Omni SEO: How AI Answer Engines Are Reshaping Contractor Marketing

Omni SEO. Never heard of it. What is that?

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini. All these answer engines, we call it Omni because we're doing SEO on all of them. Not just chatgpt SEO. We're focusing on all answering. Homeowners can now take a picture of all those business cards they can ask Perplexity. I want you to look at these companies and tell me which one is the most trustworthy. Ask anything and everything you want. It's going to give you an answer. It'll show the best ones. People are going directly from that, direct, directly to that company and it's right to their website.

Welcome to the Home Service Hacks podcast, the show for contractors who refuse to settle for average. Hosted by Bill Brown, licensed H vac contractor, AI and automation expert and founder of service titan Hacks Community, each episode features real conversations with contractors, tech founders and innovators who are reshaping the trades from AI and automation to pricing, marketing and management. If it's working in the field, you'll hear about it here. Let's get into it.

Contractors hate marketing people because marketing people sell first, right? That's what they do. They have to sell themselves. They have to sell their company. As I'm going to increase your leads, right? And I'm going to increase your revenue. Not just your leads, not just your phone calls, but your whole business is going to be great because you hired me. So the expectations, and this is from my own experience, the expectations, when I hired a marketing company, the more I spent, the more my expectations were, this is going to solve all of my lead problems. I give this company five, $10,000 a month, that's it, I'm good to go. Sometimes the companies drop the ball, but usually they give me way too high of expectations of what they're going to do. They show me case studies of best case scenarios. So I've seen a case study where you have a contractor who's been big in, in their area and their third generation and they have tons of brand equity and their brand isn't, you know, real. It's, you know, Johnny and Sons and it's not, it's not a wrapped vehicle and beautiful. And their website doesn't look like their vehicles and everything like that, but they have so much history. Then they rebrand and then they build a nice website and they start doing SEO and the digital marketing company goes, look, this company went from 50 million to a hundred. And it's like, well, maybe I could do that, maybe I could double. And you're like, well, you're two years old though, man. Yeah, it's, I, it's easier to go from 50 to 100. I'm not gonna, I've never done it, but I'd imagine that it is. Right. You, you. But I mean, if I'm a marketing company, I'm putting the best case scenario together too. Got a lot of competition in the space, so we like as contractors. Hard evidence. Right. And another thing that I think's a little tricky that I found out because I quit marketing companies too early because my expectations were wrong. And maybe they told me that or maybe it was just internal and I didn't tell them my expectations. But one of the things is they're going to get the phone to ring, they're going to get a web form filled out, but then you take it from there as the company. And if you're not good at answering the phone and converting that to an appointment and everything, you could easily go back and blame the marketing company. You could go, ah, you guys aren't getting the good leads. Well, yeah, we're not getting new people that are going to book you and try to find, you know, call you again and again when they have a problem. They're, these are new clients. You gotta, when they come in, you gotta take care of them. So anything that's a little bit bad in our own process would lead to less roi, which would lead me back to going to the marketing company saying, I need more leads. Well, Your booking rate's 55%, man.

Yeah.

What are you doing with that? And so they could kind of like blame me for it. And as a hard headed contractor, you could just go, now it's your fault. I'm gonna go with another marketing company. And you get the same shit, same result. Right? Yeah.

And I think one of the gaps that's missing a lot of the net bill, and you said at the beginning is the expectation.

Yep.

Is because with everywhere I've worked until now, it's like me, you're the contractor, I'm the salesperson. We discussed the expectation, but guess who isn't understanding what the expectations were set. The people that are going to be managing the account and working on the account. So the way that we've seen best success is you and I set expectations, then I take that all those notes that expectations set. I go and meet with the team and then we discuss those expectations and goals and all of that. Okay. Is that something that is tangible? Does this company meet our icp? We go through this internal conversation and then we, you should have a call with the contractor, the salesperson and that account management team. Let's align. Are these expectations reasonable? What is your goal? What would you like to see? Here's how long it's going to take. And mapping that out. That is the number one thing that is missed out of every single company I've worked for until now. And that's what I think is it separates the great from the okay is doing that. That one piece is you and I. We're going to sell it up. We're going to sell it up. I mean, that's what we do, people. I want you happy, I want you feeling, you know, engaged. Now let's discuss expectations and let's align. So now, I mean, because we've actually turned people down because we can't meet the expectations and we're not going to wing it if we don't feel that based off of our historical data, and this is any marketing company should be doing instead of just taking them on because you need to sale, you want that revenue. Don't burn the marketing bridge to where they never want to do anything again. And if you have to turn somebody away because they're not willing to invest in that proper marketing budget. You know that word that hate hearing is what's your budget? But yeah, is a. You know, and you probably have heard this through a lot of, you know, coaches you've talked to is there's a certain percentage that you should be investing and that based off population, how old of a company you are, all those things. And that's where it's missed and why marketing companies have gotten such a bad name because the expectations aren't aligned from you and I talking to the team and then following that and then also not being integrated with the CRM. You know. Yeah, that's the key thing right now is that we're seeing. And you hear this all the time, hey, this company brought us, you know, $5 million in LSAs. Well, LSAs aren't that. It's not rocket science.

