Google Is Deleting the LSA Dashboard. What Contractors Do Now — Chris Vance, CertainPath

Welcome to Successful Contractor powered by CertainPath, a show for residential contractors about residential contractors. We chronicle business journeys, share insights, and celebrate successes in this wonderful industry. I'm your host, Bob Houchin. For more information on how CertainPath can put your contracting company on a certain path to success, visit our website, www.mycertainpath.com. I hope you enjoyed today's show and take away a nugget or two.

If you just go in and you're used to setting a weekly budget, you go in and accidentally type that weekly budget into a daily, you're gonna have a, an unpleasant surprise when you've been spending $650 a day instead of $650 a week. One of the things that they said is brand is the new keyword. After 20 years of Google training us to talk like cavemen, that's kind of a welcome, a welcome change. This might've been kind of that just one of those middle fingers that Google's like, oh, you think you've pushed us out?

Yeah.

Well, let's take this away from you.

Yeah.

So it just sees, hey, I just delivered you a lead for $100.

Right.

I'm gonna give you all the leads you can get for $100. And so what that'll do is you'll wind up overspending on lower ticket items and starving out and underspending for high ticket items that you'll never get the leads for. Download your performance history. The leads and that kind of information itself are going to transfer over, but the performance data is not. Your spend levels, your lead rates, all of the things that help you make smart decisions, you're going to lose all of that when that dashboard goes away. And it doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be done.

Mr. Vance, thank you so much for being on the show today. For those who've not had the distinct pleasure of meeting you at a CertainPath event, can you share with everyone your name, your title and what do you do with our organization?

Hey, Bob, thanks so much for having me on today. My name is Chris Vance. I have the privilege of being the Executive Marketing Coach here at CertainPath. Been here for about the last 7 years getting to work with all of our members on creating their marketing plans, watching their budgets, watching performance, making sure that everybody kind of has an understanding of what this major black box of marketing can, can throw at them.

Black box is a really good word for it. That's certainly what it seems like. When I started years ago, it was like, well, we have Yellow Pages and you have a newspaper and maybe do some TV. And that was about it. Oh, direct mail. Direct mail too. So now it's— and the medium has changed. The mediums change themselves daily. It's so exciting. Now you're at the office there, our lovely studio in Dallas, for a very important reason. It is EP, Executive Perspective Week. There's plenty of people that watch this that are not members. What is EP? EP, as we call it. And what does that entail?

EP is, it's one of my favorite things that we get to do here is whenever a new member comes into CertainPath, the entryway is through Executive Perspective here. And it's 4 days here at our office in Addison, Texas, where they get to meet all the coaches. They get to kind of see our operation in real time and live. And we spend those 4 days giving a an overview of the complete business model that we have in CertainPath available to them. They get to meet the partner network, and a lot of the partners will come in for a happy hour so that they can, so that they can kind of see, uh, again, just what it is that, that makes CertainPath so special.

Right. And they leave with like a, a big goal to hit, and then they also leave with a lot of actionable items, right? It's not just, this is the system. We, we put them to work right away.

Absolutely. So, that's one of the things that we do is we go through a process to create your BHAG, your Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Where do you see yourself down the road? What is your why about all of this? Because the road's going to get hard. So, you need to know why you're doing it so that you can stay on that road when the times get tough. And then, we break it down because we give an overview of everything that we do. And a lot of times, it can feel like a ton of information coming at you. But in the process, what we do is we identify those 2, 3, 4 actionable things that they can walk out of here that are going to make the biggest impact in the least amount of time so that then they can just begin chipping away with that with their coaches as they leave.

Hey, contractors, stop only relying on digital advertising. It's your pal Bob Houchin with The Successful Contractor. This data is so shocking, I had to share it with you. Immediately. We all know the contracting world is obsessed with digital marketing, but did you know that properly curated direct mail campaigns outperform digital response almost every time? Good direct mail has a higher ROI over any paid channel. Again, when direct mail is done right. Research shows that consumers will keep a piece of direct mail for 17 days. It sits on that kitchen counter Looking at them all day long. Your best customers, you know, the households earning 6 figures plus, 65% say they're overwhelmed with digital ads and they now trust good old direct mail more when deciding who to buy from. So the mailbox is winning. The question is, is yours? Most contractors are spraying postcards across zip codes and praying the right homeowner opens one. That's not marketing, that's a lottery ticket. So let me introduce you to CertainPath Lead Generation. CertainPath Lead Generation is our direct mail marketing agency that works with CertainPath members and non-members. CertainPath Lead Generation uses 200+ data points— home, age, income, and more— to put your direct mail in front of the households most likely to book a job and buy. We run structured, multi-month campaigns, so instead of a one-time spike in calls that fades, you build predictable, repeatable demand. I know, I know, you love digital because you can measure it. Well, with CertainPath Lead Generation, it does it for you as well. We can show you exactly which mailed homes turned into booked jobs and the revenue behind them. So you get all the accountability of digital and none of the noise. Direct mail still works. Guessing just doesn't. Click the link and request your free market analysis. Stop guessing, start growing with CertainPath Lead Generation. And Vance, I think one thing I really like about EP and, you know, our organization being the size it is, is that we're able to work with contractors at all sorts of different levels. And so when someone that might be a PE-backed company works with us and they come to EP, or you're, you know, under $1 million in revenue, we can set a set plan for each one of them because obviously it's very different with their needs.

Absolutely. And that's— I actually do a marketing session on Tuesdays that where I, I talk to them about, you know, in the old days when it was just the Yellow Pages, we were able to just give you a binder with everything you needed. Didn't matter if you were 4 trucks or 400 trucks, you know, if you had enough A's at the front of your name, you were going to be showing up.

That's right.

On the Yellow Pages.

