Verdict

The copy is better than the site. Every page ships as an empty React shell, the brand reads as a template, there is no proof anywhere, and the whole thing is named for a service you are about to make one-fifth of the business. Rebuild it. Don't patch it.

Pillar has real assets: a founder who writes clearly, 22 resource pages that are better than most competitors', a free tool, a decent local phone presence, and a business model (provider-paid brokerage) that is easy to explain. None of that is reaching search engines or AI engines because the site is client-rendered, and none of it is converting cold visitors because there is not one testimonial, review, client name, price, or address on the site.

The scores below are out of 10. They are my judgement against what a site in this category needs to rank nationally, show up in the Carolinas local pack, and convert, not a Lighthouse average.

Five things that matter. Everything else is detail.

1. Ship HTML. Rebuild as a static site (Astro on Cloudflare Pages is the recommendation, spec in S-11). Every page's words, title, meta, and schema must be in the HTML response. Right now Googlebot has to render 761 KB of JavaScript to see a word, and ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity's crawlers, which do not run JavaScript, see nothing at all.
2. Reposition from "PEO broker" to "HR advisory for professional-services firms nationwide, headquartered in Charlotte," under the same brand. The HR audit becomes the entry product with a public price. Projects, fractional HR, and transitions sit behind it. PEO brokerage stays free and becomes one outcome of the audit rather than the identity. The nav, every H1, the schema, and llms.txt all lead with "PEO broker" today; S-07 covers how the name and domain stay while the description changes.
3. Build two ranking layers, national and local. Nationally: topical authority on HR audits, fractional HR, PEO exits, HRIS, and multi-state compliance, which is where the head terms are. Locally: a verified Google Business Profile with a real address, consistent NAP, 12 Carolinas metro pages with unique local content, and NC and SC compliance hubs. The autocomplete data in S-09 shows local demand is for "HR consultant/consulting firms {city}" and state compliance questions, not for "PEO broker {city}", which has no measurable search volume.
4. Get proof before launch. Five testimonials with names and numbers, one case study, five Google reviews, and the memberships you actually hold. The mockups have honest slots for these; do not launch with the slots empty.
5. Fix the conversion path. Primary CTA becomes "Book an HR audit" with a price on it, secondary "Compare PEOs, free." Embed the HubSpot calendar on-site, make the phone number tappable, kill or relocate the chat widget, fix the button contrast, require the three fields that matter, and track bookings as conversions.

Technical SEO

Ranked by damage. The first finding alone justifies the rebuild.

What is already right

• robots.txt allows all crawlers including AI bots. Keep that.
• HTTPS, HSTS, HTTP→HTTPS 301, and X-Content-Type-Options are correct.
• Titles and meta descriptions are unique and well written on every page (once rendered).
• Alt text is present on all images. Heading order passes. Tap targets pass.
• CLS is effectively zero on every page tested.

On-page and content

2.1 The homepage targets a keyword almost nobody types

The H1 is "Your independent PEO broker. Focus on your people, not paperwork." and the title is "Independent PEO Broker — Compare PEOs". Google autocomplete returns nothing for "peo broker charlotte", "peo broker north carolina", or "peo broker south carolina". It does return "hr consultant charlotte nc", "hr consulting firms charlotte nc", "hr consulting raleigh nc", "hr consulting greenville sc", "peo charlotte nc", "peo raleigh nc", "peo greenville sc", "peo charleston sc", and "peo columbia sc". The buyer's language is "HR consultant", "hr consulting firms", "fractional hr services", "hr audit", and "PEO {city}", not "PEO broker". The whole site is built around the phrase the founder uses, not the one the customer uses. Nationally, "peo broker" itself is a small term; the existing PEO guides ("best peo for small business", "how much does a peo cost per employee") are where the national PEO demand actually sits, and they should keep doing that job.

2.2 Geo pages are thin and templated

Charlotte: about 850 words, no address, no map, no local client, no Charlotte-specific rule, one paragraph of local color ("finance, healthcare, tech, and professional services"). North Carolina and South Carolina pages share a structure and swap city names; the SC page's schema carries a Charlotte NC address. For comparison, Catapult's Charlotte page runs 3,500+ words with named advisors, zip codes, five industries, six FAQs, video, "65 years", and "500+ employers". PEO Focus's Charlotte page is weaker than yours on content but has a street address. You will not outrank an association with a 65-year history on 850 words and no proof; you can outrank them on specificity (the NC/SC cross-border angle, fixed pricing, professional-services focus) if the page actually contains it.

