The Complete Home Service Marketing Playbook

Today we're talking about the marketing stack from $1 to $10 million.

The first million-dollar shop is just get leads. Most of your money needs to be going to building your job board and then hiring the next tech. You have to get reviews on your GBP.

Yeah, it's so important.

What I wouldn't be spending on is like buying a billboard or a radio.

I think what people get freaked out about is like traffic has gone down.

Yeah, low-intent traffic that would often like inflate numbers. Like it'd make, it'd make us SEOs look way better than we actually are. So in 2026, SEO is building forward. user experience. The keywords are not enough.

What's your closing thoughts on AI and SEO?

Um, so the first, the first million-dollar shop, yeah, is just get leads, really. It's like, yeah, you, in marketing spend at least, yeah, every dollar that goes out needs to come back within a relatively appropriate time frame, right? where this is where a lot of times, I'll, you know, someone will talk to me, they're doing $1 to $2 million, and I kind of ask them what their marketing spend is. They're, you know, they're saying, we're hurting for leads. And I say, okay, what does marketing look like? Well, we have an SEO agency and we're paying them $3,000 a month and that's it.

Yeah.

And I'm like, I love SEO. SEO leads are the best. Like, let's do that, but let's do it when you can really afford to. 'Cause if you have $3,000 a month to spend, and it's all going to a delayed lead source that compounds over time, your job board's not gonna be full, right? So I always talk with people like at $1 million, if you are using a relatively, you know, consistent budget framework or whatever, most of your money needs to be going to filling your job board and then hiring the next tech and filling his, you know, filling his job.

Yeah, yeah.

So that's like the big thing. But even when you're talking about the tech stack, like, One of the big things, so obviously, like, LSA is great. And the caveat, LSA is a lot different than it used to be. So if you're a plumber in Dallas and you have 75 reviews and you try and turn on local service ads, it's gonna be hard.

Yeah.

Because there's gonna be 15 people with 1,000+ reviews and it's gonna be really—

We talked right before we went on of like, there's this sort of like, and we've talked about this a lot on the show.

Yeah.

Because I am, frankly, I'm kind of annoyed by it.

Yes.

It's almost like the more rural, the easier. There's no other people there. So there was a— I have a friend and he was out, we had like a shop tour thing.

Yeah.

And he's based outta Chicago, but his businesses are in Nebraska.

Okay.

And it's hilarious. He buys these like $2, $3 million companies and he is very literally it. Like there's one game in town and he's it. And the obvious downside is it potentially caps—

Sure.

Like it does cap the upside.

Sure.

Like you can't have a $100 million single branch.

Yeah.

But like if you have $5 to $10 million and your LSA leads are $20 'cause no one else is there, like who gives a shit?

Yep. Go do that in 5 locations, 10 locations. Totally.

Well, that's what he did. He's on 4 now.

So I, this is like the Sam Walton approach to Walmart. So when Walmart first started, they didn't want to go compete in the big markets because they couldn't afford to.

Yeah.

And they— he wanted to work in smaller communities and then grow into larger ones.

Yeah.

And so, he intentionally went to the town instead of, you know, where's the town with 500,000 people? He said, where's the town with 50,000 people in a 30-mile radius or whatever? I don't know the exact numbers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's the same idea where if he can stand up enough of those stores, then he has a pooled revenue that is such that he can then go afford to compete in a bigger market where he can pay a premium for leads because he has all the systems and he's got the revenue backing him. So, That is interesting. But yeah, if you're a plumber in Dallas with 75 reviews, it's just hard. It's— you're— I tell people, don't count on it. Like, turn it on, try it.

Don't count on it. You might get a couple leads.

Yeah.

But if you're in, you know, there's someone here at the, at the marketing workshop and they're in like a more rural part of the Northeast. Yeah. New York. And, you know, we were talking the other day and they were like, yeah, we're a little bit slow. And I was like, well, what? service areas you have turned on? They're like, oh, we don't really like to, we don't wanna drive like too far, so we only have our little city turned on. It's like, well, if you're slow, just turn on the next 2 cities. They like tripled their leads overnight because no one else is running LSA.