Right. You know, mostly controlled by Google for the most part. It's not like you can optimize LSA so much that you're just going to crush your competition with it.

Exactly.

From what I've seen, my personal experience, you're right.

But it's in having that integration like with Service Titan that you talk so much about is being able to see my. My map pack brought me in this, my LSA brought me in this, my organic SEO brought in this. Those are the things that are missing to where A company and marketing companies take credit for things when they're not really doing it, but then it, it adds the fluff to the contractor and they feel that, oh, my marketing is working great. Yeah, it really isn't. Your brand is working great.

Yeah, that's big time. I think that you shouldn't even start doing any sort of outbound marketing until your brand's on point. Yeah, it's going to, it's going to make you your customer acquisition cost much higher and your ROI much lower. For, for some reason. There's a thought. I mean, brand counts everywhere in every purchase decision that we make as consumers. Well, it's the same thing. We're our homeowners are consumers. Nordstrom versus Walmart. What's the expectations of what you spend? Well, if you're a contractor, if you're an H vac contractor that has a $15,000 average sale on your replacement systems with a 60, with a 2/3 close rate, 66% close rate, then your average customer is 10 grand. Well, if you're somebody that has a $8,000 average ticket with 50%, your average is 4 grand for each new customer. Well, Mr. 10 grand can spend way more than Mr. 4 grand. And Mr. 10 has better sales process, has better marketing. That's pretty much that. That's what's the real difference. Right. And, and so the tough thing about that for marketing companies is that they have to work with that whether it's good or bad.

Yeah.

And you look at a company and you have shit brand, you're like, all right, well we'll get you in this. Your customer acquisition cost that I'm getting for the beautiful wrapped truck brands, 200 bucks for you. Do you think you're going to be able to get that for 200? I think contractors, a lot of contractors, including myself, are technicians turn contractors. When I first started, I was terrible at marketing and I blamed marketing agencies all the way through. A lot of my experience, the only reason I was able to make it was once I did get a customer, we converted a high rate and we were able to retain them for a long time. And so our customer lifetime value was nice, was high. But initially we could have done much better by me educating myself and understanding how important marketing was. So what you have is you, you have these contractors who are throwing a lot of money towards marketing and they don't really know much about it. They're hoping to just buy that skill without having the knowledge. And as a contractor, I realized that I have to know all these things. I don't have to do them, but I have to know and talk the talk about marketing, about financials, about bookkeeping and everything so that I can ask the right questions, have the right expectations with the professionals I work with. And I, like I said, I used to just shit on the professionals and be like, these guys don't know what they're doing. Well, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't, I don't understand what they're really talking about. I didn't really understand what SEO was. You know, my expectation is, hey, this summer it's, you know, we started in February. I have businesses in Columbus, Ohio. This summer we're going to have a lot more customers because we're doing SEO now. Maybe the marketing company said it's a slow, it's a grind, it's going to take a while. Maybe I didn't hear it that way. Yeah, you know what I mean? So I try to go back and educate myself. And I did that through, I would say, I don't know if it's millions, but it's at least over a million in marketing mistakes. And that was the education that I needed to get to understand how it worked and be able to ask the right questions. So I think that contractors need, if they're going to grow, they should almost damn near be professional marketers. And when we were talking about lead attribution, I thought about that the other, the other day. It's like I kind of look. You kind of look at marketing like you look at a stock, right? Buy a stock and you have put money into it and you have an expectation of a return on that stock. If your expectation is 15% this year, you're probably going to be disappointed and sell that stock. Right? So that's the, that's number one. Now, let's say you buy five stocks and you look at the total value of your portfolio and you have these five stocks, but you don't know which one has provided the returns for you. Then what the hell are you going to do? Say, all right, let's buy more stock of X. Well, what is the one that's doing the best there could? Even if you got good returns, there's one in there that could be really bad that just if you got rid of that and put it into another bucket, you'd be okay. So we have to look at marketing as like an investment strategy, as something that's longer charm. But the, you know, investment, you buy the stock and you don't have to do anything after that, right? With, with what we do, we like buy the stock and then work at the company. Right. You know what I mean? So, yeah, it's, it could be our fault, but that's just the things that I've learned over the years.