2.3 The resource library is the best asset on the site and it is undercut

Twenty-two resources, written in a plain, honest voice ("The Honest Risks" in the PEO guide is better than anything on the national broker sites). Problems:

• Cannibalization. /resources/peo-pricing, /resources/peo-cost-guide, and /blog/how-much-peo-costs target the same query. Nonprofits appears three times (/peo-for-nonprofits, /resources/peo-for-nonprofits-guide, /blog/peo-for-nonprofits-charlotte). Startups twice. Merge each cluster into one canonical page and redirect the rest.
• No external citations. Not one resource cites NAPEO, the DOL, the NC Department of Labor, or SC DEW. AI engines weight sourced statistics heavily (Princeton GEO study: +37–40% citation rate). The NAPEO figures (PEO clients grow 7–9% faster, 10–14% lower turnover, 50% less likely to go out of business, 230,000+ businesses using a PEO) belong in the PEO guide with links.
• Dates. "May 2026" on eight pages, one 2025 default, no visible "updated" dates. Freshness is a ranking and citation signal.
• One author, no author page. Every article is by Caleb, with a bio line and a LinkedIn link. There is no /about/caleb-sherrill/ page with credentials, speaking, and press to point Person schema at.
• Everything is about PEOs. Zero words on HR audits, handbooks, classification, E-Verify, or either state's employment law. The new business has no content yet.

2.4 E-E-A-T is asserted, not shown

About page: "Caleb Sherrill, CEO, prior business ownership experience"; "Josiah Sherrill, Founding Account Executive, ministry recruiting"; "Emily Snooks, COO, 6+ years operations." No certifications (SHRM-CP, PHR, CEBS), no NAPEO membership stated, no press, no speaking, no client count with a source. The homepage says "Used by 100+ business owners" about the quiz, unverifiable. The LinkedIn company page has 126 followers and the G2 seller profile has zero reviews. For a firm about to sell $4,000 audits to managing partners, the trust layer is empty.

2.5 Duplicate and orphan routes

/blog and /resources render the same index. /industries, /why-peo, /roi-calculator, /peo-onboarding, and /nonprofit-toolkit exist as routes but are not in the sitemap or the navigation. Solutions dropdown has three items; the footer's "Why Pillar" points at About. Decide each one's fate in the rebuild.

Ranking nationally and in the Carolinas

Pillar sells nationwide, so the site has to win two different games. National rankings come from topical authority: the deepest, best-sourced pages on HR audits, fractional HR, PEO transitions, HRIS migration, and multi-state compliance. Local rankings come from an entity Google can place on a map and a set of metro pages that earn their existence. Four layers below, in order of leverage. Layers 0 and 1 together are worth more than the rest for the first six months.

Layer 0 · National topical authority

The head terms are national and unlocalized: "hr audit", "hr audit checklist", "hr compliance audit", "fractional hr services", "fractional hr companies", "peo exit", "hris implementation consultant", "best peo for small business", "how much does a peo cost per employee". All confirmed by autocomplete. Pillar already has half the PEO cluster written; the HR audit, fractional, transition, and multi-state clusters do not exist yet.

• One hub per service (S-08) that answers the full query fan-out: what it is, what it includes, cost, duration, who it is for, vs the alternatives, checklist download, FAQ. These are the pages that get cited by AI engines and linked by other sites.
• Multi-state compliance as the national moat. A remote hire in a new state is the most common HR failure in a 10–150 person firm anywhere in the country. Publish a state employer guide series: start with NC and SC (the local layer), then the ten states where Pillar's current and target clients actually have people, then the rest, one per week, each written to the same standard (thresholds, registrations, notices, leave, final pay, sourced and dated). Never bulk-generate 50 thin pages; that triggers the scaled-content policy and drags the whole domain down.
• Industry pages are national. Law, CPA, engineering/architecture, medical/dental, RIA, nonprofit: the HR problems are the same in Austin and Asheville. Write them without a city.
• Deduplicate and source the PEO library so it keeps carrying the national PEO demand it already targets.
• National links and presence: NAPEO membership and directory, SHRM vendor directory, Clutch's national HR consulting category, G2 reviews, HR podcasts, contributed pieces in HR Dive / SHRM / industry association newsletters (NCACPA is local; AICPA and state CPA societies elsewhere are national), Qwoted and Featured for expert quotes, and Caleb's LinkedIn, which is already the best distribution channel Pillar has.