Well, I've used the example on this show, but like I've talked to people in different parts of Ohio and they've doubled in the last year or 2. And it's like, well, what'd you do? Oh, we turned on LSA. And it's like, oh my God, that's like a, you know, There. So there's still parts of like the country where this works. It just is rural.

Yes, it's, it's going to be, hey, our county is spread out. It's a large county by area and it has 120,000 people.

Yeah.

Like with one, one main city that's got, you know, 45,000. And it's like, but again, like you can do millions of dollars in revenue.

Yeah.

In that.

And so that's like an example that I've given is there's a CILA branch and CILA is like a large consolidator. And they do like 35 million in a population of 40,000 people. So you can do it.

Yeah, they do.

They own HVAC electric.

Yeah.

So you can do it. So that's why I said, hey, potentially caps your upside because I mean, that's an exception, not the rule. But like that guy's doing, you know, a dollar per person basically.

It's insane.

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So, but anyway, it's like do the basics, right? So turn on Google LSA.

Yep.

If you can get leads out of that, that's awesome. Yep. The next thing, and this is like where a lot of agencies won't really say this 'cause it doesn't benefit an agency, but I tell people, when you're at the million-dollar point, trying to pay, you know, pay an agency to run, let's say, like pay-per-click ads for you, you're having to pay a fee, plus like to run pay-per-click well, you need a decent budget to make it work. So I usually tell people like, hold off on that for a while. Like, go get scrappy and run aggregators, right?

I agree with that.

Test all the aggregators in your market.

I mean, Thumbtack. Thumbtack, Yelp, Angie, like the pay-per-click I think this is back to the, what's your technology?

Yes. That's what I was coming back to.

Because we went and we bought this company in January and we basically turned on LSA. And like, oh yeah, we doubled. There's that story that I've had, but that was also our story too. We went from $1,000 a month of LSA to $5,000, but the company doubled. We went from $100,000 of revenue to we did $240,000 in sales in February. It was ridiculous. And all of that was just filling the board. But just LSA.

Yeah.

The problem was we didn't have a speed-to-lead technology.

Yep.

They were on ServiceTitan. They're using Marketing Pro. Marketing Pro is not a speed-to-lead technology. It's like a maybe email and potentially text.

Yeah.

Potentially. Like they're very like stingy on that. And so we had— and it takes a kind of a minute to get the Avoca like speed-to-lead thing set up. So because you have to go through the TCPA approvals and All that stuff. So it took like a month, I think. But like, but now we can turn on Thumbtack. Now we can turn on Angie's List.

Because when someone puts on in their information, you're texting immediately, you know, getting a notification, a call or whatever.

So we weren't even doing aggregators without that technology because in our minds it's kind of like wasted money.

I was talking to a shop that's doing about $1.5 million yesterday.

Yeah.

And my advice to them because of their financial situation, they didn't have a huge budget, which makes sense. And I said, you should go try the aggregators. They said, okay, they don't, none of them work.

Yeah.

And I said, I'm sure some, like, it's very market dependent. I'm sure some of them are not great for your market.

Yeah.

But I've never known a market unless it's really rural where it's not offered that it doesn't work. So I kind of asked the process. I was like, if you, let's say it's Angie's and they sell you a lead and like, what's your process? Well, we see it come in and we get to it.

Yeah.

Okay, how long does that take? Well, it depends on if we're online. So it's like, okay, well, you know, if you're not calling in the first 30 seconds or texting in the first 30 seconds. And I said, what if you do get to it quickly? Well, I call and they don't answer. I usually go straight to voicemail, leave them a voicemail and try them later. Like, do you ever call them twice in a row? They're like, oh no, I don't want to annoy people. And I said, well, if you called me once and I don't know your number, I'll never even see that it came in. But if you call me twice, I then, it comes through and I see that I had a missed call from you, I'm way more likely to pick up. And I was asking you to reach out to me. I need your help.

Yeah.

