SEO Services Built for Google and AI Answer Engines

Howell Studios is a national SEO and digital marketing agency. We plan, build, and measure the search work that gets brands found in Google results and quoted in AI answers.

Book a discovery call or call (585) 558-3321

Technical SEO, content, and answer engine optimization handled by one in-house team • Built for AI answers and traditional search • Working with manufacturers, printers, sign, and trade brands across the United States

SEO services are the ongoing work that earns a website unpaid search traffic and citations inside AI answers: a technical audit, keyword research, page content, on-page fixes, internal links, and monthly reporting against a fixed keyword set. Howell Studios runs that program nationally for printers, sign companies, manufacturers and contractors. We are a marketing and video agency, not a print shop, and we run our own site the same way.

What SEO services include

Technical SEO

We fix the reasons a page cannot rank before we ask it to: crawlability, index coverage, site speed, mobile rendering, redirects, and the schema markup that tells search engines what each page is. On WordPress and WooCommerce sites we can deploy most on-page fixes ourselves, because the same team runs your web design and build.

Content and on-page SEO

We map your keywords to real pages, then write the copy and the blog articles that answer what buyers actually search. Each page opens with the answer, names the product and the industry, and is structured so a person and a crawler both understand it in one read. No spun filler, no keyword stuffing.

Answer engine optimization (AEO and GEO)

Answer engine optimization, sometimes called generative engine optimization (GEO), is the work of getting your pages cited inside AI answers. We write self-contained, sourced passages and add the structured data that assistants lift and attribute, so when a buyer asks an AI tool a question in your category, your business is in the answer. This is the route we bet our own site on, and it is the same route we build for clients.

Reporting and SEO marketing services

Every engagement carries a fixed keyword set and a monthly report, so you can see position and traffic move rather than take our word for it. As part of our SEO marketing services we connect the channels around search, content, email, and social, so the same message that ranks is the one your buyers see everywhere else.

How an SEO engagement runs

SEO is continuous, monthly work, not a one-time project. Here is how a Howell engagement runs from the first call.

Baseline and keyword map. We measure where the site ranks today, name the keyword set we will hold you to, and identify the gaps that are actually winnable instead of the head terms that are not.
Build and fix. We deploy the technical fixes, rewrite or write the money pages, and publish content on a set cadence. Because we build on WordPress in house, the fixes do not wait on a separate web vendor.
Measure and adjust. Every month you get a report against the fixed keyword set, in Google and in AI answers, and the next month of work is chosen from what moved.

Proof: we run our own site this way

The clearest proof we can show you is our own site. Howell Studios runs the exact SEO and answer-engine work described here on howellstudios.com, and we measure it the way we would measure yours.

In SearchAtlas’s AI-visibility tracking for the 30 days to September 8, 2026, our site was cited in AI answers across all three of our service lines, strongest on SEO and digital marketing, where it ranked second among the brands named on that topic. Overall AI-answer visibility rose to 19.81 percent over that window, up 1.85 points on the prior 30 days.

Source: SearchAtlas LLM-visibility tracker, 30-day window through September 8, 2026.

We are honest about classic rankings, because you should be suspicious of anyone who is not. There is no way to pay Google for an organic position, and a new or rebuilt page needs months to be recrawled, trusted, and ranked. So early on we report the signal that does move, AI citations and search impressions, while the ranking gains build. Google Search Essentials says the same thing about how ranking works.

Clients you can call

The most useful evidence an SEO company can give you is a client in your industry who will take your call. Ours are industrial: LMC Industrial Contractors of Avon, New York, and SDG Trailers of Waycross, Georgia.

LMC Industrial Contractors — Avon, New York

LMC has fabricated and installed structural steel, mechanical piping and utility infrastructure since 1982. We built their website and run the SEO behind it. We shot the photography and video of their crews and equipment, produced a LEAP 360 virtual tour so a buyer can walk the shop floor without flying in, and designed and printed the trade show booth they took to the Hard Hat Expo in Syracuse.

“LMC Industrial Contractors, Inc. was searching for a team to overhaul our current website and marketing content. We chose to proceed with Howell Studios and we have been blown away the entire process. The website development has been customized to our requirements, the 3D facility tour precisely emphasizes the size of our facility, and the brand videos perfectly showcase our capabilities.”