All right. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, so now You know, we have to take a much more prescriptive approach where we want to know more about your service area, want to know more about what your secret sauce is. And that's what really is being rewarded now, both online and off, because people do business with who they like and trust. And, and so, what I really love to do is help our members portray that through their marketing so that they're— what, you know, what they're— what you see showing up in the reviews matches what you're putting out. On the front end. So, you have a really consistent brand representation across the board.

Yeah. I had to laugh because when I started with us many, many, many years ago, that was so dead on. It was like, oh, it's Smith. But no, it's A. Smith and it's A this and A that or AAA. Because if you pay, you know, it was— and you don't see that anymore. So, for you younger guys, you're like, what are they talking about? That's why I was laughing.

Yeah, I guess my gray hair showed on that.

Well, at least you have some. But, you know, EP is not the only conference you've gone to. I know we, you know, mentioned we had a kind of a pre-call and you mentioned you were at a Google conference recently. And a lot of what we're going to talk about is, you know, was discussed at that conference. What was that like? You know, kind of give us the 411 on what you did there.

Yeah, actually, one of our partners, Scorpion, invited me to go down. They were having a Uh, a conference with Google at their headquarters in Austin and went, went over there for a day, was able to hear from the folks that actually run their paid ads division, run the LSAs, and was in there with another, a bunch of other contractors, uh, both PE-sized and franchise and folks like us, where we were just able to hear from Google. What was going on, and this what they were rolling out was one of the things that they said that I've begun to hear more as even since that time. This was in May. They talked about the changing of how Google search and really search overall. The customer behavior has changed in response to AI, and now Google. And all of the large language models have all shifted to, to really respond to that. And one of the things that they said is brand is the new keyword. And that if you, after 20 years of Google training us to talk like cavemen, that's kind of a welcome, a welcome change.

Yeah.

So now, now it's not just about, you know, plumber near me, it's about You know, who's the best plumber in my neighborhood that's not gonna rip me off? Right.

Yeah.

And so you're answering real questions now. But, uh, but back to the conference, it was them kind of rolling out one— another one of the things they said is a lot of the— where Google has been very siloed, you had LSAs over here separate from Google ad spend, separate from YouTube, And one of the things that they kind of mentioned off the cuff was, you know, our silos are going to be coming down. And at that point, you kind of knew there was a lot of change coming, but boy, it came quickly and it's still coming. Yeah.

I was going to say, so when did, so this whole thing, you know, the retiring the standalone LSA dashboard and it's become Performance Max and it's inside Google Ads. Like that's a lot of gobbledygook for a lot of folks, especially smaller people. Can you kind of just in plain English explain what, what that is and, and what's transpiring.

Certainly. So back in the day, Local Service Ads was a creation of Google to really, I think, to help the smaller contractor and the smaller service, uh, uh, companies because it had its own standa— standalone dashboard. It was fairly simple to set up, fairly simple to manage, and it positioned as a pay-per-lead. product.

Yeah.

Where prior to that had all been pay-per-click. So someone, every time someone would click on your ad, they'd land on your site or whatever your landing page was and may or may not connect with you. Well, local service ads come along and being a pay-per-lead, when somebody clicked on call now or filled out a form, that was actually coming directly to you, not going to 4 other contract, contractors. It was actually a lead that was coming in for you. So you paid for that lead.

Yeah.

And they were generally very good leads because it's positioned at such a place in the intent. So when somebody clicks Call Now, they're ready to get into your call center. They're ready to get somebody out to their house to fix whatever's going on. So it was a really great product and Consistently, the return on that ad spend has been much higher than your traditional pay-per-click type ads. So as you can imagine, everybody wants to be making sure they're maxing out their local service ad spend. And so in the old days, it was really more of a standalone product. Well, now again, with the, uh, silos coming down, What Google announced was we're actually going to sunset that dashboard and the way that those are managed, and we're pulling those under the umbrella of Google Ads, and they're now becoming a Performance Max product, which is one of the types of ads that you can run in Google Ads. So it's a big change. A lot of A lot of difference in complexity and how it needs to be managed. Just a lot of, a lot of change in a short period of time.

It makes it really easy for a small contractor, right? Because they have nothing else to do.

Exactly. That's what they need to think about at this point, right? I know.

It's, it's wild. It's just funny because you said it was originally designed seemingly for a smaller person to be able to manage it, and now it's become completely more complicated. And I thought that'd be a good time to chat with you and put it out there. On the internets. A big thing is the weekly budget, right? That's now become a daily budget. So maybe break that down, what that means for folks that are new to this, and then how, you know, get more complicated in the intricacies of it.

Yeah. So now with it being in the Performance Max space, you're moving from setting a weekly cap, a weekly budget that a lot of times Realistically, the advice was you set that budget to 2 to 3 times what you're actually wanting to spend because it would only spend 40 to 50% of your budget anyway.

Right.

And so there was, that was about as far as the bid strategy went at that point. Well, now, now that it's pulled over into Performance Max, it does go down, go to a daily max rather than a weekly max. budget that you're setting. And if you do nothing right now, it converts over and it takes your weekly budget that you've had and it goes on the average and sets your daily budget at that. So it's not going to instantly start spending tons of money. But the thing in the old system, it could be fairly— it wouldn't be as optimized, but Contractors could kind of set it and not really pay as much attention to the budget on a day-by-day basis.

Right.

In the new system, with the way that Performance Max works, you really need to keep an eye on it as it goes because, you know, one, if you just go in and you're used to setting a weekly budget, you're, you go in and accidentally type that weekly budget into a daily, you're gonna have a, an unpleasant surprise when you've been spending $650 a day instead of $650 a week.

Right.

So you've gotta keep an eye on that. But also when demand is really high inside of the Performance Max product, it could spend up to, you know, 2 times your daily average in a single day. So you could get really surprised by a really high spike in your spend during a day You know, you'd get capped at your monthly max, but, but that could be a, a big surprise and could really, could really hurt a small contractor. Yeah.

