Generated by Rank Math SEO, this is an llms.txt file designed to help LLMs better understand and index this website.

# Method 21

## Sitemaps
[XML Sitemap](https://method21.com/sitemap_index.xml): Includes all crawlable and indexable pages.

## Posts
- [B2B Lead Generation](https://method21.com/blog/b2b-lead-generation/): Most B2B lead generation underperforms for a small number of specific reasons, and almost none of them are the ones being discussed in the meeting about it. Here they are, roughly in the order we find them.
- [Energy Sector Marketing](https://method21.com/blog/energy-sector-marketing/): A recurring situation in Houston: a company with genuine engineering depth, decades of field experience and a good reputation, losing work to a weaker competitor who was easier to find. The causes are consistent and most of them are cheap to fix.
- [Generative Search Optimization](https://method21.com/blog/generative-search-optimization/): There is a lot of confident advice about getting cited in AI answers and very little sorting of it. This is our attempt at that sorting: what has evidence, what is a reasonable bet, and what has no mechanism behind it at all.
- [Houston SEO Guide](https://method21.com/blog/houston-seo-guide/): Local search advice is mostly a list of everything you could do, in no useful order. This is the short version of what actually moves the needle in a metro the size of Houston, ordered by return.

## Pages
- [Terms of Service](https://method21.com/terms-of-service/): These terms govern your use of this website, and they are the baseline for engagements with Method 21. Where a signed proposal or agreement says something different, that document wins. This page applies when nothing else addresses the point.
- [AI Visibility](https://method21.com/ai-visibility/): When a buyer asks an assistant who supplies what you sell, a handful of companies get named. Most companies have never seen whether they are one of them. That number is measurable, and it is usually the first genuinely new thing we can tell a business about its own market position.
- [Home](https://method21.com/)
- [Services](https://method21.com/services/)
- [Contact](https://method21.com/contact/): The fastest way to get a useful answer is to call. You will speak to someone who does the work rather than to a sales team relaying questions.
- [About](https://method21.com/about/): Method 21 is a small Houston agency doing search and web work. We work mostly with industrial and complex B2B companies, where the product takes explaining and the buyer is technical.
- [Accessibility](https://method21.com/accessibility/): Method 21 builds websites for a living, so this site should meet the standard we hold client work to. This page states what we are aiming for, what has actually been tested and what to do if something gets in your way.
- [Quote Request](https://method21.com/quote-request/): Thanks, your request has reached us. We will come back with something specific rather than a template with your name at the top, which takes a little longer and is worth more.
- [Industries](https://method21.com/industries/)
- [Privacy Policy](https://method21.com/privacy-policy/): This policy explains what personal information Method 21 collects, why we collect it, who we share it with and what rights you have over it. It applies to method21.com and to the enquiries, proposals and client work that follow from it.
- [Blog](https://method21.com/blog/)
- [Thank You](https://method21.com/thank-you/): Thanks, your message has reached us. Someone who does the work will read it, not an inbox that routes it somewhere.
- [Cookie Policy](https://method21.com/cookie-policy/): This site uses a small set of measurement tools: analytics to understand how the site is used, advertising tags to measure campaigns and a lead tracker that connects an enquiry to the visit that produced it. Every tool is listed below, along with how to control or block it.
- [HTML Sitemap](https://method21.com/sitemap/)

