How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Other AIs?

I've had this conversation with business owners more times than I can count.

“We have a website. We have been doing SEO for months. But where are the enquiries?”

Then we open the website together.

Usually, the problem isn't that the business has done nothing. A few important things have simply been done in the wrong order, or one small SEO issue has quietly been holding everything else back.

And that's actually good news. You don't always need to throw away the whole strategy. Sometimes you need to stop, find the bottleneck and fix the thing preventing the rest of the work from working properly.

What are the most common SEO mistakes Coimbatore businesses make?

Let's go through them properly—not as an “SEO checklist”, but as the mistakes I would look for first if you handed me a local business website today.

1. Chasing keywords instead of understanding what the customer wants

This is probably the most common one.

A business owner searches for a keyword, sees a competitor ranking above them and says, “We need to rank for that exact keyword.” Fair enough. But before I touch the page, I want to know something else:

Take “digital marketing agency Coimbatore”. The person could be comparing agencies, checking reviews, looking for a specific service, or simply learning what an agency does. Compare that with “Google Ads agency for hospitals in Coimbatore”. The commercial situation is much more specific.

If your page tries to answer every possible intent at once, it can become a confusing page that is technically optimised but practically weak.

For a Coimbatore business, this matters because local searches often contain an immediate need. Someone searching for a clinic, school, restaurant, service provider or agency nearby may not want a 2,000-word lecture. They want to know whether you are relevant, trustworthy and worth contacting.

2. Creating one page and expecting it to rank for everything

I've seen homepages carrying an impressive collection of keywords: service names, city names, industry names, “best”, “top”, “affordable”, “professional”—everything except a clear explanation of what the business actually does.

The page becomes a keyword buffet.

And the visitor is left wondering what they are supposed to order.

Your homepage has an important job, but it doesn't have to answer every search query your business could ever receive. Important services deserve enough space to explain what they solve and who they are for. Industry contexts can also deserve dedicated resources when they represent genuine expertise.

A well-structured SEO strategy for your business should map important searches to the pages that can answer them best.

Think in relationships:

3. Treating technical SEO and mobile experience as someone else's problem

Let's make this simple. You can have excellent content, sensible keywords and strong backlinks. If important pages are difficult for search engines to access—or painful for people to use—you have a problem.

I especially notice this on mobile.

The desktop website looks beautiful on a large monitor. Then we open the same page on a phone and suddenly the button is tiny, the heading wraps strangely, the image pushes the content down, the menu doesn't behave properly, or the visitor has to swipe around just to find the contact option.

That's not just a design issue. It affects the entire search-to-enquiry journey.

Before publishing a new SEO page, I would check:

• Can the important page be crawled and indexed?
• Does the page have a clear title and heading structure?
• Does it load and behave properly on a mobile screen?
• Are important links and buttons easy to use?
• Are images appropriately sized and described?
• Does the page provide a clear answer to the searcher's intent?

If SEO brings someone to your website but the website makes the enquiry difficult, you've solved only half the problem. Search visibility and website experience need to work together. A website designed around the customer journey can make that next step much clearer.

4. Setting up local SEO once and then forgetting it

This one makes me smile because the pattern is so familiar.

“We created our Google Business Profile last year.”

Great. And then?

Local visibility isn't a trophy you win once. Your business changes, competitors change, customer reviews change and the information people see about you can change.

If you're serving customers in Coimbatore, local relevance should be part of an ongoing system. Think beyond simply adding “Coimbatore” to your title tag.

Your service pages, business information, customer reviews, local references, contact details and useful local content should tell a consistent story about who you are and where you actually serve.

Coimbatore is not one single search environment. A customer searching from Peelamedu may see a different local landscape from someone around RS Puram, Gandhipuram, Saibaba Colony, Singanallur or Ukkadam.

That doesn't mean you should create a separate doorway page for every neighbourhood. Please don't.

It means your local strategy should understand how proximity, relevance and prominence interact with the real areas you serve.

5. Publishing content without a plan for what happens next

This is the mistake that creates the biggest pile of forgotten blog posts.

Someone decides they need “more content”, publishes five articles and waits. Then another five. Then someone asks why the blog has traffic but no enquiries.

Because traffic was never the whole plan.

Every useful article should have a job.

An article should connect to the next useful resource, not become a collection of unrelated sales links.

Why these five mistakes are connected

These aren't five completely separate SEO problems. They form a chain.

And the reverse can happen too:

Clear intent → useful page → good technical experience → stronger local relevance and proof → better chance of becoming a customer.

That is why I prefer fixing the system rather than chasing individual ranking positions.

What I would check first on a Coimbatore business website

If you gave me a website today and asked, “Where should I start?”, I wouldn't immediately open a keyword tool. I'd first look at the business from the customer's point of view.

1. What does the business actually want to sell? Start with commercial priorities.
2. Which searches could realistically bring those customers? Separate valuable intent from vanity keywords.
3. Does each important search have the right page? Fix the page-to-intent relationship.
4. Can Google and users access that page easily? Check technical and mobile fundamentals.
5. Does the page prove anything? Add experience, examples, trust signals and useful detail.
6. What happens after the visitor lands? Make the conversion path obvious.

Only after that would I start looking at the finer optimisation work.

A quick SEO mistake audit you can do this week

Open your website on your phone and pretend you have never seen the business before.

Now search for three things:

• Your main service + Coimbatore
• Your main service + your most important industry
• The problem your ideal customer is trying to solve

For each search, ask:

Did I find the right page? Did I immediately understand the offer? Did I trust the business? Could I contact them without hunting around?

If any answer is “no”, you've found a useful SEO project.

Not necessarily a disaster. Just a project.

One final piece of advice from working on real projects

Don't measure the quality of your SEO by how many SEO tasks you completed.

“We published eight blogs.” “We added 40 keywords.” “We built 20 backlinks.”

Those are activities.

The better question is:

Did we make it easier for the right customer to find us, understand us and contact us?

That's the question I would keep coming back to.

SEO can become incredibly technical—and yes, there is plenty of technical work worth doing. But the purpose behind all of it is surprisingly simple.

Help the right person find the right answer at the right moment.

Do that consistently, and you're no longer just “doing SEO”. You're building a search journey that can support the business.

SEO Mistakes FAQ