Layer 1 · Entity and local pack (Charlotte)

I could not find a Google Business Profile for Pillar. Without one, "hr consultant charlotte nc" shows a map pack you are not in, and AI engines have no address to attach to the entity, which hurts nationally too: an entity with no location reads as less real. This is the single highest-value local task in the plan.

• Address. A verified GBP needs a physical address or a service-area listing with a hidden address. A coworking membership with a suite number is acceptable if you receive mail there; a PO box is not. Publish the address on the site footer and in schema once GBP is verified.
• Categories. Primary: Human resources consulting. Secondary: Business management consultant, Consultant. Do not use "Employment agency."
• NAP consistency. Same name, address, and phone on GBP, site, LinkedIn, BBB, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Clutch, Alignable, Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, NC Chamber, SC Chamber, and any NAPEO/SHRM directory listing. Full list in S-13.
• Reviews. Five in the first 30 days, then two a month. The ask script is in S-15. Reviews mentioning the city and the service ("HR audit for our Charlotte law firm") move rankings.
• Posts and photos. Weekly GBP post from the content calendar; photos of the team at client offices in each metro.

Layer 2 · Twelve Carolinas metro pages that earn their existence

URL pattern /hr-consulting/{city}-{st}/, targeting "hr consultant {city}", "hr consulting firms {city}", and "peo {city}". Each page needs, at minimum: 1,500 words of content that could not be moved to another city, one named local client quote, local rules (Charlotte NDO, county-level items), the local industry mix with named anchor employers, the SC-or-NC cross-border angle where relevant, a service-area list with zip codes, an embedded map, a LocalBusiness schema with geo, and a local FAQ. The Charlotte mockup is the template. Publish in this order:

Layer 3 · Own the two home rulebooks

The Charlotte metro is the only major US market split across two states with materially different employer rules. Nobody owns that content, and it is the local proof-of-method for the national state-guide series in Layer 0. Two hubs, /resources/north-carolina-employer-guide/ and /resources/south-carolina-employer-guide/, plus the comparison piece "NC vs SC employment law for firms with staff in both", plus one article per autocomplete-confirmed question:

• "Is E-Verify mandatory in North Carolina?" (25+ employees, NCGS 64-26) and the SC version (all employers, within 3 business days).
• "North Carolina employee handbook requirements" and "South Carolina employee handbook requirements" (both confirmed autocomplete queries). Include a downloadable NC/SC handbook checklist.
• "HR audit checklist" with an ungated PDF and an Excel version (autocomplete: "hr audit checklist template excel", "hr audit checklist pdf", "hr compliance audit checklist").
• Final pay rules, workers' comp thresholds (NC 3+, SC 4+), pregnancy accommodation (SC act at 15+), wage-notice requirements, new-hire reporting.

Have employment counsel review each piece and say so on the page. That sentence is a trust signal, not a weakness.

Links

For the local layer, local links beat national ones: chamber member pages, the NC Bar Association and SC Bar vendor lists, NCACPA and SCACPA sponsor pages, Charlotte Business Journal contributed columns, Charlotte Inno, local podcasts (Charlotte Business Podcast, Carolina Business Review), and a NAPEO membership listing. Answer HR questions for Qwoted/Featured with a Charlotte byline. Sponsor one CPA-society event per state per year and get the link.

AI search (AEO)

Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "who does fixed-price HR audits for small law firms" or "who is a good HR consultant in Charlotte" today and Pillar cannot appear: its pages are blank to non-JavaScript crawlers, its entity has no address, and it has no third-party footprint to be cited from. Fixing 1.1 is the precondition; the rest is below.

Query fan-out to cover

For the audit cluster, an AI answer to "should my law firm get an HR audit" will fan out to: what an HR audit includes, cost, duration, who performs it, NC-specific checks, SC-specific checks, a checklist, and what happens after. One hub page with those as H2s plus the downloadable checklist covers the whole fan-out. Same pattern for "leaving a PEO" (timeline, duplicate W-2 risk, benefits replacement, state registrations, cost) and "fractional HR" (what it is, cost, vs PEO, vs full-time, for what size firm).

Monitoring

Monthly, run 20 queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode; log whether Pillar is cited and who is. The query list is in S-16. No tool needed for the first six months.