Yeah. And, and the one thing you did mention, as far as they sometimes quit too soon. And I mean, and I mean specifically, I know from the roofing industry, I mean they're, they're changing marketing companies like every six to eight months. Well, you're, you're jumping the ship right when the peak is about to start, if they're doing it properly. Now, some just don't know SEO at all. But like we tell all of our clients based off of beginning companies and how they've been with us, it's about 280 days before you're seeing maximum ROI from your SEO. But the difference is, is people don't understand is SEO. Everybody used to say SEO is dead. No, it was reincarnated. Now it's omni SEO and answer engine SEO, like your ChatGPT SEO. And it needs to be looked at as three pillars. You have your local map pack, which that's the golden ticket to be in that map pack, and then your core SEO, which is that organic underneath. But now that omni SEO, like AI overview on Google, it's taken up most of the real estate on Google.

Yeah.

So they're not understanding these things and they're not, they're jumping too early. I mean, I use Tommy Mello and everybody knows Tommy Mello. And I have a video that's on my Facebook page. It talks where he's talking about investing and how much you should be investing, kind of going to your brand that you were talking about building a brand first. When he goes into a new market, he's investing 25% of the gross revenue goal that he's looking to accomplish, mainly on starting building the brand first.

Yeah.

You know, because that's where he's seeing success. Then you can dial it down to your 10. Yes. Not all of us are Tommy Mello and can do that. But the understanding is that you gotta build your brand online. I mean, Google is the number one referral source there is. So you need to make sure that they know who you are before you start doing all the paid ads and lead aggregators. I know you need that quick leads at the beginning, but if you're not doing this, you're shooting yourself in the foot and that long term growth. And that's what the hard thing is with getting a lot of contractors to understand is looking at it kind of like you said with the stock or bitcoin, let's use the bitcoin. You know, you're putting that.

Might as well buy bitcoin instead of spending marketing dollars. Right? Yeah. But the thing is that putting that. You know, typically there's a level of risk versus reward. We're not. Almost always there's risk versus reward with everything. But if you could just put money in a. Something like Google Ads and always get the right. The return, you expect a great return right away, then Google Ads would start to charge more and more and more until it was right on the edge. I mean, there's no. And this is a hard lesson to learn. There's no silver bullet in marketing, because if a company figure that out, they would be the most valuable marketing company there is, like, right away. And then competition would come in there and it would make it more difficult. It's just the. The natural law of the economy. And so I wonder with contractors if their expectations are so high because they're spending the last bit of cash they have in marketing or they're spending. They're putting it on a credit card. And it's so risky and their business is in such dire straits that they have to get those returns in order to pay next month's marketing bill. And like, you know, if you start out, like, and you don't have $25,000 just to invest in a brand plus just that setting aside. Right. Yeah, that, that 25. If. If you're going to have to take that away from recruiting, and you're gonna have to take that away from how much you get to spend on SEO and things like that, then you can't spend 25 on a brand. Right. So, like, Tommy goes into a market, and I'm sure he knows he's gonna do 25% of gross revenue on that spend, but he wouldn't do that if that's. If he didn't have the money to do it from other businesses. Right. So you have to be very, very strategic in the beginning, be very, very careful what you spend. And you really. You know, at the beginning, I had to do a lot of guerrilla marketing tactics because a lot of people have more time than they do money, and I had more time than I had money, and build a website, did it myself, which today maybe you can do, maybe you can't. Depends on the skills you have. But the Mac Map Pack was how I built my business. But that was back in 2012.

Yeah.

Could I focus everything on that today? And do it. I don't know. Even the big guys didn't have tons of reviews. So I was like, oh man, If I get 505 star reviews on Google, I'm good to go. I was able to do that in less than a year with no marketing funds. And it just started to compound from there. Some companies built their brand on their business on Angie's list in the mid 2000s. Some of them built it a little earlier than that on Google. Pay per click. And what is it today? Well, there's a lot of noise in the market, right? A lot of noise. There's way more than there was 15 years ago when I started. So if I were going into the market today, no money from scratch, I'd be like, this is overwhelming, right? The first thing I would do is focus on my brand though, and work really hard at that. So we talk about this SEO, which for me was always like black magic snake oil type stuff, because I didn't really, I didn't understand exactly what the programmers were doing for it, right? I could understand what pay per click was because I physically saw the ad, I knew where it was going. And they could say, this is the ad we made for you. This is who we're serving it to. Okay, I understand that you do a direct mail card. This is the audience that's getting it. This is what the ad looks like. And you get a physical copy of the card. SEO, we're doing backlinks, we're doing on page SEO, we're doing these tags. I'm like, what the hell is this? Why would it, why would an H1 tag matter? So I had to like become, I had to really study what the hell? This was just so I could talk the talk with, with marketing companies. But like you said that six months, one year, you better have this money. This better not be your last penny that you're putting in SEO and you need this to return today or you're going to go back to a marketing company and go, you guys suck. That's just how it is, right? So you got this local SEO, which is this map pack and these pages, you have this core SEO, which from what I'm getting is the stuff that I talked about, like the little bit more old school stuff that still applies the links and everything. Omni SEO. Never heard of it. What is that?

