Field Notes
What we learn doing the work.
Local SEO, AI search, voice agents, and the Client Zero series — where we assess and rebuild our own business in public, on the same standard we sell. No recycled listicles. Notes from the field, written after the invoice cleared.
Happy Fourth, from right here
A quick holiday note from all of us at Insightful Eye - across Rhode Island, Boston, and Cape Cod.
Does your small business need an AI receptionist?
The honest math on missed calls, what an AI receptionist actually does versus a human answering service, which businesses need one most, and how to hear ours - Iris - live on the phone right now.
Freelance your CFO: your money has no owner
A full-time CFO runs $180K–$250K, so no business under ~$5M ever hires one — and the most important money decisions default to a gut feeling and a Friday bank-balance check. What a fractional CFO actually owns, and how to rent the function instead of the salary.
Why I show up and shoot my clients' photos myself
Stock photos are invisible to local search. I spent a decade behind a camera - and I still show up on-site to shoot the real, geo-specific photos that win Google's map pack and AI answers. Same eye, new subject.
A clean migration scored worse before it scored better
When we moved a Cape Cod home builder off an inherited template site, Semrush Site Health dropped to 85 on launch day - below the site we replaced. A week later it read 93. Why a good migration dips first, and why the new 93 is worth more than the old one.
AI search needs local proof, not more marketing claims
ChatGPT and Google do not trust taglines. For local businesses, AI visibility starts with crawlable proof: service pages, geography, reviews, case studies, and consistent entity signals across the web.
We ran our $2,500 audit on ourselves and scored 24/100
An agency that sells visibility, operating from a domain with none. The full story of the Client Zero audit: the zero keywords, the authority score of 2, the wedding photographer who still owned our brand query — and the 90-day plan we're now executing in public.
Start Here
Get the assessment we wrote about — for your business
Fifteen sections of verified telemetry. Tier 1 is $497, Tier 2 is $2,497, and the assessment fee is credited back if you move forward with our services.