Conversion

Traffic context: almost all current visitors are brand searches, LinkedIn clicks from Caleb's posts, and referral partners. Those are warm. The rebuild has to convert cold organic visitors who have never heard of Pillar and have a specific HR problem.

What is wrong, in order

Test after launch (not before)

• Hero headline: problem-led ("HR that bears the load") vs outcome-led ("Pass your next HR audit before it happens").
• Price on the primary button vs price only on the service page.
• Founder video (60 s) in the hero vs the load diagram.
• Quiz as first CTA on city pages vs audit booking.

Design and brand

Cover the logo and this could be any 2025 AI-builder site. Navy hero with a green highlighted word, white body, three icon cards, a numbered 01/02/03 process, a myth/truth two-column, an accordion FAQ, a navy CTA band, a four-column footer. League Spartan for display and Nunito Sans for body give it the rounded friendliness of a consumer app; the audience is managing partners and practice administrators. The green (#2ecc70) is flat-UI green from 2013 and illegible on white. The "pillar" idea appears once, as a tiny column glyph in the logo, and nowhere else. There is no image, diagram, or device on any page that explains what Pillar does.

What works: the founders' photo is warm and real, the voice in the body copy is confident, and section headings ("Bad decisions start with bad assumptions") are better than the visual system around them.

Direction for the rebuild: the same brand, executed properly

Nothing about the identity needs replacing. The logo is good: a confident lowercase wordmark, a green disc, and a fluted column that says "pillar" without spelling it. The navy (#02064B) and green (#2ECC70) are distinctive in a category full of blue-and-grey. League Spartan has the geometric weight the logo needs. The problem is that the site uses almost none of it: the column appears only in the header, the green is spent on illegible buttons, the navy is a flat band, and every section is a generic card grid that could belong to any shadcn template. The rebuild keeps every brand token and spends them differently.

Devices carried through the rebuild, each carrying real information and each built from the logo's column: the Load Diagram (hero: five employer obligations on a beam carried by the fluted column), the Service Schedule (services as a schedule with marks A-1, P-1, F-1, T-1, B-1), the Load Report (the audit deliverable, rebuilt in the DOM with pass/watch/fail), the inspection tag (green hang-tag with price and duration), and green-rule section eyebrows. The mockups in S-10 show all of them at full scale in the brand.

Positioning and service architecture

The one-line position

Pillar is the independent HR firm for professional-services firms of 10 to 150 people anywhere in the U.S., headquartered in Charlotte: fixed-price audits and projects, fractional HR, and clean transitions into or out of a PEO, in every state your people work in.

Why this and not "HR for small business": the professional-services niche has money, recurring compliance risk, referral networks (CPAs refer attorneys refer engineers), and a buyer who understands fixed-fee engagements. "Small business" is everyone and therefore nobody.

Name and domain

The brand stays: Pillar PEO Advisors, the logo, the navy and green, pillarpeo.com. What changes is the sentence after the name. Today the site introduces itself as "your independent PEO broker"; the rebuild introduces Pillar as "HR advisory for professional-services firms, nationwide, from Charlotte" and lets PEO brokerage be the free service inside that. Two consequences to manage:

• Every AI engine currently describes Pillar as a PEO broker, because that is all the site has ever said. Fix it at the entity level: the Organization schema, llms.txt, the LinkedIn tagline, and the GBP description all lead with the HR audit and list brokerage last. Expect three to six months for that description to shift in AI answers.
• Register pillarhradvisors.com defensively (available at whois on 5 Sep 2026; pillarhr.com and pillaradvisors.com are taken) and point it at pillarpeo.com. It costs nothing and keeps the option open without touching the brand.

The service ladder, with proposed public pricing

Prices are set from market ranges (HR consulting retainers $1,500–$7,000/month; project HR $5,000–$50,000; hourly $100–$300) and pitched at the low-friction end so the audit is an easy first yes. Validate with the first ten prospects and move.

Messaging pillars (use in this order on every page)

1. Fixed price, quoted before work. Nobody else in the Carolinas publishes HR consulting prices.
2. Every state your people work in. Multi-state is the default, not an add-on. NC and SC side by side is the home example.
3. Independent. No software to sell, no insurance to place, commissions disclosed.
4. Founder-led. Caleb ran a company and paid the fines. On site within 45 minutes of Uptown; on a call anywhere else.

