Knowledge
Marketing guides
Six long-form guides that teach a whole topic properly. They are written to be useful to someone who will never hire us, because that is the only kind of guide worth writing.
What marketing guides does VIS Mountain publish?
VIS Mountain publishes six in-depth marketing guides: local SEO, generative engine optimization, Google Ads, web design, healthcare marketing, and how to choose a marketing agency.
Each one covers a complete topic, cites primary documentation from Google, the FTC, W3C and published research, and links down to the specific answer pages that resolve individual questions inside that topic.
Start with the one that matches your problem
These are not a course and they are not meant to be read in order. Each one stands alone, and the one you need depends on which part of getting found is currently broken.
If people cannot find you when they search nearby, start with local SEO. It is the foundation for any business that serves a place, and a surprising number of problems that look like website problems turn out to be Google Business Profile problems.
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If you can be found but the phone is not ringing, start with web design. Traffic that does not convert is usually a structure and speed problem rather than a demand problem, and it is cheaper to fix than to buy your way around.
If you need enquiries this month rather than this quarter, start with Google Ads. Paid search is the only channel here that produces results in days, and it is also the easiest one to waste money on, which is why that guide spends as much time on waste as on setup.
If you have noticed that rankings are holding but clicks are not, read the GEO guide. That pattern is now common enough to be the default, and the research on why is unusually good.
If you run a clinic or a practice, read the healthcare guide first regardless. The compliance constraints change which tactics are even available to you, and applying general marketing advice to a practice creates real exposure.
And if you are about to hire someone, read the agency guide before you take the first call. It is written by an agency, which you should factor in, and it is written to catch us out if we are not doing the work.
Search and AI visibility
These two overlap heavily and are best read together. The first covers being found by a search engine, the second covers being named by an assistant, and the foundations underneath them are largely the same.
The local SEO guide
How Google actually ranks local results, what you can change, and the one factor nobody can buy.
- Relevance, distance and prominence, in Google's own words
- A six-step order of work, from claiming the profile to measuring money
- Why keyword stuffing a business name is both effective and dangerous
The GEO guide
Generative engine optimization with primary sources, including the peer-reviewed paper that coined the term.
- What AI answers measurably do to clicks, from Pew and Ahrefs
- What nobody has published about how engines pick sources
- Why no one can guarantee a citation, said plainly
Paid search and websites
Visibility that does not become an enquiry is an expense. These two guides cover the paid route to attention and the site that has to catch it, and they are the pair most often read together.
The Google Ads guide
How the auction really works, where local budgets leak, and how fee models create conflicts.
- Ad Rank and Quality Score, described accurately rather than simplified
- Ten specific ways local accounts waste money
- A direct answer on who should own the ad account
The web design guide
What separates a site that looks finished from one that books work, with measurable standards.
- Core Web Vitals thresholds and why the 75th percentile matters
- What Google's own speed study measured, with its 2020 date attached
- How common accessibility failures actually are
Regulated marketing, and hiring help
Two guides for situations where the general advice does not apply cleanly. One because the rules are different, one because the thing being bought is unusually hard to inspect.
The healthcare marketing guide
Marketing a practice without breaking HIPAA or overstating what treatment can achieve.
- What HIPAA genuinely constrains in marketing, in practical terms
- How to reply to a patient review without disclosing anything
- Why we will not publish a cost per new patient figure
How to choose a marketing agency
A selection process that survives a good sales pitch, written by an agency you can point it at.
- Ten red flags, four of which should end the conversation
- The ten assets that must be in your name
- When an agency is the wrong answer entirely
What we hold ourselves to on these pages
Every statistic on every guide names a real, public, linkable publisher, with the year stated in the sentence where the source is more than about eighteen months old. If a number cannot be traced to a publisher's own page, it is not used, and the qualitative point is made instead.