And so it's those little things that you have to be able to do to take advantage of it. But like, when you're this size, aggregators can be great and just be scrappy. Like, I'm gonna be the first, I'm gonna get the speed-to-lead platform set up. I'm going to use my, hey, I'm the owner of the business coming to talk to you versus, you know, I'm one of—

I'm Joe Schmo Sales.

Exactly. And so do that and that's gonna help you fill your, job boards like LSA aggregators. I mean, the biggest thing we talk about all the time, we don't need to, to, you know, beat a dead horse, but get reviews. You have to get reviews on your GBP.

Yeah, it's so important.

Like BigRep, like, yeah, they're amazing. You get automated reviews, they help you with like setting up your profile correctly. But even if you are in a market where people have thousands of reviews around you, you can still own your backyard.

Yeah.

For even if it's only a mile or 2-mile radius, That's a big deal if it's a populated market. And so, and those, those are great. And so you need to be calling after jobs, like getting the reviews again, using I'm the owner. Like, I know owners that make calls at the end of every day and their techs have asked for reviews, but they say, hey, my name is John Wilson. I run a local company here. It means the world to us that, one, we did a good job and then two, that we're able to, to know it. And it also really just helps our business. And people are way more responsive to that. And so like those little things that don't scale, people are like, oh, I can't do it 'cause it doesn't scale. You're not scaled yet. Do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that's how you fast-track it. You know, have a basic website. You need a CRM, but like, just like it's these little things like reviews, treating people well, servicing 'em well. And then, yeah, is it, are they coming through LSA? Are they coming through aggregators? you know, how are you getting them? But every dollar that you're spending really needs to come back to, to being a lead, like in the short term. What I wouldn't be spending on is like brand strategy. So like, yeah, not buying a billboard or a radio ad or anything like that because it's good that people know your brand. But if you're not getting calls immediately, like I tell people, build your brand through reviews and through treating people well in the first $1 to $5 million or whatever. And then you can worry about that. The other thing I see a lot, full-time hires too early. And usually—

Yeah, I don't know why I see that so much.

I think just people think like, I need to do marketing and so I need to hire someone to do marketing.

Yeah, there's like companies that, like I'll hear people in like the $3 to $5 range and be like, yeah, I think we need... And I'm like, what are you talking?

Like, it's just—

Our first hire was at $13 million. Like, it's, um, and even that felt a bit early.

Well, it's because I think a lot of owners are just like, I'm not a marketing person. And so this person either has a marketing degree or they've worked in marketing somewhere. The problem is at that size, what you can afford to pay someone to do marketing, um, they're, they're usually maybe good at one thing. Yeah, I'm really great at organic social media. I'm really great at running paid ads on Google. Yeah, but if you're trying to optimize a business profile, You know, do SEO on your website, if you're eventually trying to do Facebook ads or, you know, general branding, like you don't really wanna spend a full-time salary on a generalist.

Yeah.

Not yet. Now I'm a big fan of in-house marketing hires as you scale.

Yeah.

That essentially agencies can partner with and eventually as you grow, you can outgrow your agency, you can hire more things internally, but they're not even really, they're not even like the direct, marketer pushing and pulling buttons.

Yeah.

They're, they are strategy, accountability. They're communicating what costs—

Budget management. What cost—

yeah, what does our cost per lead need to be? What, what channels are working? What, what, uh, levers need to be pulled up and down? But that's kind of— we can get into that next. But like, that's $5 million is like not even that higher necessarily, but you start to think more about that.

Yeah.

But like, an owner, a good agency, um, is hopefully going to Overcommunicate to you as an owner and speak in plain language that you don't have to rely on a marketing coordinator or whatever for that early.

So on the one, sort of that finishing up the one stage, we have 3 businesses now that are in that 1 to 5 range. And our path to 5, this is it.

This is it.

We're buying more leads. We're installing the technology to respond to those leads fast. And we're selling them.

Yep.

And it people really love to overcomplicate it.

Yeah.

And it's just not that comp.

Yeah.