Protecting the traffic you already have

The founders report strong monthly traction today. That changes how the rebuild is sequenced, not whether it happens. Where that traffic comes from decides what must not move. Before a single URL changes:

1. Export Search Console (16 months): pages, queries, impressions, clicks, average position. Export GA4 landing pages by source. Any URL with impressions or conversions keeps its path in the rebuild, or gets a one-hop 301 that is tested before launch.
2. Reconcile the redirect map in S-08 against that export. Where I merged pages (the three PEO-cost pages, the three nonprofit pages), keep the URL that ranks and redirect the others into it. If two rank for different queries, keep both and differentiate them instead of merging.
3. Phase it. Phase 1: ship the static rebuild with every existing URL preserved and the same titles, so the only change Google sees is faster, server-rendered HTML. Phase 2 (two to four weeks later, once Search Console is stable): new services, industries, and metro pages added, navigation changed, and the deduplication redirects applied. Phase 3: the state-guide series.
4. Watch the right numbers. Daily for the first two weeks after each phase: indexed pages, 404s and soft-404s in Search Console, clicks on the top 20 URLs, and bookings. A dip of a few days after a migration is normal; a dip past two weeks on a page that kept its URL means a rendering or canonical problem.
5. Keep GA4 and the HubSpot booking IDs identical across the migration so the before/after comparison is clean.

Site map and redirects

Navigation: Services ▾ · Industries ▾ · Locations ▾ · Resources · About · [Book an HR audit]. Footer carries the full NAP, hours, all locations, and the legal spine.

/                                   Home
/services/                          Overview + service schedule
/services/hr-audit/                 A-1 (mockup 02)
/services/hr-projects/              P-1 hub
  /employee-handbook-nc-sc/  /flsa-classification-review/  /i-9-e-verify-remediation/
  /compensation-benchmarking/  /performance-management/  /manager-training/
/services/fractional-hr/            F-1 with three tiers
/services/transitions/              T-1 hub
  /peo-exit/  /peo-switch/  /peo-implementation/  /hris-migration/  /payroll-provider-switch/
/services/peo-brokerage/            B-1 (absorbs /peo-broker, /how-it-works, /switch-your-peo, /do-we-need-a-peo)
/industries/  law-firms/  cpa-firms/  engineering-architecture/  medical-dental/  financial-advisors/  nonprofits/
/hr-consulting/                     Locations hub (NC + SC map)
/hr-consulting/charlotte-nc/        (mockup 03) + 11 more metros
/resources/                         Guides index, filterable by topic
/resources/state-employer-guides/    Hub for the 50-state series
/resources/state-employer-guides/north-carolina/   /south-carolina/   /georgia/ ... one per state, no thin pages
/resources/multi-state-employer-checklist/  /resources/nc-vs-sc-employment-law/  /resources/hr-audit-checklist/  ...existing PEO guides, deduplicated
/tools/hr-risk-score/               (renamed quiz)   /tools/peo-cost-calculator/
/case-studies/                      One per engagement, anonymized if required
/about/   /about/caleb-sherrill/    /how-we-get-paid/   /pricing/   /contact/
/pricing.md   /llms.txt   /llms-full.txt   /sitemap.xml   /404.html

Redirect map (add to _redirects)

Keyword map

No Ahrefs or Semrush access in this pass, so volumes are not stated. Evidence is Google autocomplete on 5 Sep 2026: a term that autocompletes has measurable demand; one that returns nothing usually does not. Priority reflects demand × fit × winnability.

Dropped: "peo broker {city}" (no demand), "hr headache" (autocompletes to medical queries), "hr for accounting/engineering/architecture firms" (no autocomplete; write the industry pages for referrals and AI fan-out, not for search volume). Not yet checked: per-state volumes outside the Carolinas; pull them from GSC and a keyword tool before sequencing the state series.

Mockups

Three full-scale pages, built in the proposed design system with real copy. Open each in a new tab; they are responsive. Dashed "slot" boxes mark proof that has to be collected before launch; they are deliberate and should never ship empty.

Not mocked, but specified: the About page (founder page with credentials and a "how we get paid" section), the state employer guides (long-form with the NC/SC comparison table pattern from the homepage), and the HR Risk Score tool (nine questions, instant score, email for the plan).

Build spec

Effort estimate for a competent Astro developer: 3–4 weeks for the shell, templates, 30 pages of migrated content, redirects, and schema; content writing for the new services, state guides, and wave-1 metros runs in parallel and is the real bottleneck.