So for one day you might get barraged with calls that you can't handle, and then 2 days later, because you're capped out, you're not getting any calls. Correct. And if you didn't capture those leads earlier to try, and you know how to capture a lead and, and to book it properly to, to get someone to, to come in a couple days, you are in a world of hurt.

Exactly.

So it's become far more, far more complicated. Something else, you know, let's talk about this, this automated Performance Max bidding now. So the algorithm chases volume, right? Not value. I think that's what you were telling me in kind of our pre-call to try and help me wrap my head around all this. So kind of walk people through what you walked me through earlier on what that all is about. Sure.

Where in the old system, you could have one campaign and it would Based on what you were trying to run ads for, you could set your maximum bids on that side. Where now in the new system, you're— it kind of is going to be, if you leave it in one campaign, it's not going to know the difference between, let's say if you're an HVAC contractor, the difference between an install lead and a—

Mm-hmm.

service lead. So it just sees, hey, I just delivered you a lead for $100.

Right.

I'm gonna give you all the leads you can get for $100. And so what that'll do is you'll wind up overspending on lower ticket items and starving out and underspending for high ticket items that you'll never get the, get the leads for.

So, so what is— so what does someone need to do then? So they just need to have separate campaigns? Like, what kind of walk me through tactically What, what they need to do to, to save themselves.

Yeah. So you would have different campaigns based on the type of, the type of call that you were going for. So you'd have a campaign for install, you'd have a campaign for service so that you, you would be able to manage those by that. And some of our larger members that are, that are multi-trade, you would have different campaigns for each trade. Right. So because, you know, a plumbing profile for a, for a, for a lead is going to be very different from your, your leads for an install for HVAC.

Right. And so again, though, for a smaller contractor that may do multiple trades, they have more to manage. So it's daily, it's multiple campaigns, multiple headaches, right?

Yes.

So fun, fun. Also, this lead history transferring, right? Or so— excuse me, performance reports are not transferring. Lead history does. Or fill me in on what I'm stumbling through.

Yeah, so August 17th was kind of like they lit the match that day, uh, where over the course of the remainder of the year, they're going to be migrating all of the local service ads into the new platform or into the ad platform, which doesn't mean that everything is now just instantly brought over. They're kind of staging it out, but the trades that we work with are in that first tranche of, of Companies to be moved over.

Yeah.

So you'll get notice and there'll be kind of a 2-week window where you're transferring from the old dashboard into paid ad— into the Google Ads dashboard. And the key there is prior to that happening, you want to make sure that you go into your existing dashboard in local— your local service ads dashboard and download your performance history. Because like you said, Bob, it, The leads and that kind of information itself are going to transfer over. But the performance data is not. Your spend levels, your lead rates, all of the things that help you make smart decisions, you're going to lose all of that when that dashboard goes away.

And it sounds like it's, I mean, that sounds, it is, it's more critical now than ever because it's become so much more, not manageable in a good way, but there's a lot more for you to manage, right? So you really should and need and And with AI, you know, you can dump it in there and have it sort it for you. But it's critical to get that information. So, and no one really knows though, right, when they're being migrated. It's just like a surprise, you know.

Well, they'll get a notification. They'll get an email notification. If you see it.

Yeah, if you see it, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

And I don't know what everyone else's inboxes are, but I know mine. I go, oh boy, I missed a whole lot of stuff.

Yeah. So I'm sorry. And if you've ever been on a Google ad Email chain, you you get plenty of those emails. So you definitely want to be watching out for the announcements that are coming through because it it could be a needle in a haystack there.

Yeah, or just be proactive and get it done ASAP. Move it up your task list of things that you don't want to do, but they're they're you know highly important and necessary. So correct. What led us to attend the event today? We've been watching the Certain Path podcast on YouTube for. quite some time, and it just had a lot of good content, so we wanted to come and see what that content was live. Coming into this, I had no expectations of what it might be. I've never experienced anything like this before, but it proved to be a truly moving and engaging experience all the way around. My most powerful insight from this is that there are other contractors just like me, just struggling to make it, to figure it out. And it's wonderful to know that there's a network of people that can help support you and have your back. The most exciting thing to take home here, what we're going to implement, is going to be the call-taking and dispatching for profit. I can truly see from the coaches what the value of that is, and for us, that's going to be step one. I would recommend others come and experience so that they can find out what they don't know, to understand that they don't know what they don't know. I don't know. And to be able to experience a community that's willing to help answer that question. Lots of other great and exciting changes. Their Better Business Bureau badge. Yeah, you know, let's, let's shift into that. It is no longer as valuable as it once was, right? So Google has kind of played with that as well. Kind of fill everyone in on that.

Yeah, it's been very interesting, you know, over the course of the last year or so as AI has really taken search by storm and really changed the way, the way things are moving. What you saw a lot of times is one of the key contributors, kind of one of the key trust factors that you would see cited would be the Better Business Bureau. And I was actually talking to one of our partners last night, that was here for EP, who, and she said, you know, after all of these years of telling people like, your Better Business Bureau, eh, maybe important, maybe not. Suddenly it was all of a sudden because it was really beginning to drive performance in AI recommending you.

Sure.

And the thing is— Google didn't like that.

Google didn't like that.

You know, they've been on their heels for the first time in their history for the last year, you know, and I will say they've responded Amazingly. So, you know, all of the people saying Google is dead last year, I'm sorry, they were wrong. But, you know, it does turn out, you know, in my judgment, I'm kind of looking at it going, you know, this might have been kind of that, just one of those middle fingers that Google's like, oh, you think you've pushed us out? Well, let's take this away from you.

Yeah, that's right.

Of course, their version is they're They're making it where the callouts that you're, that are gonna be associated with your ads are more verifiable.