My favorite thing to talk about here lately, you know, because everybody, you know, ever since COVID all the, you know, chat, GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, all these answer engines, as they like to call them, came out and what is done is I think it's given a major rebirth to SEO because they pull a lot from that. And we call it Omni because we're doing SEO on all of them. Not just chat, GPT SEO. It's we're focusing on all the answer but what it is is homeowners are gotten smart on how to research. If you're in Texas you're getting knocked on by five, six, you know, companies or more and you're leaving a business card. That story I had when I was actually in Texas and talking to a roofer is that homeowners can now they can take go to Perplexity because that's one of my favorite ones. Take a picture of all those business cards. Now it can ask Perplexity. I want you to look at these companies and tell me which one is the most trustworthy. Ask anything and everything you want. It's going to give you an answer and now it'll show the best ones. So now people are going directly from that, directly to that company and it's right to their website.

Yeah, it's almost next level, isn't it?

Yeah.

That level of trust, the amount of trust. I think Sam Altman and chat the OpenAI SEO said people CEO said people trust chatgpt way more than they should but they it is what it is, they trust it. And so that perplexity you're talking about is the search engine the more of a search based LLM people trust it a lot. There's a lot level of trust on that.

Well I think the reason being when you go to Google you're not getting references of where the resource that they got that information right with perplexity And a lot of them it'll give the sources of where they find how. Why are they saying this is the best one? Why are they saying this, this and this. And it's given that homeowner that reassurance where they're not going to Google to research. Now they're going there to get the answer. And that's why Google came out with AI overview. I don't even go past AI overview anymore.

I don't really need to. Right.

You know where I've been talking a lot about this is you know a lot of companies. Oh I don't see it being that big of an impact right now. Well I use the analogy and I love analogies is it's a lot easier to jump on a train when it's going five miles an hour when it's going full speed at 120. So do you want to get on now and invest like you do in the stocks or Bitcoin and understand that that money is, it's coming out. You might not see anything for maybe six months, but it does optimize the return that you're going to get off of that and how much further you're going to be ahead of everybody else. It's going to be game changer for these contractors that can stop and get out of their mindset of instant gratification. Just because you can put a roof on in two days or change a AC unit in a day doesn't mean your everything else can be done that quickly.

I agree with you. I think that contractors are typically not early adopters of things. You know, I think, you know, what was it? One of the first digital marketing strategies was Google Ads. This was before my time. I was in my early 20s when Google Ads came out. And that's the first way that Google monetized their business. I think, in fact that's where they make most of their money still today. The first people that were on Google Ads, wow, what an ROI they got. You know what I mean? The first people that were on Angie's list in the Angie's List book versus and then on their digital platform, what an roi. What's that other one? That's our Home Advisor version, but the actual Angie version. Then the first people that started to get a lot of reviews on the map pack were, had a, had a nice big advantage. That was me. That's how I got in there. Then the first people with lsa. I was fortunate in my market. I saw LSA coming because, you know, I just tried to stay up on the industry and I was one of the first three Google guaranteed contractors. Well, that first year we did $300,000 in LSA for an insignificant amount of spend. I mean, I don't even know what the. I don't remember the cost per lead. It was so cheap, but it was like a newer Google Ads version. Right. And so everybody was listed on there, but none of them had the green check mark except for me and two other contractors. Well, now there's 50 of them and there isn't even the inventory in the market enough to get that kind of money. Right. And, and so if you can get first on something, maybe even a little early, if you're not early, you're late. Right. Then you're going to see big returns. But like we were talking about, if that's the last bit of money you have is to spend Your money on AI search and you need it to make your make or break your business in six months. Nobody can promise that it's going to.

Yeah.

That it's going to be there in six months. They just can't.

Yeah. And I would, you know, if somebody was that, you know, taking that much of their money and hope and dream, I wouldn't recommend doing that.

Yeah.

And that's where being with, you know, with a company or a marketing person that has integrity, which is hard to find I think in these days, is not just selling to sell, but selling to what's going to be the best fit. Meeting their goals, their expectations. As we've talked about a couple times, that's going to be the key differentiator. But the early adopters, you know, are going to be the ones that are going to win all of this. I mean if you look at back in. Because I'm really old school, I used to work for the yellow Pages, the phone book and all that. And I was part of the company that was the very first reseller of google adwords yp.com but the people that were already in the phone book that had those, you know, the biggest one, biggest ads in there, two pagers.

