Bing crawl data or push a changed page for immediate indexing. Copilot is built on that index and ChatGPT search draws on it. Included with the optional ads bundle; verification needs the site access in section 01 either way.
Three ship with the campaigns. The remaining two follow once the first data arrives.
GoodFirms, Cloudtango, BuiltIn and Clutch hold more Cincinnati page one positions than most of the local firms do, and together with The Manifest and BBB they are the sources an AI assistant summarizes when someone asks who to hire. Across fifteen buying questions put to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, thirteen Cincinnati firms were recommended and Obviam was named in none of them, while all three named it correctly when asked about it directly. Obviam is absent from four of the six directories we checked, which is the most likely reason rather than a proven one. The BBB listing does exist but under the former name Optimized IT, so that one is a claim and update rather than a new submission. All free; the slowest part is waiting for approval.
Slider Revolution 6.7.34 carries a published vulnerability. Removing or updating plugins needs a written approval list and a staging rehearsal. We will issue a dated security note either way, so the decision is on record.
Needs HubSpot access. Forms keep working as they are until then.
A live view of the numbers in this report, so nobody waits for a monthly document.
Analytics and adjustments. The build is done; this is where it is steered using data that did not exist before month one.
Paid search wastes money in its first weeks by design. Weekly negative keyword work is how that stops.
Compliance and vCISO terms where a specialist outranks an analyst firm. Not another explainer competing with Gartner.
Five posts carry roughly 78 percent of all impressions and point nowhere useful.
The lever that moves map rank, and the slowest to compound. Starting it in month one is why it can show by month four.
Correct business type markup, service markup, and the remaining title and heading work.
Two full cycles of real data, compared against the frozen baseline.
Measurement, and a decision about what comes next.
Same tools, same filters, same date ranges. Anything that missed is reported as a miss.
Cost per lead by channel, and an honest read on whether it should continue.
Refining whichever markets Obviam green lit in month one, based on four months of evidence rather than assumption. The decision itself starts in month one because a verified profile takes weeks; this is the evidence based revision of it. Columbus carries nearly three times Cincinnati's security search demand and no presence at all, so the cost of leaving it until month four is real. See the competitive strategy page.
Including whether the method is worth replicating on the other domains.
Page one for terms like penetration testing is held by Reddit, IBM, CISA, CrowdStrike and Gartner. That is not winnable in four months, and pretending otherwise would waste the engagement.
Intrust IT publishes 224 of them. Security service plus city demand does not support that build, and it is the pattern Google's doorway guidance warns against. Localising the service pages Obviam already owns is a different thing and is in the plan; a page for every surrounding town is not.
In both cities tested the pack is dominated by a business literally named Penetration Testing. An exact name match is close to immovable locally. That term is pursued through paid search instead.
Obviam can realistically move from position fifteen toward single figures in Cincinnati with category and review work. Whether that reaches the top three depends on proximity and competitors we do not control, so it is not promised.
Form submissions were recorded but never identified. Until the tracking added in month one has run, no lead count from before this engagement will be presented as fact.
This engagement covers obviam.com only. The method is proved on one property first, and only then considered for the others.
Seven measures, agreed before the work starts, each checkable in tools Obviam already owns.
| Measure | Today | At month four |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial pages indexed and earning impressions | Eight industry pages orphaned, 252 to 255 words each, no headings | All eight linked, written and indexed |
| Leads countable | No conversion recorded in thirteen months | Every form and call counted |
| Non brand search footprint | 0 clicks from 424 non brand queries, across every day Search Console holds | A measured, dated increase |
| US visits a month | 424 over the last thirty days, 256 across the year | Above the thirty day figure, not the annual one |
| Cincinnati map position | Position 15 from the office, average 16 across the metro | Category corrected and position improved |
| Business Profile completeness | 1 photo, 0 extra categories, 0 reviews, description names no city | Category fixed, photos added, reviews on a cadence |
| Service terms on the map | 0 of 49 points on 4 of five service searches, 36 of 49 on cybersecurity consulting firm | Movement on the terms that return a pack at all |