The DIY Playbook
This is the actual order of operations we run for paying clients, written out so you can run it without us. Nothing is held back, nothing is gated, and there's no email box between you and any of it.
Work the steps in order. The sequence matters more than any individual tactic — most agents fail at this by starting at step five.
Run our free checker to see whether AI assistants name you in your market today. It takes a minute, and it's the only way to know later whether any of this worked. Write down what it says.
Check your AI visibility →Roughly in order of leverage per hour. If you only ever do the first three, you'll still be ahead of most agents in your market.
Why first: it multiplies the value of every step after it.
Your name, brokerage, service area, phone, and website should be written exactly the same way on every profile you own. Machines resolve you as an entity, and four slightly different versions of you read as four weak strangers rather than one well-established professional. This is free, takes an afternoon, and almost nobody does it.
Cost: $0 · Time: 1–2 hours
Why: it's the highest-return free asset in local search, and most profiles are half-built.
Claimed isn't the same as finished. Categories, service areas, services, hours, photos, and the Q&A section all carry weight, and an incomplete profile quietly loses deals you never hear about. Grade yours honestly first, then fix what the grader flags.
Cost: $0 · Time: 2–3 hours, then 10 min/week
Why: reviews are what people check after they hear your name from anywhere else.
A steady trickle of recent, specific reviews beats a burst of ten followed by two years of silence. The habit is the asset: ask every closing, make it one tap, and reply to all of them — replies are public evidence of how you treat people.
Cost: $0 · Time: 15 min per closing, forever
Why: being named in an AI answer takes corroboration across independent sources, not one great page.
LinkedIn is the most underrated surface here — it's among the most-cited domains in AI answers and the most cited for professional, who-should-I-hire questions, because identity there is tied to verifiable facts. Yelp matters more than it used to now that OpenAI licensed its data for ChatGPT's local answers. Claim both, plus your brokerage bio and the main industry directories, using the exact facts from step one.
Cost: $0 · Time: 2–3 hours
Why: a beautiful site that can't be parsed is a business card, not a lead source.
This is where money starts being involved, so be deliberate. What matters is structure — real page titles, headings, alt text, schema markup, and fast loading — far more than visual polish. And if you're rebuilding, get a URL-by-URL redirect map before you approve anything, because a rebuild without redirects is the most common way agents lose their rankings overnight.
Then check you're actually in the indexes. Each assistant searches a different one, so ranking on Google doesn't put you in front of Claude — read your robots.txt to confirm you aren't blocking the crawlers that surface you, then submit your key pages to each engine.
Cost: $0 if you have a site · Time: a weekend, or a project
Why: local knowledge is the one thing a portal can't manufacture at scale.
Neighborhood pages are the highest-value content an agent can produce, because they're where genuine local expertise beats every national competitor. Five deep pages about areas you actually work beat thirty thin ones — thin location pages are the most common local SEO mistake in this industry, and they can actively hurt you.
Cost: $0 · Time: 3–5 hours per page, done properly
Why: without a baseline you can't tell progress from noise — or spot a vendor showing you vanity keywords.
Re-run the same checks every month against the baseline you took at the start. Watch whether AI answers name you, whether your profile views and calls move, and whether the terms you're winning are ones real clients would actually type. Rankings on keywords nobody searches are the oldest trick in this business.
Cost: $0 · Time: 30 min/month
We sell this as a service, so weigh what follows accordingly — but the honest version is that plenty of agents should not hire anyone, and we'd rather say so than take a bad-fit retainer.
Whoever you use — us or anyone — insist that you own the domain, the content, the profiles, and the analytics outright.
Same playbook, executed for you, with everything owned by you. Plans and prices are public — no demo required to see a number.