The CBS Blog
Guides on what makes a website rank, why most AI builders miss the mark, and how to own your web presence outright.
Every major website builder has a free plan. Wix is free. Squarespace has a free trial. The free plan is one of the most effective marketing tools in SaaS — get users invested in building something on your platform, then make the free experience painful enough that upgrading feels inevitable. This is the stated business...
A website that ranks but does not convert is an expensive billboard. Conversion engineering is the discipline of building websites where every structural decision — page hierarchy, CTA placement, trust signal sequencing, friction reduction — is made with the explicit goal of moving visitors toward a specific action. It is not a feature you add...
The debate between WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace for SEO has been ongoing for years. The consensus has shifted — Wix and Squarespace have made real improvements and the old arguments about Wix being terrible for SEO are outdated. But the debate is usually framed around the wrong variables. The question is not which platform handles...
There are now dozens of platforms that use AI to build websites. Type your business name, answer a few questions, and in 30 seconds you have something that looks finished. The design quality is genuinely impressive. What most AI builders have not solved is the deeper question: what does a local business website actually need...
There is a framing problem in how most businesses think about their website. They treat it like a phone plan — a recurring service you pay for access to. The website builder industry has deliberately encouraged this framing because it is enormously profitable. Wix generated over $1.7 billion in revenue in 2024, almost entirely from...
Contractors operate in one of the most competitive local search environments online. “Plumber near me,” “general contractor Denver,” “roofing company in [city]” — these are high-intent searches with real money attached. The contractors ranking at the top do not just have a Google Business Profile. They have a website with specific technical architecture that most...
Restaurants have a specific local search problem that generic website builders completely ignore. Your customers are not searching your restaurant name. They are searching “best farm-to-table restaurant in Austin” or “restaurants open Sunday near me.” Ranking for those searches requires a completely different site architecture than what Wix or Squarespace provides out of the box....
Local businesses have a different SEO problem than national brands. You're not trying to rank #1 for "best CRM software." You're trying to rank in the top 3 for "plumber in Austin" or "dentist near Temecula." The signals that matter for local search — LocalBusiness schema, service area pages, Google Business Profile alignment, local keyword...
The website builder industry was designed to extract recurring revenue from small businesses. Pay $29/month. Then $33/month. Then the plan you need is $49/month. By year 5, you've spent over $1,700 on a site you don't own, can't export, and that disappears the moment you stop paying. There's a better model. The 5-Year Cost Comparison...
There are now dozens of AI website builders. Type in your business name, answer a few questions, and inside a minute you have a site. The demos are impressive. The SEO results are not. The reason is simple: building a website fast and building a website that ranks in Google are two completely different engineering...
What We Cover
AI Website Builders
What makes them work — and what makes most of them fail in search.
Schema Markup & SEO
Structured data, rich results, and the technical signals Google actually reads.
Local Business SEO
Service area targeting, LocalBusiness schema, and ranking in your city.
Ownership vs. Renting
Why one-time builds beat monthly subscriptions over any meaningful horizon.
Industry Builds
Vertical-specific architecture for restaurants, contractors, dentists, and more.
WordPress & Portability
Why the platform matters and what it means to own your stack.
One-time purchase. WordPress. Industry-specific AI. Schema markup. Built to rank from day one.