Nicholas LoBrutto, Marketing Director, LMC Industrial Contractors — watch the video review

SDG Trailers — Waycross, Georgia

SDG builds new, pre-owned and custom trailers, from refrigerated units for food transport to cargo trailers for equipment. They came to us from a previous marketing partner with a website that did not rank. We rebuilt it, did the keyword research and the on-page work behind it, and run the Google and Meta advertising alongside.

What you will not find here is a traffic multiple printed next to a client’s name. We do not publish a number you cannot check. Ask on the call and we will walk you through the account, or introduce you to the client. Both engagements are written up in full: LMC Industrial Contractors and SDG Trailers.

SEO services for New York companies

We run SEO for companies across New York State, and we are one of them: our head office is at 805 Ridge Road in Webster, just outside Rochester. The New York work runs inside the national program described above, with New York terms in the same tracked keyword set — not a separate map-pack campaign built around one city.

That distinction matters for the kind of company we work with. A structural steel fabricator in Avon, a commercial printer in Buffalo, a packaging plant in the Hudson Valley — none of them sell only to whoever is within ten miles of the shop. Their buyers are specifiers, purchasing managers and general contractors, spread across the state and past it. So the keyword set covers the statewide and national terms those buyers type, and the pages are written to be found from Rochester to Syracuse to Albany to the New York City metro without pretending to be local in each one.

LMC Industrial Contractors in Avon runs its website, SEO, social and video with us, and their trade show booth went to Syracuse. If the work you need is filmed rather than written, it runs on the same footing: corporate video production in New York for print and sign companies across the state. For more on this market: Rochester NY Digital Marketing: A 2026 Growth Playbook and Top B2B SEO Services in Rochester, NY.

Why brands choose Howell over a typical SEO company

Most of what is sold as SEO stops at rankings and reports. Here is what only this team can put its name to.

We optimize for AI answers, not only blue links

Search now splits between the classic results and the AI answer above them. We write and mark up your pages for both, so a query that ends in an AI Overview still names your business. Many SEO agencies have not changed their playbook for this yet.

One team builds the site and ranks it

We design, build, and rank on the same team, so a technical recommendation is something we deploy, not a ticket we hand to your web company and hope they action. See how we handle the build on our web design agency page.

We know industrial and trade search

We work daily with manufacturers, printers, sign companies, and trade contractors. We know the vocabulary a buyer of a wide-format printer or a monument sign actually types, which is not the vocabulary a general marketing agency guesses at. For a plant or a fabrication shop, that search work sits inside a wider program: see how we run it as an industrial marketing agency for manufacturers.

The same agency films your brand video

Ranking content and video work better together than apart. The team writing your pages also runs your brand and product video, so the story on the page and the story on camera are the same story.

Where SEO fits your wider marketing

SEO is one channel, not the whole plan. As a digital marketing agency we also run the paid, social, and email work around search, and we build the site the search work lives on. If you want search direction without a full retainer, we also take on SEO consulting services and hand you a plan you can run yourself. The thread through all of it is one team and one message. See the rest of what we do across our full range of services, from web design to video production.

How do I get my sign company to show up in AI search like ChatGPT?

Publish a page that answers the question in your buyer’s own words, put the answer in its first two sentences, and support it with figures an assistant can lift. Assistants quote passages, not websites, so the unit of work is the answerable page, not the home page.

On September 24, 2026 we put ten questions a print or sign company owner asks about search in front of four assistants, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, and read all forty answers. One page on one printing-industry marketing site was cited in eleven of the thirty answers that named their sources, across four of the ten questions. Nothing it won came from an adjective. What the assistants lifted was specific: word counts, load times, response windows, character limits.

So answer engine optimization for a sign company is a build, not a rewrite: one page for each question your buyers ask, the answer inside the first forty to sixty words, a number with a unit behind every claim, FAQPage and Organization markup so the assistant can tell who is answering, and the same ten questions re-run every month to see whether you are being cited yet. We measure that with SearchAtlas LLM visibility across all four assistants, and we report the citation count, not a visibility score. The longer version is here: how sign companies earn citations in AI Overviews and ChatGPT answers.

