Business Profile SEO
Business Profile SEO: A Case Study
This case study sets out what happened on therankingstore.com, the website of The Ranking Store, between Aug 28 and Oct 14, 2026. The site is run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory and is not a client site.
Situation
People ask AI assistants for digital marketing and local SEO help near them, in Havre de Grace and elsewhere in Maryland, including how to rank in Google’s map pack and how to rank a Google My Business listing. Answers from those assistants draw on pages published on the open web.
The Ranking Factory, the business’s own software, had listed these local and digital marketing subjects as gaps on therankingstore.com. The subjects people were asking about were not yet covered by pages on the site.
What Was Done, and Why
Between Aug 28 and Oct 14, 2026, The Ranking Factory wrote and published 25 pages on therankingstore.com covering local and digital marketing, one subject per page. Among them were pages on digital marketing near me, online marketing in Havre de Grace, local SEO companies in Maryland, Google map pack rankings and local SEO software.
Each page was submitted to IndexNow, the protocol that notifies participating search engines of new URLs instead of leaving them to be discovered by crawling alone. Publishing one subject per page kept each page tied to a single question, which is how people phrase requests when they ask an assistant for help near them.
How It Turned Out
By Oct 21, 2026, 13 of the 25 pages (52%) had been cited by at least one AI answer. The first citation came on Sep 9, 2026. Seven of the cited pages appeared in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store.
Perplexity Sonar cited 12 of the pages. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna cited 4, Google Gemini cited 3 and DeepSeek cited 2. Google AI Overviews were the first to cite 2 of the pages.
The site’s crawler log recorded search crawlers fetching all 25 pages between Oct 9 and Oct 21, 2026. Of those 25 pages, 24 were fetched by a verified crawler.
The work shows how a gap list held by The Ranking Factory became published pages, and how quickly those pages began appearing as sources in AI answers — including answers given to people who never asked for The Ranking Store by name.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Google my business ranking
- Reference: Digital Marketing in Havre de Grace: A Practical Guide to Choosing the Right SEO, Google Business, and Content Support
- Reference: How to choose a mega bundle of SEO tools for your business
- Presentation: google my business ranking
- Video: business around me
- Specification: business around me
- Glossary: business around me