Your industry narrows this list quickly. Scorpion is the large, industry-specific option for law firms and trades that want SEO, ads and software from one vendor; Rise Local is the firm to call when a Google update has cut your traffic, and its prices are public; Miller Ad Agency fits dealerships and home-services companies that also buy TV and radio; and The Point Group suits senior-living, health-care and restaurant brands whose marketing leans on PR. The three questions below cover technical decisions that can undo good SEO work: moving or redesigning a site, filter pages on online stores and what Google requires for its AI answers.
Will a new domain or redesign cost us our Google rankings?
Not permanently, if the move is planned. Google’s guide to site moves, last updated in August 2026, says to expect temporary fluctuations in ranking, to redirect each old URL to its new address with permanent redirects and to keep those redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year; it recommends moving a small or medium site all at once, while large sites can move one section at a time. When the domain or subdomain itself changes, Search Console’s Change of Address tool tells Google about the move, and Google’s help center says the tool’s effects last 180 days and advises paying for the old domain for at least a year. Ask an agency handling a redesign to deliver the redirect map before launch rather than after traffic falls.
How should an online store handle filter pages for size, color and price?
By keeping Google away from the combinations it does not need. In a December 17, 2024 post, Google’s Gary Illyes explained how faceted navigation, the filters that narrow a catalog, can generate huge numbers of URLs for Google to crawl, and Google published a guide the same day that now sits in its crawling documentation. If filtered pages need not appear in search, it recommends disallowing them in robots.txt or putting the filters in URL fragments, and it calls rel=canonical and nofollow generally less effective in the long term; if they should be indexable, it advises the standard & separator between parameters, a consistent order of filters and a 404 status for combinations with no products. Ask your agency to compare Search Console’s crawl stats before and after the change.
Do pages need special optimization to appear in Google’s AI Overviews?
No, according to Google. Its page on AI features and websites, added in May 2025, says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no other special optimizations necessary; a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in Search, and a May 2026 Google guide sums it up by saying that optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. The same nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex controls that limit ordinary results also limit what these features show, while blocking the Google-Extended token in robots.txt governs use of your content for Google’s Gemini models and, Google says, does not affect inclusion or ranking in Search. Treat any “AI Overview package” that is not ordinary SEO work with suspicion.