Yeah.

And stand out better.

Yeah.

There's a case to be made for that, but I'm sure they didn't not enjoy kind of pulling a, pulling a rug out from, from some of the other LLMs.

Right. So, so if the, if the BBB badge is not as important, then what do, what do we need to do? So what's someone need to do, right? There's some starter 6 is what you mentioned to me. Kind of explain to everyone what that is.

Yeah, yeah. So Google is giving you the, the, the ability to add in 6 different callouts. And what you're— what that does is where the Google— or I'm sorry, where the Better Business Bureau badge used to live, that's where your callouts are coming into.

Mm-hmm.

And that, and that's incredible real estate that, that is, is going to be taken up in your ads and Part of the beauty of what Google is doing here and bringing AI and how they're delivering ads is they're getting closer to the intent of the person searching and they'll pull in the callout that's important to that searcher. And so the kind of callouts that you're gonna want to be putting in are gonna be around things like, Your straightforward pricing or how you're pricing, those kind of things. That's a, that's a trust signal. Uh, your years in business, things that are, which, what I call your only we kind of statements.

Yeah.

Like, what are some of these verifiable things that help you really differentiate yourself from the competition that you're able to bring into a call out there that, that then they can That then shows up automatically in your ads based on the intent of the person searching.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, for CertainPath members, like you said, a straightforward pricing is something that we, we've, you know, branded our pricing tool, Tech Seal of Safety. We have different types of things like that. And it becomes something that, you know, that it picks up on that, right? It's something of value that is a differentiator. Yep.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. Now, LSA is only kind of one piece of all this. Walk me through what AI Max is specifically, right? It reads intent and builds the ad off your site?

Yeah, so AI Max is kind of, it's a feature on traditional search. So Performance Max is, you know, it's going out to all the Display Network, it's going to all of these different places. AI Max is associated with, with your straight normal pay-per-click search. But what it does is where ads where you've got automatically generated content or, or broad match keywords, those are automatically going to come from, those are automatically gonna become AI Max ads. And what that's doing is it's really designed to push up and engage the person searching earlier in their buyer journey.

Mm-hmm.

So it's matching intent and it's understanding their intent along the way. And so then when they hit that search, what it's gonna do is, is AI is, the AI Max is going to pull in from that intent. It's gonna pull in the right callout. It's gonna pull The, the creative, the image, the video directly from your Google Business Profile or from your website. It's going to pull actual content from your website into the ads.

Mm-hmm.

So that's why having structured data in your website is so critical to make sure that you are— that when your ads are pulling that information, you want to have good representation of, of what you're getting out there. And so you want to have content that is really representing who you are effectively.

Right.

Also answering the questions that people are going to be asking naturally.

Yeah.

So that it's pulling in specific content, because if you're just using boilerplate template type content on your website, like so many websites I look at have basic, just generic content. That's what AI sees and it just kind of blends you into the sea of generic. Even if you've done all the things right, but you haven't really taken the time to take it that next step, it's gonna blend you in with the generic and then it's gonna choose someone that's more specific. to deliver that ad for.

So it's, it's, I think you used the term clean data. You want clean data, right? Is that what, so you want custom, unique to you. So that's what your website, your socials, like it reads all of that and ties it all to, like what else, what else should people be like, what do I need to evaluate and see if, you know, that I'm consistent online?

Yeah, absolutely.

What are the different tools? Are different, you know, website, what else?

Yeah, absolutely. And this is another term that I first heard at the Google meeting in May that I've begun hearing from other, other agency owners across different podcasts and things that I'm listening to is called search everywhere optimization. So, Yeah. you know, I just, I just got past, you know, breaking it to all our members, you know, in the, over the last 6 months, congratulations, you're now a content creator. Um, but, but it really is the truth where how you're showing up not only on your website, making sure that you're Your structured data on your website, your schema are built. That's all nerd speak that your SEO agency will understand, but that all has to be in place. The frequently asked questions, all of how your site is structured is important. But now with AI, before AI, and then even Google now is, is doing the, the AI overview on, on most searches. What that's pulling from is it's not only looking at your website, it's going to your Google Business Profile. It's reading through your reviews, how you're answering the reviews, the posts that you're doing on your Google Business Profile, the posts that you're doing on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube. And it's looking across to see, am I getting a consistent message of who this company is and what they do and how they're answering this question that someone just typed into the AI search. And the one that has the clearest and most consistent answer and representation of that, they're the ones that are getting pulled into that AI overview and getting the answer and getting the clicks that convert at a much higher rate. than traditional search.

This also means you're talking about all these platforms. I know one model, ChatGPT, is now pulling from a 4-letter word that everyone in contracting likes so much. No, I should be nice. Yelp. It's pulling from Yelp now. And I know plenty of contractors that for years have just went, nah, just going to worry about Google. I'm not going to worry about Yelp. But now that's clearly not the case, right?

That's right. And it, you know, it was definitely a shock. You see that press release come across and you're like, seriously, Yelp? And so, but it is, it is one of those things that we're definitely communicating out to our members. What you need to do is go back. And I actually, right before this call, I was on with a member saying, This is how you claim your Yelp site and go in and answer, answer the bad reviews. Because where do people go to complain most of the time? Yelp. And so you need to have answers there.

Yeah.

You need to really treat it similar to how you're doing your Google Business Profile. Your Google, Google Business Profile is still the most important, but having a clean representation of who you are on Yelp is now important because They just handed over 300 million business— businesses' information to ChatGPT. So what you don't want to have is when somebody searches and pulls you up in their, in their ChatGPT, that the representation they get is someone that posted 5 years ago on your abandoned Yelp page.

Yeah.

So you definitely wanna make sure that you're, Cleaning that up a little bit.

