BRD Media’s Chris DeWilde on Local SEO, AI Search and Why Most Small Businesses Are Measuring the Wrong Thing

Ask a dentist in the Chicago suburbs how their SEO is going and you usually get a shrug. There is a report somewhere. It has a lot of green arrows on it. Nobody can say whether a patient came from it.

Chris DeWilde founded BRD Media in Villa Park, Illinois in 2022 to be the agency that could answer that question. The firm builds websites and runs search and paid campaigns for local practices and service companies across Chicagoland. We asked him what has changed in local search, what has not, and what an owner should expect from an engagement in 2026.

Most owners have been told SEO is slow. Is that still true?

“Half true. The six-month number came from an era when Google crawled slowly and most sites were a mess. In 2026, a technically clean site with a fully built Google Business Profile can see movement on long-tail local terms inside thirty days. Competitive head terms still take longer, and anyone promising page one in a week is lying to you.

“What changed is that speed now tracks work volume. The agencies that stall are the ones doing one blog post a month and calling it a program. We publish three supporting posts a week on our own site and add new service and town pages on top of that, and clients get a cadence scaled to their plan.”

What did AI search change for a local business?

“Two things. First, the answer box now cites sources, and it tends to cite pages that answer a specific question in the first sentence. So the way you structure a page matters more than it did. We put the answer at the top, in plain words, then earn the rest of the page.

“Second, Google Business Profile became the front door. For a dentist in Naperville or a plumber in Schaumburg, the map pack and the AI summary pull from the profile: categories, services, photos, reviews, posts. We see practices with beautiful websites and an empty profile, and they wonder why the practice down the street with the ugly site gets the calls.”

What is the most common mistake you see when you audit a new client?

“Measuring the wrong thing. Owners get a report full of impressions and keyword counts and have no idea whether the phone rang because of it. Every engagement we run is wired into GA4 and call tracking from day one, and the client holds the logins. A lead we cannot tie to a page or a campaign does not go in the report.

“The second mistake is buying cheap. There is a whole tier of SEO sold for a hundred dollars a month, and it is one person running the same automated checklist across two hundred sites. It does not work, and it sometimes does damage. Real SEO is a labor cost. That is not a pitch, it is arithmetic.”

Dental is where DeWilde says the cheap tier does the most harm, partly because dental is where the competition is heaviest. BRD Media puts the price and the scope of its dental SEO service on the page itself, which DeWilde says is deliberate: owners kept asking how to tell one SEO quote from another, and a published price next to a published scope is the fastest way to compare.

Your agency offers a 90-day guarantee. How does that work?

“We agree on a ranking milestone before we start. If it is not visible in Google, Maps and AI search inside ninety days, the rest of the service is free until it is. We can offer that because we control the whole stack: the site build, the content, the profile, the links, the tracking. When an agency only touches one piece, it cannot guarantee anything, so it does not.

“The guarantee also keeps us honest about who we take on. If a business is in a market where the math does not work yet, we tell them to run paid search first and come back to SEO when the site has earned some authority.”

The agency runs that paid search work itself, which DeWilde says is the only way the handoff back to SEO happens on schedule instead of getting lost between two vendors.

Where do websites fit now? Some people argue they matter less.

“They matter differently. The profile gets the click, but the website closes the lead. Load time, a form above the fold, a phone number that works on mobile, a page for each service and each town you serve. We build every site on the same stack so that structure is baked in, instead of retrofitted after launch.

“One of our auto customization clients reached the top Google result in a competitive local category, and once we reworked the site’s conversion path that same ranking produced 30 percent more conversions. The ranking got them the visit. The site got them the job.”

What should an owner ask before hiring an SEO company?

“Four questions. Who owns the accounts? What exactly gets published each month, and can I see last month’s? How do you track a lead back to the work? And what happens if it does not rank? If the answers are vague, keep walking.”

He adds that the agency’s own case studies, with the spend and the tracking source shown next to the result, exist mostly so an owner can see what one of these engagements looks like before signing.

What is next for BRD Media?

“More of the same, done better. We are expanding across the Chicago suburbs and into regional service companies that cover several towns. We keep adding to our own site because it is the proof of the method: if the agency’s pages rank, the method works. And we are spending a lot of time on how AI assistants choose which local businesses to recommend, because that is where the next two years of local search are going.”

BRD Media LLC is headquartered at 322 Ardmore Ave, Villa Park, IL 60181 and serves businesses across Chicagoland.