Right.

Yeah. And were the first adopters to the paid advertising, were the most successful and were hard to beat. And that's what I'm trying to educate people on with this Omni. Even if you're not able to come on board and work with me and our team, there's things that they can do to start getting their self prepared and maybe see some small little tractions before they can invest in that. Because it is the way of the future for search. I mean ChatGPT is going to triple the amount of searches that are done by next year. I mean it's, it's not stopping. So the importance of that is going to be finding a company that for one they can trust. And that's where it's been very hard. Cause I mean, hey, I have to make cold calls and all that. And every time you call on a contractor, man, we're good.

We all have horror stories, right?

Exactly.

For whatever reason. And again, if we had unreasonable expectations or we had the right expectations and the marketing agency did not fulfill their promises, either way, I don't know any contractors that feel like they haven't been torched by Marketing Agency 100% we are on guard, man. We're like going to homeowners and trying to offer them a furnace and air. And the last company that did it didn't put one in and charged him 15 grand and now there's nothing there. So most homeowners aren't like that. They're pretty reasonable. But yeah, us as contractors are not reasonable when engaging with marketing companies. And I wasn't, I wasn't personal.

No, I totally agree. And I think that's one benefit that I can bring, you know, because I was a contractor with my father. I was electrician. I mean, my dad did everything but, you know, as far as ceiling work, you know, painting, carpentry, whatever needed, you know, he did. So I understand it. Man, I wish I knew now back then what I know now back then we probably could have quadrupled the company, you know.

Yeah.

But the thing of it is, it's just really understanding what a contractor goes through and their mindset of that and just being vulnerable for them and being unlistening to them, so to speak. And what was the pain, what was the expectation that that marketing person gave you? Was it realistic? You know, what is it that we can offer and all these things. But the biggest thing that I like to tell them and even when I'm cold calling, sending emails or whatever is you don't know what you don't know just because, you know, you can look at some people, man, that guy's, he is healthy and all that, but he goes to the doctor and he's got skin cancer, colon, whatever it is. You don't know if you don't get it checked. So the one thing that I recommend every contractor to do either once or twice a year is to get a third party company, somebody that's not doing your marketing, let them do an audit, see what gaps there are. You might uncover something. Because one thing that I tell everybody is like, look, just meet with me for 15 minutes. Even if we don't do business together, I'm going to give you stuff that you can maybe take back to your marketing team. Be like, hey, can we fix this?

Also for some sort of consensus, three marketing agencies all say the same thing. Then I mean, they're looking at similar insights and they have some sort of a consensus. If one of them's, if they're all wildly different, then you kind of have to step back and go, hmm, maybe I should even check more, right? So get a couple of bids, right? Just take stand, get educated, get educated on what you're spending about the most amount of money on. For H vac equipment was the most money then labor, things like that. But on the below the line, marketing was up there. It was up there to sometimes it was the most expensive below the line number for, for us.

And it was really something that could make or break a company. One thing I tell every contractor I talk to, whether you do business with me or not, make sure you're fully integrated with your CRM. We believe in it so much that if you don't have a CRM when you work with us, we give you one we own nutshell which is a CRM as well because we know the importance of the growth that that can help with and the understanding of your business where we want to make sure that they have all the tools needed. I can't say enough as far as SEO. If you're not doing it, you need to do it at some level. Even if you just have a company focus on your local map pack doing, you know, posting on your Google business profile, making sure that you're. You're tagging it with the longitude, latitude, those type of things. Reviews and do not pay to get reviews. Get real reviews from clients and responding to those and think because I did a search on ChatGPT and I was like look at these companies and tell me look at their reviews and how many do you feel that didn't come from an actual client? And you'd be surprised how many come back with that. And homeowners are looking at that type of stuff. Hey, tell me the best roofing company, H VAC Co. With real reviews from actual clients because they know people are buying. There's contractors on Facebook that are posting that they're buying reviews on their.

I think that AI when the more that people start to use AI the more it'll be able to filter that stuff out. Like even if it's the contractor that has 4.9 stars and 10,000 reviews in their market, AI will read all of those reviews. Read all of them. I went through. If I were a contractor today, I would go into all of my competitors reviews and I would copy everything that they say and I would paste it into ChatGPT and I'd say and I'd start to get insights from it. What do customers like about this contract or what do they not like? And that way I could be different than those other ones. But AI will be able to sift out those fake reviews maybe Unless those fake reviews are written by AI, who knows. It's hard to tell.

I can't tell you this because I actually wrote that the, the reviews for this.

