The same task menu, applied to the searches and buyers that matter in your field. Each guide names what actually moves rankings in that vertical, in order, with the public price of the task that does it.
The three keyword clusters that carry pipeline, the ChatGPT shortlist problem, and technical notes specific to software sites.
Category pages are the money pages. Crawl budget, faceted navigation, Product schema and the replatform trap.
The map pack pays for everything. Procedure pages, review velocity, and the AI answer to best dentist near me.
One page per practice area, bar-compliant trust signals, and the map pack as the front door.
Credentialed content, multi-location technical SEO, and the symptom search that moved to AI engines.
The IDX trap, neighborhood content that outlives the listing, and the agent as the entity.
The three searches that close deals, comparison pages as due diligence, and the AI shortlist as the new analyst report.
Every industry claims its SEO is special. Most of the time that is marketing. Crawlability, indexing and a clear entity work the same way for a dental practice and a B2B software company, and any agency that tells you otherwise is charging for the difference.
Three things do genuinely differ: which surface decides the sale, what a single lead is worth, and where the compliance floor sits. A dental practice lives or dies on the map pack, so local signals outrank almost everything else. A software company almost never appears in a map pack and competes instead on topical depth and comparison queries. A healthcare site carries a trust burden that changes what you are allowed to claim, and a law firm carries the same burden under different regulators. These pages name those differences and then get specific about what to buy first.
If a map listing decides it, start with dentists, law firms or real estate. Local setup is usually the first purchase and a technical audit comes second.
If a comparison page or a category search decides it, start with SaaS or B2B services. Keyword work and content beat local work here by a wide margin, and it is not close.
If a product page decides it, start with ecommerce. Structured data is doing more work on those pages than most owners realise, which is why schema markup is worth understanding before you buy anything at all.
If a regulator is watching, start with healthcare, and read the trust section on that page before you write a word of new content.
Most businesses are not cleanly one of seven verticals, and forcing yourself into the nearest one is a reliable way to buy the wrong task first. The Growth Plan reads your actual site and market rather than your category label.