And I, you know, we had a little pre-interview and I asked you a question. I'm like, well, because I'm, you know, I've been doing a lot of sales and sales training, communication training lately. You know, we— and I think we do a good job of teaching our members, technicians, salespeople on how to ask for 5-star reviews. Right. And we were always directing to Google because that was what you did. And I go, well, Chris, shouldn't we just have people start directing to Yelp? And you said, well, maybe not necessarily. Right. You don't want to just abandon everything for Yelp. Well, Kind of fill everyone in why you said that.

Yeah, what— because right now, the—

you—

one, Yelp doesn't like you driving people, yeah, to leave you reviews. They want it to be more of an organic experience, and, and so they frown on that. So if, if it begins to sniff of that where it's been abandoned for 10 years and all of a sudden you're getting 10 reviews a day, They're— you're probably— most of them won't even show up.

Yeah.

But what it does do is now instead of just driving everything to Google Reviews, now you, you need to start paying more attention to reviews on Yelp, to getting shoutouts on Nextdoor, and all of the different platforms that you can to, to, to get that feedback in. Because now, again, with the search, every where optimization, that's where it's going to be pulling from is across the board.

So maybe it's just like maybe start off with just responding to the Yelp reviews where before you're like, okay, you know, I just, it is what it is, right? Start small in that way and then maybe you can start building up and, and yeah.

From what I've seen, they say that you don't have to buy Yelp ads to, to show up. I know that their, their sales, sales team, I'm sure, is capitalizing largely off of selling ads now that they've got this. But you don't necessarily have to do that, but you do want it to have a— what AI looks for is fresh, consistent content.

Yeah.

And so, so kind of managing it in that way and then determining down the road if it, if it makes sense to do, do paid ads there, that, that's, that's for another day. But, but at least getting, getting it to something that you wouldn't be embarrassed if it's what pulled through on the AI result.

Yeah. I wanted to bring up another platform, one that we are on, YouTube. And I know for, again, a lot of contractors, they don't— there's more and more that are doing YouTube stuff, doing video. But still, I'd have to say probably in the 90s percentage, percent don't do anything. And it's really a missed opportunity. Or if you turn it around, it's an opportunity to get into that space and benefit from it. Because why? Because they explain what the AI models are crawling YouTube as well, right?

Yeah, absolutely. If you think about YouTube being the 2nd largest search engine in the world and also being a part of Google, that tying together the communication of the silos coming down, it's going to be more and more relevant for you to be on YouTube. And the great thing about YouTube is when you upload a video to YouTube and you put it up there and you put content out there, The transcript is going live, and so that transcript is is feeding these large language models consistent content. And so if you're putting together good content where you're answering real questions and you're you're formatting what you're talking about so that you're giving good context, really getting across who you are, really getting across. what customers can expect when they work for you.

Mm-hmm.

That becomes such an amazing tool to help you show up more in AI search, to help your SEO show up even more. And it, it's gonna be, it's gonna be really a game changer for a lot of, uh, contractors that really embrace that.

Yeah.

And so, don't, don't look too soon at, at, oh, it's only got 4 views. It's wasted time. It's the content that you're creating that becomes the wall of information that you're providing AI.

And really video, I mean, it's free. I mean, you don't have to pay to put anything on YouTube. It's free. YouTube wants you to put stuff up there, right? It doesn't have to be great, right? And so let's talk practically for people that want to get better or do something. What do I do? I'm like, you know, I'm a service company. I'm a plumber. I'm an HVAC guy. What are some things they can do to start seeding their YouTube page? And again, it doesn't have to— like you said, doesn't have to be great. I know we started out— I'm still not great at this, but our videos do look better thanks to Randy. Um, but no, what are some things, uh, you know, any size shop can do to start populating a YouTube page and benefiting from that?

You know, it— here's what is great about where we're at today. You go— the first thing you do is you go into your AI of choice, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever, and just ask it, what are the top 30 questions that customers in my area are asking about? And pick a service from your service listing on your website about HVAC repair and get, get a list of questions out. And I guarantee you, every contractor that I've talked to over the last 7 years that I've worked here If I ask them a specific question about anything that they do, could sit there and talk for 3 minutes about it.

Oh yeah.

And so, take one of those questions, hold up, you know, our iPhones have amazing cameras in them. So, all you have to do is hold that up, talk into the camera, answer that question in 2 and a half, 3 minutes. Maybe 4. Take that video, upload it onto YouTube, and there you've got some content. And it doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be done.

Yeah, have a presence. And I'm going to tell you, if I can figure out how to upload to something YouTube, anyone watching this can figure it out. Uh, but you know, the, the, the interest— interesting thing, and I know not everyone has technicians or, or people even in the office that are super tech savvy, but a lot of our, a lot of our techs especially are young, right? It's a young industry. The people in the field are young, and young folks are very accustomed to taking video, right? And so maybe it's having them take video on the job, right? I mean, I think that was something you and I talked about and, and using, capitalizing on that, right?

Absolutely. Incentivize your techs, you know, because they're They've got their TikToks, they've got their Instagram Reels that they're doing. They know how to use all the little tools. So you've got that asset with you and they would love to do that. And so engage them, get them, say, this is the kind of shots that we need. And also, yeah, make, make one of those funny skits. We've got some members that are doing some really funny stuff and great videos on, on their Instagram Reels and their TikToks and bringing it over and putting them into YouTube for YouTube Shorts. And it becomes great content because the thing about that too is going beyond just AI search. What that's doing is that's casting a wide net for people that want to— people, like I said earlier, people do business with who they like and trust. This lets some of your personality as a business flow through and put that in the hands of your techs.

Yeah.

And as that happens too, like, like we were talking about, you know, technicians You know, technicians are younger. There's a different thing that attracts them to what they're going to be doing. And so, a lot of times your audience on that TikTok video or that Instagram video or YouTube Short is going to be other technicians.

Yeah.