It's not that complicated. It's it's simple but not easy.

Yeah.

Like you just need leads. And like that one plumbing company, the example I gave, like we took it over in January. It's a great team. Like they just needed more leads. They did a million, like 1.48 last year or 1 point. Yeah. And Like, we'll probably do 4.

Yeah.

This year.

Just with some simple but not easy necessarily.

Simple but not easy. It's expanding the lead budget significantly, installing the right technology, answering the phone more. And like, that's actually it.

And you also have to price right. That's another— that's one more thing.

Yes.

Like, we don't have to talk about it a long time.

Yeah.

But you, if you—

We did a 30% price increase, like, off the rip.

If you can't afford leads but your competitors can, there's usually a pricing issue because it is a supply and demand market. Like, Google is not new to this. Like, they will not make a lead so expensive that no one can make money on it. But there are people like, you know, you've talked about it before, if my average ticket can be higher than my competitor, I can pay more per lead, I can win more leads.

I got in this discussion last 2, well, 2 weeks ago, we had like a shop tour thing.

Yes.

Maybe 15 companies were here and this was a discussion people were really focused on. Well, like, what's your cost per lead? And it's like, who the fuck cares? Like, it doesn't— it doesn't actually matter, right? So in our restoration company, Cut and Dry, they did $150,000 last month at a massive gross margin, like 70% gross margin. It's a ridiculous business. And Sarah, she runs it and she's awesome. And like, the leads are like $500. Like, we've spent more than $500. What's your average ticket? What's your margin? 30%. Yeah. So like, okay, we close 1 in 3. So we spent $1,500 per job, but our average ticket might be $6,000.

Yeah.

And it's like, okay, would I pay 25% for that? Sure. Yeah, sure.

Especially with your gross margin. Like, it's know your numbers and then like know what they need to be. Yeah. Anyway, that, that's a whole other conversation. But like, we— there's only so much a good agency can even do in terms of cost per lead because you get in trouble.

You know, people— I think cost per lead is not the thing to focus on.

It's not. And people—

what's your ROI?

Yes. People ask me all the time, what's my cost per lead going to be? And I said, well, It's going to depend a lot on a lot of things. Like, you're a plumber, I can get your cost per lead really low and you'll only be doing leaky faucet calls. You'll never touch a water heater for the rest of your life.

A good example of this is LSA versus Angie.

Yes.

So LSA might be like $80 to $100 a lead. Angie leads might be $15 to $30.

What are you closing? What's the quality?

So our book rate on Angie is 29%. Our book rate for LSA is like 80%. So like right off the rip, It takes, what, 3 Angie leads, which is $90 to equal 1 LSA lead.

So, it's all the same. And you're not introducing automatic competition. Like, people, when they called you through LSA, they saw your brand and your reviews. So, you already have a higher—

It's a little annoying that people get so— it's like you are missing the forest through the trees.

Cost per lead matters as a part of an equation.

As a part of like 5 other data points.

It's the funnel, but we could go forever on that. Okay. $5 million. I would say it's a lot of doing the same stuff better. So up your budgets on LSA. If you found a great aggregator that works, you have a system, keep upping it.

Yep.

Somewhere along this path, you can start to think about introducing pay-per-click more because yes, cost per lead is going to be a little bit higher than LSA. Everything's market dependent. You're going to have to pay more for a man, for, you know, an agency to manage it. But like, what's great about pay-per-click is you can really position yourself well and you can scale it. I always tell people like LSA is great, but everybody's LSA account looks the same or LSA ad essentially.

Yes.

It's how many reviews you have. You have a couple of things you can toggle.

Yeah.

But if I am running in a market where everyone's running PPC and when I look for plumbing, you know, plumbing Akron.

Yeah.

And the guy's ad says plumber in Akron and mine says, you know, plumbing, plumbing Akron, same-day service, No service fee.

Yeah.

No, like, who are you picking?

Yeah.

You're picking the one with the unique selling proposition.

Yeah.

We work with some people that are in heavily private equity markets.

Yeah.