## Services
- [Analytics and Tracking](https://method21.com/services/conversion-optimization/analytics/): Measurement comes before optimization, because every decision downstream rests on it. Almost every account we open has at least one conversion action that is wrong, and until that is fixed nobody in the room is discussing real numbers.
- [SEO](https://method21.com/services/seo/): Method 21 runs SEO programs for industrial and complex B2B companies, and measures them against what buyers actually see: both the ranked results and the AI answers that increasingly stand in front of them. We have been doing search work for a long time, from Houston.
- [Custom Website Design](https://method21.com/services/web-development/custom-website-design/): Custom design means the site is built around what your business actually needs to communicate, rather than around what a theme happened to include. For a technical company that usually means designing for dense information, not for large photographs.
- [PPC](https://method21.com/services/ppc/): Method 21 manages paid search and paid social for companies with a considered sale, where a lead is worth qualifying and a wasted click is worth eliminating. We run Google Ads, LinkedIn and Meta, and we report on what the spend produced rather than what it bought.
- [Ecommerce](https://method21.com/services/web-development/ecommerce/): Selling technical products online is a different problem from selling consumer goods. The buyer needs to be certain the part fits, and no amount of photography substitutes for a specification they can check.
- [Conversion Rate Optimization](https://method21.com/services/conversion-optimization/): Conversion rate optimization is the work of turning traffic you already have into enquiries you can act on. It is the cheapest growth available to most B2B companies, because it costs nothing extra in media or content, and it is the most commonly skipped.
- [Responsive Design](https://method21.com/services/web-development/responsive-design/): Responsive design means one site that works at every screen size, rather than a desktop site with a degraded phone version. For B2B the hard part is not the layout, it is the tables.
- [A/B Testing](https://method21.com/services/conversion-optimization/ab-testing/): A/B testing proves whether a change actually helped. It only does that when there is enough traffic to separate a real effect from noise, and most B2B sites do not have it on the pages that matter.
- [Shopify](https://method21.com/services/web-development/shopify/): Shopify is worth choosing when you want payments, checkout, tax and fraud handling to be somebody else's problem. That is a large amount of unglamorous engineering you do not have to own, and it is most of the argument for the platform.
- [Landing Page Design](https://method21.com/services/conversion-optimization/landing-pages/): A landing page exists to answer the specific question a visitor arrived with. The most expensive mistake in B2B paid media is sending that visitor to the homepage instead, where the answer is somewhere in the navigation.
- [UX Optimization](https://method21.com/services/conversion-optimization/ux-optimization/): User experience work on a B2B site is mostly detective work. Something is stopping a proportion of qualified visitors from getting to an enquiry, and the job is to find out what rather than to guess.
- [Meta Ads](https://method21.com/services/ppc/meta-ads/): Meta reaches people who are not looking for you. That is its weakness for capturing demand and its strength for creating it, and for an industrial company with a long sales cycle the second is often worth more than it looks.
- [Google Ads](https://method21.com/services/ppc/google-ads/): Google Ads is where you capture demand that already exists. Someone has a problem, they are describing it in a search box, and the question is whether you appear and whether the click was worth paying for.
- [LinkedIn Ads](https://method21.com/services/ppc/linkedin-ads/): LinkedIn is the only major ad platform where you state the job title, industry and company size you want rather than hoping an algorithm infers them. That precision is the product, and it is what you are paying a premium for.
- [AI SEO](https://method21.com/services/seo/ai-seo/): "AI SEO" gets used for two unrelated things: getting found inside AI-generated answers, and using AI tools to produce SEO work faster. They deserve different answers, and only one of them is a strategy.
- [Ecommerce SEO](https://method21.com/services/seo/ecommerce-seo/): E-commerce SEO is mostly the work of making category pages good. They receive the most internal links on the site, they outlive the products they contain, and on most stores they are a bare grid with a heading.
- [Generative Search Signals](https://method21.com/services/seo/generative-search-signals/): Generative Search Signals is our name for the signals that decide whether an answer engine can retrieve a company, understand what it is, and find something on its site worth quoting. It is the mechanism inside our SEO program, not a separate product.
- [Link Building](https://method21.com/services/seo/link-building/): Link building is the work of getting other people to reference you, on purpose, because you published something worth referencing. Everything else is buying a number that increasingly does not predict anything.
- [UI UX Design](https://method21.com/services/web-development/ui-ux-design/): UX decides what the thing does and in what order. UI decides how it looks and behaves while doing it. Both are design, they get conflated constantly, and confusing them is how a project ends up with a beautiful interface to a badly conceived flow.
- [Remarketing](https://method21.com/services/ppc/remarketing/): Remarketing shows ads to people who already visited your site. For a purchase that takes months and involves several people, it is usually the highest-return paid activity available, and it is the one most often configured once and never looked at again.
- [Web Development](https://method21.com/services/web-development/): Method 21 builds websites that are fast, editable by the people who own them, and legible to the systems that decide whether a company gets found. We run the search programs on the sites we build, which changes what we build.
- [Web Applications](https://method21.com/services/web-development/web-applications/): A web application is warranted when a business process needs to live online and no existing platform models it properly. That is a real category, and it is also what a lot of unnecessary software gets justified as.
- [Local SEO Houston](https://method21.com/services/seo/local-seo-houston/): Local SEO is the work of being found by people searching near you, and of being the result that maps and answer engines trust enough to name. For a Houston business with a service area rather than a storefront, most of it comes down to consistency and coverage.
- [On Page Optimization](https://method21.com/services/seo/on-page-optimization/): On-page optimization is the work of making a page unambiguously about one thing, and making the answer it contains easy to extract. The second half is newer than the first and is where most sites are weakest.
- [WordPress](https://method21.com/services/web-development/wordpress/): WordPress runs a large share of the web because it separates content from code well enough that a marketing team can publish without a developer. That is its actual advantage, and it is the reason most of our client sites are built on it.
- [SEO Audit](https://method21.com/services/seo/seo-audit/): An SEO audit should end with a short, ordered list of what to do next. If it ends with a long document describing everything that could theoretically be improved, it has diagnosed nothing and prioritised less.
- [Technical SEO](https://method21.com/services/seo/technical-seo/): Technical SEO is the work of removing every reason a search engine or answer engine cannot read, understand or retrieve a site. It is unglamorous, it is first, and skipping it makes every later effort more expensive.