That are gonna see your technician that's not getting beat down every day, that's not looking at their check at the end of the week going, man, I wish I made more money. And they see your technicians happy and celebrated. It's a great recruiting tool.

Yeah, that's a great point. That is a great point. And, and you mentioned, yeah, incentivize. Maybe give them $5 or something a video. I mean, if that— why not? I mean, it's—

it's—

look at what— how much a lead costs you in the first place, right? So, right, shoot a video in front of the water heater, maybe with a smiling homeowner. If the homeowner— they connected really well, you know, 30 seconds, text it over, you know, to the boss. And then it— like I said, guys, if I can figure out how to put something on I mean, anybody can. I mean, I'm lucky I'm even on TV right now. Anyway, that was— I thought that was fascinating. And it's, you know, it's something that not enough people take advantage of and they think it's really complicated. YouTube, it's video. It's really not. It's not, especially younger techs that I think a lot of folks will enjoy that. Hey, contractors, stop only relying on digital advertising. It's your pal Bob Houchin with the Successful Contractor. Contractor. This data is so shocking I had to share it with you immediately. We all know the contracting world is obsessed with digital marketing, but did you know that properly curated direct mail campaigns outperform digital's response almost every time? Good direct mail has a higher ROI over any paid channel. Again, when direct mail is done right. Research shows that consumers will keep a piece of direct mail for 17 days. It sits on that kitchen counter looking at them all day long. Your best customers, you know, the households earning 6 figures plus, 65% say they're overwhelmed with digital ads and they now trust good old direct mail more when deciding who to buy from. So the mailbox is winning. The question is, is yours? Most contractors are spraying postcards across zip codes and praying the right homeowner opens one. That's not marketing, that's a lottery ticket. So let me introduce you to CertainPath Lead Generation. CertainPath Lead Generation is our direct mail marketing agency that works with CertainPath members and non-members. CertainPath Lead Generation uses 200+ data points— home, age, income, and more— to put your direct mail in front of the households most likely to book a job and buy. We run structured multi-month campaigns, so instead of a one-time spike in calls that fades, you build predictable, repeatable demand. I know, I know, you love digital because you can measure it. Well, with CertainPath Lead Generation, it does it for you as well. We can show you exactly which mailed homes turned into booked jobs and the revenue behind them, so you get all the Accountability of digital and none of the noise. Direct mail still works. Guessing just doesn't. Click the link and request your free market analysis. Stop guessing. Start growing with CertainPath Lead Generation. All right. So we've covered a lot of difficult topics and, and, you know, we work with, uh, we work with lots of large companies, but we work with quite a few that are in a couple million bucks shop, you know, and maybe the owner is just, we've helped them get out of the field. We met them. They were just in a truck and now they're, they're in the office and they've got 5 or 6 trucks rolling and, uh, they're doing their own marketing, right? And the beauty of LSA is that, like we said, it was something you could do on your own, but now it's a lot more complicated. So it's probably not something that anyone would want to do on their own anymore.

It's, it's going to be much more challenging. I, I think it is. I think some of that remains to be seen. of, of once it gets over, over into the new platform. But there is, there's much more bidding strategy that, that goes into it. So I would recommend to really make the most out of it. I think that you could probably keep it set up and move over and do okay at LSAs. But, but the thing is, is there's such an amazing platform when done right.

Yeah.

That it's, you're going to earn the fee that you're going to pay somebody to manage it for you. So I, I would recommend, just like with pay-per-click, don't manage it yourself. Go ahead and have, have an agency manage that for you.

This is an old school, you know, old school question. You get it probably all the time though. When is the right time? You know, again, we work with a lot of companies that are making money, with plenty that are just barely getting by. So what— when does it make sense financially to hire somebody? What do you tell people?

To, to bring on an agency?

Yeah, bring on a partner.

Yeah, to bring on a partner like that is, you know, we actually— as soon as possible, uh, because your online presence right now is so critical that you, that you're putting who you really are of getting that out there. And that is the beauty of, you know, a lot of times in marketing, you, you get what you pay for. in, in marketing. So there's a reason that, that some, some partners really command a premium when it comes to management fees. But we've also got partners in our partner network that we work with that I've seen take a meager investment and, and actually produce incredible results, you know.

Yeah.

It, you know, for, for, for that smaller guy, for the smaller guy, they don't need all the bells and whistles and integrations and all this kind of stuff that you can get with, with a much larger agency. But if you've got somebody that takes the time to get you and give you a respectable, good presence online, again, it goes back to it doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be done. And it needs to be done in a way that you're, that represents you well.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned our partners because, I mean, we have, I don't know, there's a number now. Of marketing partners, vendors that—

Yeah, we've got close to 30 at this point.

Is that right? Holy cow!

Yeah.

And, you know, folks that are not members, you have the opportunity to meet with these people at our CertainPath events. And I think what's, what's so nice in working with them, and as you said, as Chris said, you know, there's different, there's people that can work with small budgets and ones that are, will make it highly sophisticated. And you pay for sophistication, just like you would a car, right? You can get a beater, A beater's a bad word. But you can get an economic car, economical car, and get you around. And, or you can get the luxury car. They each have different needs. But our partners are used to working with home service companies. If you hire somebody in your hometown just because Betty has a nephew who's a marketing whiz, they don't know our industry, right? And so there is, there is value in working with people and not being the guinea pig, right? Is there some value to that, Chris? And I'm sure you see that all the time. With new members.

Absolutely. Because one of the, one of the things that you really want to get across is who you are as a business, but also what you do. And so if you have somebody local, and I've seen this many times, somebody that does great locally, but they don't know the trades. And so when you're putting together a service page, they'll match images with text that There, an electrician will look at and go, and there's— that's a, that's a commercial panel. There's no way you're going to put that in a house, you know. And so it just, it just doesn't match. You need somebody that understands your business, that understands how to write in your voice, that's going to, that's going to actually connect and build trust with the homeowner.