Yeah, I don't really know. Yeah, like yeah, it's fake because I have that in my memory of me doing it. The AI is a, is a wild world. I mean, I've knew that I had to get out of the contracting business, right. When I saw the first time I ever used ChatGPT, I was blown away. And as a tech guy, that nothing's really done that for me before like AI has. I said this is the future. This is like the first time that somebody bought something online and it just was delivered. Right. Or this is like being the first person in a corporate meeting to show up with an Excel spreadsheet that you did while everybody else has done it on. I don't even know what paper they used before that graph paper, what the hell they used. It's just so different and so ahead. It's going to change the world, I believe, profoundly. I don't think it really has yet. I think it's. I say that from what I've seen, only 7% of people consciously use AI on a daily basis, which means they are on chatgpt or perplexity all, all the time, right? And they're doing those searches and everything. But, and then 70% of people interact with AI unconsciously. So they're online and they're getting, they'll Google search and they'll get AI results. Right? Things like that. But do we think that it's going to that 7% where it's going to stop? Oh no, man, this is going to go up and up and up. I mean, we. The day that I discovered ChatGPT, I bought the subscription to it and then I bought the subscription for my wife and my kids. And my kids use ChatGPT for school even though they're not supposed to. I said, this is the future. This is the future, man. This is everything right here. And it's made my output at least three times. Made me, made me three times more productive than normally would be. And I think about it like as a homeowner, if I'm searching for home services, home services are not a very high quantity consumption item. Right?

Right.

Like you could go for being a homeowner for 20 plus years and not replace your heating and air conditioning system just because of when you move. Like I've been a homeowner for 17 years, I've never replaced a roof, right. I just happen to got a newer house and I moved to another area and now my house is five years old and I have a, one of those Spanish tile roofs. So if it were time for me to make one of those purchases, I would be 100% ignorant to it. Like I'M not going to Google or I'm not going to AI search what kind of jeans I should get. I've bought jeans many times, right. Like I kind of have an idea. But when it comes to something that you don't know anything about, that's where people are going to go to AI and they're just going to go to it more and more and more. And that's what I've, I've done it and it's, it gives you great results, man. I mean it really does. So I mean it makes shit up.

Yeah, right.

No, it does do that.

How I, you know, I search. I mean I'm a new home now. I mean we've lived here for a little over two years. But I think of when I'm talking to a contractor, when I'm communicating about AI is like doing live searches. Hey, I'm looking for a trustworthy this and this and this. Where when you go to Google and do it before AI overview, you had to trust what you saw in there to a certain extent. But people are really paying a lot of money to be there and there's no source to say why they're there. ChatGPT, perplexity and all these, it actually gives you the resource will show you their Yelp reviews, that why they're trusted, their BBB or maybe an article that was written about them. So I can feel more comfortable when I go there not having to trust a door to door guy that comes and knocks on my door and says my roof needs replacing. I can now research them.

AI is doing the research that you would have tried to do as a homeowner, right.

That you don't.

You would be able to aggregate that together. So I mean I look at AI as a billion dollar assistant. Like if you paid an assistant a billion dollars, I mean this person would be the most intelligent person in the world. It's not there yet, but it will be. Yeah, it will be the most, cumulatively the most intelligent person in the world. In fact, most more intelligent in every domain than each person in that domain. So the best person in physics, AI isn't better than that person in that domain. It will be. Even those people in that area say, yeah, they will be. Well, they'll be better in every domain than every human that even in their specialties. And yeah, so what, what are you going to trust? You're going to trust yourself to make that decision? To a certain extent, right? Some people will. But just like with Google, when you searched Google and you got what you wanted, you Started to trust Google's results. Remember searching Google like back in the late 90s and early 2000s when it was just a shit show. Right. It was like it was a total shit show. And you would get, they would have that SEO that where people would put keywords on pages and just, and just stuff the keywords in, maybe have the background of the page white. And then they had a bunch of keywords in white.

Oh my God.

Google got hip to that. And then as you started to search it, whatever you clicked that gave you the real result you wanted, you started to trust Google more. And that's where SEO came in with their whole formula, their page rank formula and all that which still runs today. The backlinks and stuff, they still have that as part of their secret sauce. But it makes sense. It's the backlinks are because of trust Index. Well now with AI that all of that is going to be aggregated into the answer that you want. That's it. I just want an answer. I don't want research. I just want an answer.

Well, I think that you know, and you, you definitely with your group, you hear a lot about around the private equity, you know.

Yeah.

That. So kind of want to touch on that real quick is we work with a lot of private equity companies and I have years and one thing that I think contractors are missing on is when they're looking to be purchased or whatever it is.

Yeah.