90-day plan

Local presence kit

Google Business Profile setup

1. Business name exactly "Pillar PEO Advisors" (no keywords appended; Google suspends for it).
2. Primary category Human resources consulting; secondary Business management consultant.
3. Service-area business covering Charlotte metro and the 11 other metros, or a verified physical address if you have a suite.
4. Services list mirroring the service schedule with prices ("HR Audit, from $2,500"). Set the service area to the Charlotte metros you visit; the national work is a website claim, not a GBP claim, and GBP suspends for over-broad areas.
5. Description (750 chars) leading with fixed-price HR audits for professional firms, headquartered in Charlotte and working nationwide.
6. Hours, phone, website (UTM-tagged), booking link (the embedded calendar page).
7. Ten photos: team, Caleb at a client office in each metro as you go, the Load Report cover.
8. Q&A: seed five questions from the FAQ and answer them yourself.
9. Weekly post from the content calendar; every post links to a page.

Citation list (NAP identical on all)

Google Business Profile · Apple Business Connect · Bing Places · Yelp · BBB (accreditation optional) · Clutch · Alignable · LinkedIn company page (update tagline and address) · Charlotte Regional Business Alliance · NC Chamber · SC Chamber · Rock Hill/York County Chamber · Greenville Chamber · Charleston Metro Chamber · NAPEO member directory · SHRM vendor directory · NCACPA and SCACPA sponsor/partner pages · Crunchbase · Facebook page (even if unused, for NAP).

Content calendar: first twelve weeks after launch

Every piece: a 40–60 word direct answer under the first H2, one cited statistic, an "Updated" date, the author byline linking to the founder page, a contextual CTA to the matching service, and a 60-second video version for LinkedIn and YouTube where Caleb already has a post on the topic.

Scripts

Tracking and KPIs

Events (GA4, via Zaraz)

Also: a call-tracking number for GBP (CallRail or similar, NAP-safe with a tracking number shown only on GBP and swapped on-site via script), UTM on the GBP website link, HubSpot lifecycle stage set from the form's firm-size field, and Search Console + Bing Webmaster on the new domain.

Targets

Monthly AI-visibility check (20 queries)

hr audit services for small law firms · fixed price hr audit · fractional hr companies · how to leave a peo · multi-state employer compliance checklist · hr consultant charlotte nc · best hr consulting firms in charlotte · hr audit for a law firm · how much does an hr audit cost · fractional hr charlotte · peo broker charlotte · is e-verify required in north carolina · is e-verify required in south carolina · north carolina employee handbook requirements · south carolina employee handbook requirements · how to leave a peo · peo vs fractional hr · best peo for a 40 person cpa firm · hr consulting greenville sc · hr consultant raleigh nc · charlotte non-discrimination ordinance employer · nc vs sc employment law · are peo brokers free · what is a peo broker · pillar peo advisors reviews. Log: cited? who is? which page?

HR Audit product spec (the Load Report)

This is the thing the site sells first, so it has to exist before the site does.

Copy deck

Homepage hero, three options

1. HR that bears the load. (used in mockup) Sub: Fixed-price HR audits, projects, fractional support, and PEO or HRIS transitions for law, accounting, engineering, and medical firms in any state. Headquartered in Charlotte.
2. Your firm is an employer in more states than it thinks. Sub: HR advisory that checks every rulebook your people work under, fixes what it finds at a fixed price, and stays on as your fractional HR lead.
3. Find out what your HR is carrying before it fails. Sub: A fixed-price audit, then the fixes, from an independent firm that discloses how it gets paid.

CTAs

Primary: "Book an HR audit" (with "from $2,500" where space allows). Secondary: "Compare PEOs, free". Tertiary: "Get the NC/SC checklist". Never "Learn more", never "Submit", never "Schedule a PEO Strategy Call" on a page that is not about PEOs.

Section heads worth keeping from the current site, reframed

• "The wrong setup costs more than the monthly fee" → "The wrong setup costs more than the audit."
• "Bad decisions start with bad assumptions" → keep, with HR myths: "We're too small for E-Verify" (not in SC), "Salaried means exempt", "The PEO handles compliance" (not classification, not your managers).
• "Make a confident next-step decision" → drop; it is filler.