Yeah. And I— another point I want to make based on what you, you know, like you said, I asked, you know, when is the right time to start working with a partner. And you're like, well, really, it's— it's— you want to try and get there as quickly as possible. The only way to do that is to have money, right? Is to be able to be profitable, to have, uh, the cash reserves to invest in your marketing. And we have thresholds on what you really should be doing. I'm not going to divulge because that's proprietary. Actually, we might have— we've probably revealed it in another podcast. But, um, that means you, you got to be profitable. And, and I would say, you know, those of you who are watching, who are listening, and, and you are not making money, You know, this is only getting harder. This industry is getting harder. I don't have to tell you guys how many big PE giants are squatting in your neighborhood and they can buy up this stuff. So you, you know, work. If you're not making money, a little ad for CertainPath, please reach out to somebody that can show you how to make money in this industry. We've been doing this for 25, 30 years now. You got to be able to generate revenue, keep it as net profit to invest in marketing. Right. And once— that's what EP is all about, right, Chris? Like, that's what people are doing right now in our big office in Addison, which is in Dallas. They are learning how to make more. And that's a big— wait, what's the biggest thing, Chris? We always hear pricing. Yeah.

And that's one of the things that I— yeah, one, one of the things I lead with is the last thing you want to do is to start spending money on marketing. Because when you do it right, it's going to make the phone ring. But if you don't have a trained CCR to take that call, and you don't have the right process in place to convert that call coming in into revenue that becomes a multiple of what you've invested, then you're just, you know, I, I can give you my address and you can just send me the cash.

It's right. It's easier. It's easier that way. But I mean, yeah, you have a 32% gross margin. So you go do that work and a guy collects, you know, if he collects on the job, he just lost money on that job. So there's all, there's all these elements. And again, for you smaller guys, I know so many of you that are, are So sharp and you work for somebody and you go in business on your own and you're watching videos, you're listening to content to try and get whatever you can. You know, you're at a point where if you— marketing's getting more complicated, the whole business is getting more complicated than when we started. It really is worth finding somebody to walk with you, and it's a total investment. All right. No more ads within the free content. So I am a small person, right? And let's say I am making money, but I'm still teetering. I don't know. with a partner, what are a couple things? And I'm busy, right? Let's be honest. You're, if you're managing, if you're at that threshold where you're the, you know, maybe 1 or 2 people, you're as the owner in the shop, have somebody answer the phones, your hair is on fire. You don't have a lot of time. But if I have a couple of hours a week to try and do my best, what are some things I can do practically?

Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, going back to our YouTube example and taking that 4-minute video In taking that transcript, what you can do now with AI, you can have AI tell you what snippets from, from that 4-minute video would make a great 30-second clip that you could then post on Shorts, YouTube Shorts. You could post it as an Instagram Reel, as a TikTok video, and then you can take the transcript from the video that you made for YouTube, you can pound that out as a blog post and turn, turn that into 3 or 4 Facebook posts probably. So that out of that one 3 to 4 minute video that you have, that you've recorded, you could utilize AI and some tools to turn that one piece of content into a dozen that you could then schedule To just, so you spend a couple of hours at the beginning of the week or whenever you set aside for, for that work that you set a couple of hours there, schedule it all out so that it runs on autopilot for the, for the week while you're out, you know, running like your hair's on fire. And then just like, I remember my, my old mentor from here is Michael Zeller that, that retired a while back. He said, you know, treat it like a dentist appointment. You know, when you've got— when you're in the dentist chair and he's got his hands all in your mouth, the phone rings, you're not gonna be answering that phone. So, you know, set your, set your marketing time like a dentist appointment at, you know, for that 1 to 2 hour window to create some content that you're just getting out there.

Yeah. And, and, you know, I know more and more people are using AI models, and— but there's still plenty that aren't, and, and When they listen to you explain what you're doing with AI, they're like, oh my gosh, that's, you know, I'm gonna tell you folks, if you can use Google, you can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude. I would say invest a little, what's, I don't even know what the entry level is on those platforms. It's worth it. The material you get out of it is better. But if you can Google something, you can ask an AI model to produce something. It really is that simple. And then once you're like, holy cow, this is it? Yeah, that's it. And then you just keep tinkering with it, type something else in. Oh, I like this better, that better. And it'll do a lot of this stuff that Chris is doing for you. Again, if I can figure it out, I swear you can figure this out. Also, Google Business Profiles, right, Chris? That's still, that's a huge platform people are underutilizing.

Yes. And, you know, here's the thing too. AI can feel so big and daunting like you were just saying. And there are definitely specific things that we need to be doing. to make sure that we're, that we're preparing ourselves to show up in AI search. But 80% of that battle is just having good SEO.

Yeah.

And one of the things that we've been talking about for years with local SEO to try, try to show up in the map packs has been your Google Business Profile.

Yeah.

That's where your reviews live. And so the thing about your Google Business Profile is it's, more important now than ever. Now with all the changes in the ads, the, the content from the ads, what's being driven in, in your ad platform is going to be pulling largely from your Google Business Profile. So again, with your Google Business Profile, what you want to consider there is also quality over quantity.

Yeah.

But you want to have a consistent cadence because AI really has a recency bias. So it's looking for, you may have 5,000 reviews, but if all of them are over 90 days old, they're largely irrelevant.

Wow.