That rule removes a number of figures you will see repeated confidently elsewhere. The claim that the Small Business Administration recommends spending seven to eight per cent of revenue on marketing does not appear here, because no live SBA page carries it. Neither do the Google Business Profile photo percentages, which Google itself withdrew, nor the various cost-per-new-patient and cost-per-case figures that circulate in healthcare and legal marketing with no disclosed method behind any of them.
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Technical claims are checked against primary documentation rather than against other people's summaries. Google Search Central for how search works, Google Business Profile Help for local ranking, Google Ads Help for the auction, web.dev for Core Web Vitals, W3C for accessibility, the FTC and HHS for what advertising and patient data rules actually require. Those links are on every guide, at the bottom, so you can check us.
Where something is genuinely unknown, the guides say so. How generative engines choose and attribute their sources is the clearest example: it is not documented by any vendor, nobody can guarantee a citation, and a guide that pretends otherwise is inventing a mechanism to sell against it.
And there are no guarantees anywhere in them. Results vary with market, budget, competition and execution, and that is a statement of fact rather than a disclaimer. Anyone promising instant first-place rankings is overselling, which is a line the site has carried for years and one worth keeping.
Where to go after a guide
Guides teach a topic. The answer pages underneath them resolve one question each, in more depth than a guide can spend on any single point, and the resources are the step by step version for when you have stopped reading and started doing.
Setup and policy resources
Numbered procedures rather than explanations: Google Business Profile setup, the wider business listings, who should own your marketing accounts, and the opposite review rules at Google and Yelp.
Setup and policy resourcesMarketing answers
Forty-six pages, each answering one real question properly, from what a backlink is to why rankings drop.
Marketing answersWhat we do
The services these guides describe, and what is actually in scope for each.
What we doPricing
Published, so you can compare us against anyone else on the terms the agency guide sets out.
PricingIndustries we serve
Where the general advice on these pages needs adapting to a specific sector.
Industries we serveCase studies
Work we have done, with the context attached rather than percentages floating free.
Case studiesFree audit
We will look at your site and tell you what we would change first, whether or not you hire us.
Free auditReading one of these and want a second opinion?
Send us the page and the problem. We will tell you what we would do about it.
Straight answers.
Are these guides free to use?
Yes, entirely, and there is no gate, no email capture and no download. They are published because the version of this work that is genuinely useful to a business owner who will never hire us is also the version worth reading for one who might.
If you want to reference them, please link rather than copy, so the version anyone reads stays current.
How often are these updated?
Each guide carries a last updated date, and they are revised when something they rely on changes: a Google documentation change, a new edition of a cited study, or a mechanic that stops being accurate.
The statistics are the part most likely to age. Several of the cited studies publish annually, so the figures move even when the underlying argument does not.
Which guide should I read first?
Whichever matches the problem you currently have. For most local businesses that is the local SEO guide, because being findable comes before anything else works.
If you are not sure what is broken, the web design guide's section on the route to an enquiry is a useful diagnostic: it walks through the five points where a visitor quietly gives up, and identifying which one applies to you usually points at the right guide.
What is the difference between a guide and an answer page?
A guide covers a whole topic and is meant to be read from the top: what it is, how it works, how to do it, how to tell whether it worked. An answer page takes one question and resolves it completely.
In practice, guides are what you read when you are trying to understand something, and answer pages are what you read when you have a specific question you want settled.
Do you publish anything for people in regulated industries?
The healthcare marketing guide is the main one, covering how HIPAA and FTC substantiation expectations change what a practice can do. It is written to help a practice ask its own counsel better questions, and it is explicit about where its own limits are.
Legal, med spa and other regulated categories have their own constraints that the industry pages address. If you are in one of those and the guide does not cover your situation, ask us.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab)Google's published self-assessment questions for content quality and experience.
- Google web.dev: Web Vitals (opens in a new tab)The current thresholds for LCP, INP and CLS, and the 75th percentile rule.
- W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: Advertising and marketing basics for business (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.