On 2 August a cat groomer's new site went live: sophisticatedmanes.au, built here, Google Business Profile alongside it. Sixteen days later, her Google review of the studio read:
> "Very easy to communicate with, great results and looking forward to a continuing future ahead! > > Update since going officially live i have been getting a lead a day and they have all booked 🤗 he has worked his magic! …"
Her punctuation, her emoji, her lowercase i. Tidying any of it would quietly make it mine, and the entire value of the thing is that it isn't.
She calls it magic. Here is the trick, written out in full, including the parts that haven't worked.
The site
Ten pages. A suburb page for Pakenham, which has since earned more impressions than any page but the homepage. Three plain pages answering what people actually type at midnight: what to do about a matted cat, how Persian grooming differs. Twenty-one of her own photographs with her own captions. Her three Google reviews quoted on the homepage, word for word.
Prices, published. That is not the default advice and it wasn't my call, it was hers. It opened the door to a question the site had been shut out of: what cat grooming costs around Melbourne.
There is an assistant on the site called Sophie. She answers questions about services, hours and the booking path. She runs on a hard monthly spend cap, and if the model is unavailable she falls through to a deterministic answer engine rather than an error. I wrote 135 checks for her and she passes all of them twice: once against the model, once with the API key removed entirely.
The enquiry path is a form to her inbox, with call and text one tap away inside the alert. There is a Google Sheet lead log she owns outright.
That path had two faults in it. The form took a phone number but not an email, and replies went to my sender address instead of the customer's. One real enquiry was unanswerable because of it. Both fixed on 15 August, and four enquiries that had already been lost were pulled back out of the mail log and written into her lead log so she could chase them. That is my mistake, not a feature, and it is in this post because leaving it out would make the rest of the list less believable.
Her email now runs on her own domain, SPF and DKIM included, rather than a free address.
The Google profile
Eleven service areas across the south east. Eleven services: five of Google's own, six written for the way she actually works. Payment and ownership attributes. A description rewritten to 746 of the 750 characters Google allows, front-loaded so the useful half survives the truncation.
The website button on her profile pointed at an http address that redirected twice before landing. It now points straight at the https page. Two redirects is not a disaster, it is a tax, and it was being paid on every tap.
Her reviews went from three to ten in the first week, all five stars. That was her. She asked her customers properly and they answered. I'll take credit for the machine and none for that.
The citation trail, and what it's actually made of
Ten directories were worked through. The honest state of them:
- Starworks lists her at Pakenham. Nobody submitted it. The page was generated automatically from her Google reviews, which is worth knowing: some of your citations build themselves once the profile is real.
- Bing Places, submitted 9 August, imported from Google with sync on. Still pending publication.
- Yellow Pages, submitted 19 August. The form quietly reset the suburb-only setting to full address when the category was chosen, which would have published a home address she deliberately hides.
- Localsearch, account made, wizard stalled because it demands a street number.
- The certifying body's own member directory still shows an address she left. Our submission never landed, because the form only accepts members. It is back with her to send.
Four of the ten were not directories at all. Oneflare shut down on 30 June and now redirects to Airtasker. Airtasker wants a government photo ID and a live facial scan, and lists individuals rather than businesses. Groomzy turned out to be a competing cat salon. PuPKuS sells grooming products to groomers.
Separately, six pages still bind her phone number to a trading name she stopped using, at an address she left. Found, written down, not yet corrected.
What the machines are told
The site carries structured data describing the business, her feline master credential and the year she started, the questions and answers, and every suburb she covers as its own node. There is an `llms.txt`: a short, plain brief for answer engines that states the services, the hours, the area and the prices without making them dig.
Two decisions in there are worth stealing. `PetGroomer` looks like a schema type and isn't one, so it came out. And there is deliberately no rating markup, even now the ratings are real, because Google has disallowed businesses marking up reviews of themselves since 2019 and doing it risks the rich results that do work.
She is also listed on register.tyso.io, the directory this studio runs. Her entry carries a disclosure saying tyso built her website. It should: I publish both ends of that link, so it is self-corroboration and worth considerably less than a listing somebody independent decided to give her.
What the numbers actually say
This is the part most case studies leave out.
Nine pages indexed. Seventeen clicks and 148 impressions in the first fortnight, average position 25.1. She wins her own name outright and almost nothing else yet.
A nine-point map grid around Officer, run twice a week apart, found her at one point out of nine, at rank fifteen, unchanged. She is not in the local pack for any target search.
Eight buying questions put to Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT, three times across three weeks: cited zero times, every run. The diagnosis is not mysterious. Those engines answer local questions out of directories, and she is live on exactly one so far. That is the same citation trail above, which is why it is being built.
So both things are true at once. The phone is ringing, six enquiries in eleven days and every one booked. And the search numbers are still small enough to fit in a sentence. The first came from a real business finally being legible: a site that loads, a profile that answers, reviews she earned. The second is a longer job, and it is measured rather than promised.
The honest size of this
One client. One review. Sixteen days. I'm not drawing a curve through a single point, and you should be suspicious of anyone who would.
What a single point does show: the machine can be built quickly, and when it's built, the phone is where you notice first.
The audit is free. It reads where you're findable and what's leaking, and it shows you the score before it asks you for anything.