## Industries
- [B2B Services](https://method21.com/industries/b2b-services/): A B2B services buyer is purchasing something they cannot examine in advance. There is no specification to check, so the entire evaluation runs on evidence that you have done this before, for someone recognisably like them.
- [Manufacturing](https://method21.com/industries/b2b-services/manufacturing/): A manufacturer is usually found by capability rather than by name. Somebody needs a part in a material, to a tolerance, in a quantity, by a date, and searches for a shop that can do it. Whether you appear depends on whether those specifics exist anywhere on your site.
- [Technology](https://method21.com/industries/b2b-services/technology/): B2B technology has the most public evaluation process of any category. Buyers compare on review platforms, in communities, and increasingly by asking an assistant to shortlist for them. Most of that happens on properties you do not own.
- [Retail Ecommerce](https://method21.com/industries/retail-ecommerce/): Retail and e-commerce is the most measurable marketing there is, and the most crowded. The advantage sits with whoever makes category pages genuinely useful and keeps product data clean, which is less glamorous than it sounds and more effective than most alternatives.
- [Energy / Oil & Gas](https://method21.com/industries/energy-oil-gas/): Method 21 is in Houston, which means the energy sector is not a vertical we added to a list. It is the market outside the window, and it has been most of our work from the start.
- [Energy Technology](https://method21.com/industries/energy-oil-gas/energy-technology/): Energy technology companies are selling change to an industry with excellent reasons to be conservative. The marketing problem is not explaining what the technology does. It is making adoption feel like a smaller risk than standing still.
- [Industrial Equipment](https://method21.com/industries/energy-oil-gas/industrial-equipment/): Industrial equipment is specified rather than chosen. Somebody has a requirement, a set of constraints and an existing installation to fit, and their search is a verification exercise. Most equipment sites are built as brochures for a browsing buyer who does not exist.
- [Oilfield Services](https://method21.com/industries/energy-oil-gas/oilfield-services/): Oilfield services buying has two modes: the planned procurement cycle, and the call made when something has gone wrong at 2am. They need different things from a website, and most sites are built only for the first.
- [Petroleum Engineering](https://method21.com/industries/energy-oil-gas/petroleum-engineering/): A petroleum engineering firm sells judgement. There is no product page, no specification sheet and no price, which removes most of the usual search levers and leaves one that matters more: demonstrated competence in conditions the client recognises.
- [Local Services](https://method21.com/industries/local-services/): A local services company is not competing for a page of results. It is competing for three slots on a map and, increasingly, for a place in a short spoken list of names. Both are decided by signals that mostly sit outside the company website.

## My Templates