A company. Let's say you have Bill's H vac and Corey's H vac. Bill, he's got 10 million in revenue, but he has no organic presence. Everything went through lead aggregators and paid and networking. But then you would have Corey who's got a strong digital brand through local map, organic, omni, SEO, all that strong. Maybe he's only 6 million. Who do you think the private equity is going to want?

The one that's Hudson thinking more money behind.

Yeah.

Because Mr. Lee got aggregators pretty much maxed out at that point, right?

Yeah. And none of those building his brand. He's just buying. He's building Angie, he's making Angie more relevant on Google, but he's not helping his brand. And that's where contractors really need to think whether you're going to do private equity. Give it to your kids, whatever they really need to invest and be ready to invest 12 months in SEO. Local core game changer. And their websites aren't just a, you know, digital thing online anymore. It's actually your digital salesperson. It needs to answer all these questions that people are asking on these answer engines have those answers on their website. That's the key thing that I want everybody to understand. Yeah, SEO is more important now than it probably ever was. Really Making sure that whoever they're working with has a grasp on all three and not just looking at SEO as one because it's not. They all have their each individual strategies that need to be done. And having a company that execute it and lays out, you know, hey, this is going to be the focus for the first four to six months. This is six to 12 months and really setting the proper expectations with each other and the team that's managing it. Those are my key things. I want to make sure anybody in the contractor world understands.

Let me, let me check something out real quick. Yeah, you're more of a special specialized in the roofing space. Right. Like you in particular. Let me see.

Yeah, roofing. And I mean H Vac. Cause I was a roofing coach for Revolt back in the day. So soft spot for the roofing.

I'm checking out. I want to see what the average revenue. You might know this offhand for a roofing contract in the United States is.

I think it's going to be right around two and a half to three mil.

Okay.

Because you got, well, you got. Texas is the one state that throws everything off because you, you don't have to be a licensed roofer to do roofing.

So here's ChatGPT stats which could, could be made up. No, they have it from ibisworld.com who knows? Market Research Report $76.4 billion US Roofing Industry Revenue 96,000 Contractors an average of 795,000 per year. Average owner makes 85K. Average net profit 3.3 to 5%.

What?

Okay. Yeah. It's always way worse than you think on those. So yeah. Now let me get the average H Vac contractor. It's probably, it's worse as far as revenue goes. $156 billion. Market growing at two and a half percent. Annual 115,000 businesses. Well this is also includes commercial. So the average average residential H Vac contractor revenue is a million. Probably driven up significantly by these large aggregate private equity companies. Average net profit 2 to 6%. Take owner, take home net income 2250 K. I don't really feel like that's a great number. That's too big of a range, right?

Yeah.

So at a million dollars, let's, let's take an average of a million dollar contractor, which is not somebody who just started. Some of them can be But a technician turned owner got some traction. Probably a good referral business. Let's say his budget is going to be 10% of that million. Right. Which is. It's decent. You could go higher than that. But let's say he's got a $100,000 budget annually. Let's just make it 12%, 120,000 annual budget, 10k a month. If you were a contractor with 10k a month, where would you put that 10k as far as marketing?

I love that question. Thank you so much for that.

You're welcome.

The way first is foremost making sure the website is built for 2025 and moving forward, answer engine stuff and questions answers on there. Local SEO, core SEO to start. Okay. Then LSAs as LSAs is going to be the best cost per lead to get those leads in. And then once you're building up your your capital then you can start trickling into the paid advertising and omni SEO. But I would go very heavy, well written website. Okay. Local SEO go super aggressive with that. Making sure the company's doing at least two posts a week with citations. All that being done properly. Core SEO doesn't need to be super aggressive. But being five mile famous so to speak or ten mile famous in your area and then the LSAs, that's what I would invest heavily first off and then grow into the others. That's where you have that strategy team that you're working with with your market that's looking at that six to 12 months.

Awesome. Yeah. What is one SEO myth that you wish would just die?

That is dead.

Yeah. You hear that all the time, right? I hear it all the time. All the time.

I mean you can have SEO ramp faster if you want to invest in certain types of backlinks. High end backlinks at the beginning. But it, it's definitely the biggest thing I hear is it's dead. And then marketing companies don't know how to do it. No. They're just not setting the proper expectations. And everybody on the same page. That is the key thing with that. But it's not dead. It's been reincarnated. And it's more important now as I've said as ever.

Nice. So what is one thing that you wish every contractor knew about their Google presence, Their online presence.

How homeowners see them online and not how they see themselves when they're searching for themselves.

Right. Because it's Google displays that differently.

Yeah. So like I tell a lot of contractors, they're like man, we're, we're ranking, you know, in the top three in the map pack. Well, when you did that search, where were you at? Were you at your office? Go to the neighborhood that you want to rank in, clear your cache, your, you know, browser history, then do a search as if you're a homeowner. And how are they? That's what I really want them to, to understand and to do.