So it wants to see consistent reviews going in. It wants to see you responding to them in a timely fashion. It wants to see that you're posting on, doing posts on your Google Business Profile just like you would on your Facebook. But, you know, doing it in such a way that is consistent with what makes sense on Google, uploading pictures, those kind of things. Uh, and the same thing that we've talked about for a long time with your, with your NAP consistency, your name, address, phone numbers, so that you're listed the same on your website, on your Google Business Profile, on your Yelp, on your Facebook, so that where AI is looking across across the web, it's getting a consistent representation of your basic business information.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And consistency is key. And again, AI can help you. But again, maybe for people, again, listening to this, watching this that are not— they're just kind of initially playing with the language models. AI knows when it's being fed AI. So, so what are some things that, again, when you're kind of typing and trying to create copy that, yeah, how do you kind of make it more unique to you? What, what do you tell folks?

One of the things that I've been working with a lot of members on lately is putting together what, what I call a brand brief. And it, it goes through and, and it's just a 1-page document of who you are as a business, who your ideal customer profile is, What kind of what your personality is. Here's 3 things we always say. Here's 3 things that we would never say. And then I would put in some examples of maybe emails I've written or how I've responded to reviews in the past. And I put together this brand brief that's kind of a 1-page, 2-page document of this is who we're like.

Mm-hmm.

And I'll, and I'll put that into a, into ChatGPT or into a Claude. You can put it in the memory or you can open a project in these platforms or just use it to copy and paste at the beginning of a chat that you're going into.

Yeah.

Here's my brand. Here's, here's who we are. Now here's what I want to create.

Yeah.

And then it'll give you content back based on that. And what that'll do is that'll, that'll actually get you 80, 85% of the way to where you want to be from a content perspective. And then you just start going back and forth and editing what, what you get out of it.

Yeah.

Until you get it to a place where it does sound like you.

Yeah.

And then I always feed it right back into the engine again and say, this was my final, this is what I sound like, please update your memory.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's a great tidbit and a value of working again with, with us. See if someone like Chris that can help set up that document, make it real easy for you. Um, all right, kind of in, in kind of wrapping up, Chris, I'm a contractor. What are, what are like 3 things based on what we've talked about I should be doing this month on my priority list? My, you know, I got a 3— I've got 10 things I try to focus on a month, maybe 5. What are a couple that are advertising related I need to do right now?

One is if you're running local service ads, go download your data, your historical data before it moves over and have that, have that with you so that you're ready for the change. Number 2 is take a look at your Google Business Profile. Is it optimized in such a way that is gonna, is gonna drive you in front of the customers that you want to serve? Does Your About section tell a real story about what you do and who you are? Do you have your categories set appropriately? Are you uploading pictures regularly, not just of the work? Yes, we want to see before and afters, but do we have pictures of your trucks, your logos, your technicians, so that we're beginning to see more of a picture there? So, I would pay a lot of attention to my Google Business profile. And then also what I would do is I would just go to a ChatGPT or a Claude and, and just ask it. I would put my web address in there and tell it who I was and say, will you do a review on my site and on me and tell me what I can do to improve to show, be more likely to be recommended in, in AI search?

That's fantastic. And guess what? Everything you suggested is free unless you pay for the language model, like I said you should. But I mean, all that is very— that's all free. That's not you dumping a ton of money into. That's a good way to start, especially for you guys that are smaller. Now, for those, again, non-members, members know we have an internal member website with thousands of videos and tools that are searchable to help people. And you created a tool, I guess it was a week or two ago, to kind of summarize a lot of this information, right? Kind of explain to people members specifically, obviously, that have access to it, what that tool looks like and how it can benefit them.

Yeah, basically what we did was when that announcement came out of the change of LSA is we kind of broke it down and said, OK, here's what it is. Here's what it's not. It's still going to be, even though it's pulled into the new platform, as far as where it's showing up on the search results page, as far as how it's going to engage at an intent level, the return that you should be able to get off of your local service ads, that's not what's changing. And it's just a lot of the backend that's changing. So we, we kind of pulled away some to hopefully make it a little clearer of this is what's changing, this is what you need to do about it.

Yeah.

And Gave, you know, like you said, we gave the 6 callouts recommended that would be kind of the account-level overall universal kind of callouts and then callouts by trade. And just to really break it down and give you, here's your next steps that you need to take.

Yeah.

You know, if you're managing it yourself, you do this. If you're, if you've got an agency, here's the questions that you need to go to your agency with to make sure that you're all on the same page. And being prepared for the move that's coming.

I'm just thinking myself, I'd download that tool. I would download my data that we said to download, and I'd throw it into an AI model and ask it, you know, what am I doing right? What should I do with this data based on what Chris has created? You know, so there's a little tidbit too for you members that haven't done it. AI is a wild thing. Chris, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I mean, you're one of like, I don't know how many coaches we have, Now, I feel like we have an army of them. You know, it's, it's, it's incredible, the resources. So, you know, Chris is just, is one of many very talented people we have on our team. As he mentioned, we have 30 marketing vendors alone, partners, we try to call them partners, and we have countless others that work in every kind of industry that you folks are in, in home services. Plus, I don't even know, I know we were at 1,200 members at some point. I think, uh, that's been growing rapidly. It's a huge network that is here to help you if you're looking for help. You know, check us out at mycertainpath.com. Chris, again, thank you for your time. This was a lot of fun and best of luck at EP.

Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Bob.

My pleasure. Have a great day. I hope you've enjoyed today's show. If so, please like and subscribe on YouTube. If you're on your favorite podcast player, please leave us a 5-star review. The 2 seconds you take to leave a review will help other success-minded contractors like you find us and hopefully get a little bit better. Which elevates our entire industry. And please join me for future episodes. This has been The Successful Contractor powered by CertainPath. The Successful Contractor Podcast is a part of the CertainPath family. CertainPath builds successful home service businesses and has for more than 25 years. We do it by providing contractors with a proven path to success, professional coaching, software solutions, and a member community of more than 1,000 home service companies just like yours. Doubling your sales with a 20% net profit and an inspiring company culture really is possible. Let us show you the way. With CertainPath, success is made certain. Visit mycertainpath.com for more information.