Don Elliott - Founder-Led Growth Advisor

Your website could be invisible in 6 months. Google traffic is down 34.5% since AI results launched. Someone asks ChatGPT "best HVAC companies near me" Your competitor shows up. You don't. The difference? Their website is AI-ready. Yours isn't. We audit 36 technical points that AI bots look for. Things like schema markup, LLM.txt files, and semantic structure. Check yours for free! (make sure you're following me so I can dm the link)

Did you know Google uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking, even when someone searches on desktop? Your mobile site is CRUCIAL. It literally determines if you're worth ranking. Mobile now represents the majority of web usage globally. The homeowners searching for contractors are doing it from their phones during gaps in their day. Which makes sense. I mean picture someone finding a leak in their roof, they're not running inside to find a computer. They pull out their phone and search for what they need. This is one of the first things we check when we audit a contractor site. Happy to take a peek at yours. Just message me.

College kid emailed me last week. Had built an app, wanted a gut check from "someone who's been doing this a while." That's me now, apparently. I gave him an hour and showed him where the thinking was tight and where it leaked. He took notes like it mattered. Half those meetings go nowhere. Which is fine. At some point you quietly become the old guy with answers, which may even surprise you. And when a kid shows up asking for your time, you give it. Not because it's noble. Because somebody did it for you once, and you still remember their name.

I audited an electrician's site last week. Good people, decent traffic. But the content was killing me because nobody could get through it. Sentences running 30 words long, no one's reading that. The data tells us that: - At 8 words, comprehension is 100%. - At 17 words, it drops to 75%. - At 25 words, it drops to 24%. - At 29 words, it drops to 4.5%. (that's insane) But it gets worse. AI reads your content the same way humans do. If it can't extract a clear answer from your sentences, it does not cite you. It literally just moves on. Don't assume short sentences are dumbing it down. They're quite honestly the difference between you getting more business or being invisible. Find out if yours does. Run the free AI audit at gravitate.report and see exactly where your site stands in sixty seconds.

AI does not scroll. When ChatGPT pulls from your website, it reads the first sentence of each section and decides whether you're worth citing. If the answer is not right at the top, it just moves on. I see this when I'm auditing contractor sites often. They start with background, company history, a paragraph about how long they've been in business. The information the homeowner searched for shows up four paragraphs down, if at all. That structure made sense when the goal was keeping someone on the page long enough to see more ads. I'll tell you what I tell my clients: Lead with the answer. Put the most important information first and let the context and detail follow. Most of you will ignore this and keep doing what you're doing. Cool. See you at the bottom of the search results.

I've watched contractors spend money on Google Ads and get almost nothing back. Almost every time, the campaign wasn't the problem. They were. - Week two feels slow. They change the bid strategy. - Week three still feels slow. They swap out the ad copy. - Week four, they adjust the budget because something must be wrong. Every single one of those changes reset the learning phase. Most people running Google Ads have never heard of the learning phase. I'll make it simple for you. When a campaign launches, the algorithm doesn't know who your best customers are. It doesn't know which keywords convert, which audiences engage, or what time of day produces the lowest cost per lead. It finds all of that out by running your ads and collecting data. Google needs around 50 conversion events to fully calibrate. Meta needs 50 optimization events per ad set within seven days. Until those thresholds are hit, performance is inconsistent by design. Because it's still learning. Every significant change during that window sends it back to zero. - Change the bid strategy. Reset. - Touch the landing page. Reset. - Adjust the budget. Reset. - Swap the ad copy. Reset. The contractor who keeps tweaking because week two feels slow is the same contractor who never lets the campaign learn enough to produce anything. - Month one is calibration. - Month two is refinement. - Month three is where it starts paying off. The contractors who get there are the ones who understood that patience is the name of the game.

Let's do a ten second test of your mobile site. Pull up your website on your phone right now. Three things I want you to check. 1. Can you find your phone number without scrolling to the bottom of the page? 2. Can you tap into the contact form and fill it out without zooming in or accidentally hitting the wrong field? 3. Can you open the navigation menu find a specific service and get there without the menu covering the entire screen? If any of those felt harder than they should, that's a problem.

We just wrapped up our outdoor summer concert series at the pub. We had local bands every week and a full crowd every time. What wild, we didn't run a single ad for it. We just created something people genuinely wanted to be at and told them about it consistently until showing up became a habit for them. I kept thinking about that while watching the crowds fill in every week. This is exactly what separates the contractors I've watched scale from the ones who stay stuck at the same revenue year after year. Something worth showing up for. Shown up for consistently until the right people start planning around you. The "set it and forget it" mentality kills more businesses than competition ever does. You evolve or you plateau. There's not much in between.

You want to talk about stress testing a business model? I've owned Gravitate through a recession, a pandemic, a boom, and a revolution. Most people only see one of those. Maybe two. I've seen all four up close and each one taught me something. The 2008 recession taught me what a business needs to survive when everything contracts at once. Not what is nice to have. What is essential. The pandemic taught me who our real clients were. The ones who called to figure out how to get through it together and the ones who disappeared the moment things got uncertain. You find out fast who is a partner and who is just a vendor relationship waiting to be cancelled. The boom taught me how fast you can grow when you are not paying attention to the right things. Revenue covers a lot of cracks. Until it does not. The AI revolution is the one we are in right now. And honestly it might be the most clarifying of all four. Not because it is the hardest. Because it is the most undeniable. Every business is being forced to figure out what they actually are in a world where the rules just changed completely. 25 plus years of building this company and the lessons that stuck did not come from the good years.

Spent a week backpacking through the Enchantments. 22 miles around alpine lakes that looked too perfect to be real. Aasgard Pass absolutely kicked my ass and did I mention one mountain goat who had absolutely no intention of moving off the trail for me? Just standing there like I was the inconvenience. He was not wrong. Aasgard Pass had already put me in my place by that point so honestly I was not in a position to argue with anyone. We eventually reached an understanding and went our separate ways. Great week. Disconnected and with some of my favorite people.