Every question you have
before saying yes.

The honest timeline: months 1–3 are infrastructure. We're building your GBP profile, generating foundational content, submitting citations, and establishing the review rhythm. Dramatic ranking movement won't happen yet — and any agency that promises otherwise is telling you what you want to hear.

Months 4–6 is when rankings start to shift. Google registers the signal consistency, citation authority builds, and review velocity starts compounding. This is when the heatmap starts moving green.

Month 6 and beyond is when the results become visible in your business: more calls, more directions, more website visits from the Maps listing.

We don't wait until month 6 to flag a problem. Every month we review your heatmap against baseline. If a keyword isn't moving after 90 days of consistent optimization, we diagnose why — typically citation gaps, review velocity, or a competitor signal issue — and adjust the strategy.

If you're not seeing meaningful improvement by month 4, we have a direct conversation. We don't hide behind jargon or "SEO takes time" deflections. We show you the data, tell you what's happening, and tell you what we're changing.

Yes. NOVA works in any U.S. market where Google Maps is the primary local search surface — which is every city, suburb, and metro area. We have active clients in Dallas, Houston, and surrounding markets, with a growing national presence.

Market competitiveness varies by city and vertical, which is exactly what the free GBP audit measures. The audit maps your current heatmap against competitive density in your service area so you know what you're up against before committing.

Yes — reviews are one signal out of hundreds. A business with a 4.9-star rating and 200 reviews can still rank at position 8 if the GBP profile isn't optimized, citations are inconsistent, or a competitor has stronger proximity and keyword signals.

Good reviews give you a head start on one dimension. NOVA builds out the others: content freshness (consistent posts), geographic authority (geo-tagged images), citation footprint (300+ directory accuracy), and keyword relevance (service descriptions, Q&A, attributes). All of these factor into the Maps algorithm independently from review volume.

Paid ads and organic Maps placement are different systems. Ads stop the moment you stop paying. Organic Maps placement compounds over time — a position you earn at month 6 stays earned as long as you maintain the signals.

More importantly: 85% of local search clicks go to the Google Maps 3-pack and organic results. Only 15% go to paid ads. Organic Maps placement wins the attention of people who scroll past the ads looking for a business they can trust.

Every month you receive a NOVA performance report covering three areas: your heatmap (a visual grid showing your Map rank at every point in your service area), your keyword table (before/after AMR and Top-3% for each tracked keyword), and your GBP action summary (posts published, reviews requested, reviews responded to, citations submitted or updated).

The heatmap is the centerpiece. Green means top-3. Yellow means 4–6. Red means you're invisible to that searcher. You see the territory you're winning month over month. Reports arrive as PDFs you can share with your team. No login required.

AMR stands for Average Map Rank. It's a single number summarizing your average Google Maps position across all tracked search points in your service area. An AMR of 3.0 means you average position 3 across the grid. An AMR of 8.0 means most of your market doesn't see you in the top 3 at all.

AMR matters because a single keyword position doesn't tell the full story. A business might rank #1 for one keyword directly in front of their location, but rank #12 three miles away where most of their customers actually search. AMR captures the full geographic picture in one number.

We typically track 8–15 keywords per client, chosen based on your primary services, secondary services, and the highest-volume local searches in your market. Keywords are selected during onboarding and reviewed at 90 days.

Keyword selection matters as much as optimization. We focus on terms that drive actual phone calls and directions requests — not the terms that are easiest to rank for. If a keyword has high volume and high commercial intent in your market, it's on the tracking list.

Yes. GEO reporting tracks your business's citation presence in ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Llama, and Perplexity — showing whether you're being recommended when someone asks an AI about services in your area.

AI search reporting is included alongside your standard heatmap report. It shows which engines are citing you, for which queries, and how your visibility has changed month over month. This is early-stage data — AI search is still establishing patterns — but the businesses building citations now are the ones that will dominate when AI search volumes mature.

NOVA starts at $1,000/month. Full pricing details — including what's included at each tier and which add-ons are available — are on the Pricing page.

The better question is: what is a new customer worth to your business? If a new client is worth $2,000–$5,000 or more, NOVA pays for itself the first time it works. Most clients recover their first month's investment with a single new customer in the first 30 days of ranking movement.

It depends on the plan you choose. Foundation is month-to-month — cancel with 30 days notice, no penalty. Quarterly is a 90-day billing cycle. Semi-Annual is a 6-month billing cycle. All plans auto-renew at the same rate and can be cancelled, downgraded, or upgraded at the end of any billing period.

Longer commitments exist because meaningful ranking movement takes 4–6 months. If you commit for 90 days and cancel just as the heatmap starts moving, you've left the result on the table. The Performance Guarantee on Quarterly and Semi-Annual plans exists precisely because we're asking you to stay long enough to see the work pay off.

Rankings don't disappear overnight. The signals we've built — citation authority, review velocity, GBP completeness — persist after cancellation. You keep everything we built.

What stops is the ongoing signal maintenance: new posts, new reviews, new geo-tagged content, citation updates. Over time — typically 3–6 months — competitors who are actively optimizing will start to close the gap. Google rewards consistency. Businesses that maintain steady signal rhythm hold their positions. The ones that stop providing fresh signals slowly fade.

That's not a sales tactic. It's how the algorithm works.

Yes. Franchises and multi-location businesses are one of NOVA's core use cases. Volume pricing applies at 3+ locations, and we build a centralized reporting structure so you can see performance across your full footprint in one view.

For franchise brands, we also offer an Agency Partner Program where the franchisor or a regional operator manages NOVA on behalf of their locations. Contact us to learn more.

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's the discipline of optimizing your business to be cited by AI search engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Llama, and Perplexity — when users ask questions like "who is the best plumber near me?" or "find a chiropractor in Dallas."

This matters because AI search volume is growing rapidly. People are increasingly skipping Google search entirely and asking AI assistants instead. The businesses that get cited by those assistants are building a competitive moat that doesn't exist yet for most local markets.

AI engines pull citations from three primary sources: authoritative web mentions (directories, reviews, local publications), structured data signals (schema markup, GBP attributes, NAP consistency), and content authority (how consistently your business is mentioned in context with your service category and location).

NOVA builds all three. Citation management builds authoritative directory mentions. GBP optimization builds structured data signals. Review and content work builds topical association. Together, they form the entity profile that AI engines reference when answering local service queries.

It's not a switch you flip. It's a footprint you build over months. But the businesses building it now will have a significant head start when AI search becomes the primary discovery channel for local services.

Volume is growing but it's not yet the dominant channel for most local service searches. Google Maps still drives the majority of local discovery clicks — which is why NOVA leads with Maps optimization and treats GEO as the second tier.

The reason to build GEO signals now is adoption-curve behavior. Early movers build positions that are expensive for late movers to displace. Waiting until AI search is "proven" for your market means competing against businesses that already have 12–18 months of citation authority built.

We track your AI citation performance monthly so you can see the trajectory — not so you can hang your business on it today.

Using AI to generate content is different from being optimized for AI search. Most businesses using "AI for SEO" are doing the first thing: using ChatGPT to write blog posts or GBP updates. That's a production efficiency tool. It doesn't build AI citation authority.

GEO is about being the source that AI engines reference, not about using AI to create content. The two often get conflated. If your competitor is producing AI-generated content, they're probably not ahead of you on GEO unless they have a sophisticated structured data and entity strategy behind it.

Run the free audit. It shows your current GBP signal strength and competitive gap. From there we can assess where the real exposure is.