Real playbooks for real southern Vermont small businesses.
Downloadable guides written for southern Vermont small businesses - small operators in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Putney, and across Windham County. No fluff. No upsells inside the PDF. Just the same playbooks we use ourselves.
The same checklists we use on client sites
Written for owners, not marketers. Use them yourself, or let us do it for you - either way they are free, complete, and gate-free.
All resources
The 27-Point Local SEO Audit
27 specific checks across foundation, visibility, UX, and conversion. Self-diagnose your site in an hour, then prioritize fixes by revenue impact.
Get the free PDF →The AI Search Survival Guide
The biggest shift in local search in 20 years is happening now. 11-point AI-readiness audit, mechanics explained, quick wins for this week.
Get the free PDF →We make money when small businesses in southern Vermont thrive.
These guides are free, with no email gate beyond a single field, because every small business we help win is one more local economy we get to participate in. The math works.
They're also the easiest way for us to demonstrate, before any sales conversation happens, that we actually know what we're talking about. Most local agencies can't write content this specific because they don't actually do the work themselves. We do. The playbooks are exactly the audits and frameworks we run on every prospect's site before we quote a project.
How to actually get value out of these
A downloaded PDF that never gets opened is worth nothing, and most lead-magnet guides are written to be downloaded rather than used. These are built the other way round: they are the checklists we work through ourselves, so they are ordered by what changes results rather than by what is easy to write about.
Do the first section in one sitting. Each guide front-loads the items that cost you money right now - the ones where an hour of work changes how many calls you get. If you only ever do the first few pages, you will have got most of the available value.
Work on the live site, not a list. The common failure is reading the whole thing, writing a to-do list, and never returning to it. Open your site beside the guide and fix each item as you reach it. Most entries take minutes; the ones that do not are marked.
Do not do all of it. Genuinely. Some items will not apply to your business, and a few are only worth the effort at a size you may not be at yet. Skipping those is correct, not cheating.
Give it a few weeks before judging. The speed and usability fixes show up quickly. The visibility ones - the pages that name your towns, the structured information that tells a search engine and an AI assistant what you are - take longer and then keep compounding. Judging the whole exercise after ten days is the reason most people conclude that none of it works.
Why these are free, and what the catch is
There is a real answer and it is not "we just love helping". These guides describe work that is genuinely doable yourself if you have the time and the patience for it. Some people read them, do the work, and never need us - and that is a completely fine outcome, because the alternative is a market full of businesses who think all of this is mysterious and expensive.
Most people who download them read the first few pages, recognize how much of it there is, and decide their time is better spent on the business they actually run. When that happens they already know what we would do and why, which makes for a much better conversation than one that starts with a sales pitch.
The catch, such as it is: we ask for an email address on the guides that come as a PDF, and that is one field rather than a form asking your revenue and your biggest challenge. You get the guide immediately. You are not put into a sequence, you will not get a follow-up asking whether you had a chance to read it, and one click unsubscribes for good.
If you would rather not hand over an email at all, the blog covers most of the same ground with no gate whatsoever, and the free website audit tells you which parts of any of this actually apply to your site rather than making you work it out.
What you will not find in here
Tricks. There is nothing here about manipulating rankings, buying links, or gaming an algorithm. Not out of primness - that work stopped being effective years ago and now mostly gets sites penalised. Everything in these guides is the slow, dull version that keeps working.
Guarantees. No promise of page one, no timeline for results, no claim about a percentage increase in anything. Any guide making those claims is selling you something, because the honest answer depends on your market, your competition and how much of this your competitors have already done.
Filler. These are short on purpose. A forty-page guide is usually thirty pages of preamble protecting six pages of substance, and it exists to look valuable rather than to be used.
Anything we would not do ourselves. Every item on these lists is something we do on our own site and on the client sites we build. If it were not worth the effort, it would not be in here, and there are several fashionable tactics deliberately absent for exactly that reason.
Which one should you start with?
If you are not sure, start with the audit checklist rather than the AI one. It covers the foundations - speed, mobile, whether your pages say where you work, whether your business profile is claimed and complete - and almost every AI-visibility problem turns out to be one of those foundations missing rather than anything exotic. The assistants are reading the same pages Google reads. A site that is invisible to one is usually invisible to both.
Go to the AI guide first only if the basics are genuinely in place: your site is quick, it works properly on a phone, your profile is claimed, and you already appear for your own name and your main service. In that case the AI-specific work is the next real lever, and it is currently one of the few places where a small business can get ahead of larger competitors simply by having done it earlier.
If you have no website at all yet, honestly, do not start with either. Most of what these describe is easier to build in from the beginning than to retrofit, and reading a hundred-item improvement list before you have anything to improve is discouraging for no good reason. The blog is the better starting point, and the free audit becomes useful the moment something is live.
And if you have read one of these and hit something that does not make sense, say so. Reply to the email it arrived in, or use the contact page, and you will get an explanation from the person who wrote it rather than a link back to the same document. Questions like that are how these guides have improved, and it costs you nothing to ask.
Who wrote these, and why that matters
These were written by the person who builds the sites, not by a content team working from a brief. That is not a credential so much as an explanation for why they read the way they do: the priorities are ordered by what has actually moved the needle on real client sites, and the items that sound impressive but rarely change anything are left out.
It also means they get updated when the ground shifts rather than on a content calendar. The AI-search material in particular has been rewritten more than once, because the honest advice in that area changed substantially over the past two years and a guide that still describes the old behavior is worse than none.
If you want to see the same thinking applied to your specific site rather than in general, that is exactly what the free audit is: the same checklists, run against your pages, with the findings ordered by what would change your results first.
A straight answer about doing this yourself
Most of what is in these guides is genuinely within reach of a business owner who is comfortable with a computer. Claiming and completing a business profile, writing pages that name the towns you serve, compressing images, getting reviews asked for consistently - none of that needs a developer. If you have the evenings, do it. You will understand your own market better afterwards and you will never again be at the mercy of someone telling you it is complicated.
Where it stops being realistic is the part that needs a rebuild rather than an edit. If the site is slow because of how it was built, or the pages cannot be added to without paying someone, or the platform charges for the thing you need next, then no checklist fixes that. A guide can tell you the foundation is the problem; it cannot pour a new one.
The other honest limit is time. This work is not hard, but it is steady - a few hours to start, then something small most months, indefinitely. Plenty of owners begin well and stop by the second month, not through any failure but because running the business takes precedence, which is exactly as it should be. If that sounds like how it would go, knowing that in advance is worth more than another PDF.