Title and description patterns

Launch QA checklist

• curl any inner URL: title, H1, body text, and JSON-LD present in the response without JavaScript.
• A made-up URL returns HTTP 404. www redirects to apex with 301. Legacy Wix paths redirect.
• Every URL in the old sitemap resolves to a 200 after at most one redirect. No chains.
• Rich Results Test passes on home, one service page, one metro page, one article, one FAQ.
• Lighthouse mobile ≥ 90 performance, 100 accessibility, 100 SEO on home and one metro page. LCP under 2.5 s.
• All buttons ≥ 4.5:1 contrast. Keyboard focus visible. Skip link present.
• Phone is a tel: link; address matches GBP character for character.
• Form submission creates a HubSpot contact and fires form_submit_contact; booking fires meeting_booked.
• No proof slot is empty. No "lorem", no "[Name]", no "282xx" left in copy.
• llms.txt, pricing.md, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, 404.html all return 200 with correct content types.
• DMARC at least p=quarantine before the outreach campaign starts.
• Search Console: sitemap submitted, top 20 URLs requested for indexing.

Pass log, and what was not verified

• Pass 1 (evidence). Pulled raw HTML and headers for 20 URLs, the sitemap, robots, llms.txt, DNS. Rendered home, Charlotte, quiz, and a 404 in headless Chrome and diffed against raw. Inspected the 761 KB bundle for routes, schema, titles, dates, and form handlers. Ran Lighthouse 12 three times. Pulled Google autocomplete for 50 seed queries. Read four competitor pages. Checked whois on five domains.
• Pass 2 (challenge). Re-checked claims that would embarrass the report if wrong. Corrected: an early mobile screenshot suggested horizontal overflow; Lighthouse's device emulation shows none, so that claim was dropped. Confirmed schema does exist (JS-injected), so the finding is "invisible without JS and inconsistent", not "missing". Confirmed /services is a client-side redirect, not a 404. Confirmed the invalid "May 2026" dates against the bundle rather than the rendered page.
• Pass 3 (build and read-back). Built the mockups, then read the report against them for contradictions in prices, service names, and thresholds. Aligned the audit bands ($2,500 / $4,000 / $6,000) and the nine areas across all four documents. Ran the state-law table against two independent sources each.
• Pass 4 (QA against the live site, after the client noted strong monthly traffic). Re-tested every finding that could be wrong. Corrected four: the phone is a tel: link in the header and footer (only the contact-page card is not); the hero image already has fetchpriority="high" and dimensions (the problem is that the tag exists only after JavaScript); the route count is 49, not 50; the quiz does capture first name and email in the bundle. Confirmed the rest: Googlebot and GPTBot user agents both receive the same 2,994-byte shell with no server-side rendering for bots; /blog and /services duplicate other pages but carry client-side canonicals; contrast ratios (white on green 2.1:1, navy on green 8.8:1, #1A7A45 on white 5.4:1); no lastmod in the sitemap; the chat avatar is not one of the three team members on the About page. The search index I can query (not Google Search Console) returns only the homepage and legacy Wix URLs with old titles for Pillar; the Charlotte page did not appear for its own exact title. Treat that as a signal to check the Search Console pages report, not as proof. All the traffic-protection guidance in S-07b follows from this pass.
• Pass 5 (design). After the client rejected the first refined-brand mockups, the creative-director and product-designer agents produced a module spec and a UX critique, and the front-end design agent rebuilt the three mockups from those. See S-10.

Not verified, and how to verify

• Google Business Profile. Web search found no listing; I could not query Maps directly. Search "Pillar PEO Advisors" in Google Maps. If a listing exists, the S-13 work becomes an edit, not a creation.
• Search volumes and rankings. No Ahrefs/Semrush/GSC access. Autocomplete is a demand proxy, not a count. Pull GSC for the last 16 months before finalizing the keyword map.
• Quiz lead capture and contact-form destination. Not exercised end to end. Submit both and check where the record lands in HubSpot/GoHighLevel.
• Backlink profile. Unknown. Pull from Search Console's Links report or Ahrefs before the domain decision; if there are meaningful links, the 301 plan preserves most of their value.
• "Used by 100+ business owners." Take it from GA4 or the quiz backend, or remove it.
• State-law thresholds. Checked against two sources each on 5 Sep 2026, but statutes move; employment counsel signs off on the published tables. SC bills 3218 and 4797 (E-Verify documentation) were pending in the 2025–26 session at the time of writing.
• Twitter handle @PillarPEO in the meta tags: existence not confirmed. Remove the tag if the account is dormant.