What keywords should a sign company target for SEO?

Target the products you fabricate and install, in the words your buyers use for them, and give each product its own page. The generic trade terms are harder to win and worth less than the products underneath them.

US search volumes and difficulty, pulled September 24, 2026: vehicle wraps 14,800 searches a month at difficulty 7, channel letter signs 3,600 at 10, monument signs 1,600 at 13, ADA signage 2,400 at 23. Now compare custom business signs: 4,400 a month at difficulty 41. The catch-all term is six times harder than channel letter signs and tells a buyer nothing about what you make. Printers see the same shape, with banner printing at 14,800 and difficulty 16 against wide format printing at 720 and 36.

Two rules follow. One page for each job you sell, because a single services page listing twelve products ranks for none of them. And keep the map-pack terms separate: sign company near me carries 22,200 searches a month at difficulty 9, but it is won with a Google Business Profile, service-area coverage and reviews rather than with an article. The same split works for print buyers: six marketing strategies for printing companies.

What should a print shop’s website have to rank in Google?

A page for every job you sell, each one written for the phrase a buyer actually types, sitting on a clean technical floor. The most common gap we find on print sites is the catalogue page: ten products given a sentence each, ranking for none of them.

The floor is measurable, so measure it. Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds are the pass mark: largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint under 200 milliseconds, cumulative layout shift under 0.1. Each page needs one H1, a title under 60 characters, a meta description of 140 to 155, and copy written for that product rather than the same paragraph with the product name swapped. Add Service or LocalBusiness markup so a crawler can tell what the page is, and make sure the page is reachable in two clicks from the home page.

Above the floor, the things a print shop has and a marketing site cannot fake: photographs of your own presses, your own finished work and your own installs instead of stock images, stock and substrate names spelled the way customers ask for them, and a stated turnaround or minimum wherever you can commit to one. That is the material an AI answer quotes and a buyer trusts. If the site itself is the blocker, that is our web design and build work, run by the same team.

SEO services: common questions

What is included in SEO services?

SEO services include a technical audit, keyword research, on-page and content work, internal linking, and monthly reporting, run as ongoing work rather than a one-time fix. At Howell Studios they also include answer engine optimization, which is the work of getting your pages cited inside AI answers, not only ranked in the standard results.

How much do SEO services cost?

SEO services are priced as a monthly retainer, set after we audit the site and agree the keyword set, because the work scales with the size of the site and the competitiveness of the terms. We quote a firm monthly number once we have seen your site rather than a rate card that ignores it. Book a discovery call and we will scope it. If you are budgeting search alongside ads, social, video and the site, what a marketing agency costs in total puts the five line items in one place.

How long does SEO take to work?

Most sites see early movement in three to six months, with the larger gains after that, because search engines take time to recrawl, trust, and rank new work. There is no way to pay Google for a higher organic ranking, so anyone promising the top spot in weeks is guessing.

What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?

Answer engine optimization is optimizing your content so AI answer engines quote it. Where classic SEO aims to rank a page, AEO aims to have your business named inside the AI answer a buyer reads first. It relies on clear, self-contained, sourced passages and structured data, and it now runs alongside SEO rather than replacing it.

What is the difference between SEO and digital marketing?

SEO is one part of digital marketing. SEO is the work of earning unpaid search and AI-answer visibility, while digital marketing is the wider set of channels, paid ads, social, email, content, and web, that a brand uses to get found and convert. At Howell Studios, SEO sits inside a digital marketing offer, so the same team can line your search work up with the rest of your marketing.

What is the difference between an SEO company and an SEO agency?

In practice there is little real difference between an SEO company and an SEO agency, because both terms describe a team you hire to improve your search visibility. What matters is scope. Ask whether the SEO agency also builds the site, writes the content, and optimizes for AI answers, or whether it only sends recommendations for someone else to implement.

Do you offer national SEO?

Yes. National SEO is our default. We target non-geographic, commercial terms such as seo services or video production company for brands selling across the United States, rather than local map-pack rankings tied to one city. If your market is the whole country, that is the work we do every day.

Get an SEO plan for your site

Tell us your site and the terms you want to win, and we will send back what is winnable, in what order, and how we will measure it. See recent work in our portfolio.