Okay, makes sense. And they're going to, at least in H vac they might call it something different than what a homeowner would search. Right. So H Vac, do most homeowners use that word or they use the air conditioning? Well, that's where a company is going to help you. You know, Google has, Google Trends, they have also they have these insights to get really deep. Plus there's other tools. Digital marketing agencies should be able to understand that and give you some, give you some idea of, of what words you're going to rank for and things like that. And those things would still be that, still. That same idea would still be the same in AI. Yeah, AI isn't anything new. It's just supercharged version of the best of the best.

And to that this is a, you know, kind of talking about how they actually look and all that. So I had plumbing H Vac company in South Carolina. He's like, we got somebody, we ranked great where we're located and all. And I can use, I'll use the name local Falcon is a thing that you can do. And I had it to where it was just a five mile radius. The keyword he wants to be seen for. And I was like, yeah, here you are. Yes, you rank one right where your business is. But three blocks over you ranked 20th. So getting them to understand that you need to go where the work is that you're going to be doing to see how you're actually ranking not where your business is. Because you're not going to fix your own H Vac and plumbing. You will, but you're not making any money off of it. So really understanding that is where a lot of contractors are missing out right now.

So really to take your business past that million, 2 million, 3 million is going to be your knowledge and application of marketing. Yes, 100% that's going to be, that's. There's no $20 million contractor that hasn't, that doesn't understand marketing. That just doesn't get, just doesn't get that way. Right. Yeah, I mean obviously there's tons of other things that it takes in there. Being able to take that lead and see it all the way through the funnel to turning it into an actual customer who buys and then buys from you again and again. But ultimately all of that stuff is marketing. But the first part of it is initially is getting the lead in the first place. And where are these leads? And they also have a lot different of quality from one lead to another. Right. I always knew that LSA always was very good quality leads for us, but it was local and people saw our reviews and everything and they were closer to a purchase decision than how other people found us. Right?

Yeah. And to your LSA point is, you know, they, they rank you in that a lot off of reviews and location. So that has a lot to do with your local SEO. If you're not strong and dominant in there, you're not going to be that number one, number two, or number three in LSAs. Again, coming back to the importance of SEO, right. It's going to power that best cost per lead, which is LSAs.

That makes sense. Guess we could kind of think of SEO as anything that's not paid, search kind of anything. It's. It's a big. There's a big bucket when it comes to SEO. It's not just one little piece. So I guess there's some pieces of it that might end up dying out, but in general there's some that'll become more important.

I think it. SEO influences even everything in paid. When it comes to Google, you know, you have strong organic trust and reviews all in your organic stuff and all that and you're ranking well there. Who is Google going to show higher than anybody in ppc?

Sure.

You know, you might have somebody that spends a little bit more, but they don't have the total brand package online. And this company that's doing everything is going to be the one that's going to win out.

That makes sense.

This was great. It was good.

I really enjoyed it, man. I love talking about marketing stuff.

I can tell stuff.

Yeah. I just like talking about business in general, man. I just, you know, that and operations and everything. Marketing is just a big piece of it. If you don't know it, you're dead. You'll just stop. Just get to a point where you stop and you're like, why can't I grow anymore? It's just something that I had to, like I said, had to kind of become a pro at. I understand why contractors don't like it.

But I think what's fun about it, and it always has been for me, I think it's a little bit. Because I'm a little Addicted is. It's always changing.

Yeah.

It's always moving in a different direction. Something's going to wow you and you're over here. And then it's like, oh, man, they just added this to Chat GPT, you know, and all that. Because, like, Perplexity will even show that. If you do a search for H VAC companies, it shows the map pack. It shows them where they're located on the map, everything. So it's just intriguing because that's changing almost every week. Just helping contractors understand it enough to adapt it in some way. Maybe they don't need me right now, but maybe they will if they're in a conversation with somebody and they're like, man, I really wish I knew more about this ChatGPT and AI and how I can be seen. Well, hey, give Cory a call. He's not going to try to sell you. He'll educate you.

Yeah. The whole takeaway, really, from what I see, is contractors have to educate themselves on all aspects of marketing, especially on the digital side. Get to learn this if you want to grow. Gotta know it.

Yeah, right.

Can't outsource all this knowledge. The knowledge does exist out of there. You gotta be able to understand it yourself so you can ask the right questions.

Yeah, absolutely.

Makes sense. Awesome. And, man, thanks for coming today. Appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thanks for listening to the Home Service Hacks podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform so you never miss a future episode. For more information or to connect with Bill, you can check us out on Facebook @ServiceTitanHacks or visit our website at ServiceTitanHacks.com we'll see you next time.