And I'm like, guys, let's run an ad that says, still family owned, still locally owned, because consumers are more and more aware of private equity.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And so—

I have a friend in Virginia and he was telling me, we actually had him on the show, But he was telling, he might've even said on the show.

This is the conversation I had with him.

Okay. Yeah. So he'll walk up, his techs will walk up to the door and the customers will ask, hey, are you guys private equity? At the door, which was really interesting.

He was the first guy because I was talking through how ads might make sense for him.

I think that Coast, because Len the Plumber was one of the earlier big deals. I feel like that was 2017, 2018. Big freaking company. And that went pretty early. And then Horizon has been humongous over there too. So I think like the combination of those 2, they're like 40 branches each. Like, I think they got— yeah.

Well, people know. And like, I live in Dallas, huge HVAC market, a lot of private equity.

Yeah.

Like people, people are aware. And, you know, even like if you'll, you know, go look on like a forum somewhere, it's like, hey, who's the best whatever company, it's like, hey, you know, the joke is like, well, if they walk in with an iPad, you know, run away. Like, that's kind of the joke because everyone has the same play. But yeah, what's your unique selling proposition in your market? Is it— do you work with a lot in a, in an area with a lot of chucking in a truck? Then yeah, then play like the professional, timely, you know, buttoned up, you know, approach. Are you in a big private equity market? Well, we're still family owned, still locally owned. I love that because it tells people you're family owned and you still are, which implies that other people aren't. Like, yeah, those little things can really work.

So yeah.

PPC is great for that. You can be way more targeted on the type of customer.

And you just have budget.

Yeah, and you have budget, and so you can go for it. Real SEO strategy, like thinking through how does my local SEO—

Maybe pushing on a programmatic type.

Yeah, with my Google Business Profile, how is that gonna tie into how my website performs? What content am I putting on the website? And then this is also where, depending on how good you are at getting reviews, you can think about more GBP locations. on the other side of town, like however far it's gonna be, because if you're able to get to 1,000 reviews or 750 reviews, whatever, depending on your market, then you can support a second one. And can you get that to 100 reviews really quick? Well, now you have another just like awesome review source that is really, it's a lot harder to do that when you're at a million because you're not running enough jobs to actually support 2 profiles with enough reviews.

Yeah.

So that's big. And then you really get like into, Um, you've grown your customer list over time, and so you're doing a lot more retargeting. So people—

I actually think that comes in earlier.

Well, it should always be a play, but it becomes more of a, um, it becomes a bigger deal because the bigger your list is. Now, if you've been in— if you maybe are a family-owned company and you're at $1.5 million, you may have a customer list as big as, you know, as you do. Like, if they've been in business for 80 years.

The company that we took over in January, they had 8,000 people on the list. And that's a humongous list. So the number that I've always sort of had in mind was 6,000 people in your customer list is one full-time outbounder making 100 calls a day.

Yep.

Because then you call your whole customer list every 90 days and then you just restart.

Yeah.

Because you probably won't get ahold of them. You'll probably actually only talk to them once a year.

Yep.

But 6,000 is like, that's enough for a full-time person to call that list every single day and that'd be their whole job.

And so even if you don't have 6,000, when your CSR is not picking up the phone or your dispatch or whatever, like—

So that was another part of our core strategy for doubling that business. It was LSA and literally 20 outbounds a day. Like we actually couldn't even— the company was so small that because it only had 4 technicians, you couldn't service it. I think we have 7 now, but like, yeah, we couldn't service it. If we did put a full-time outbounder on it, we would book 8 to 10 appointments a day because that's what our full-time outbounders book. Like, I don't have room for 8 to 10 appointments today. Like, we're literally too small.

Yeah, you need to hire because it's too successful.

It's too good of a lead channel. Here's a stat about Yelp that I bet you didn't know. When millions of people ask AI like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any of the others what the best home service provider is, Yelp recommendations show up 3 times more than Angie's, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, Better Business Bureau, and Nextdoor combined. And here's why that matters to you. 91 to 97% of those searches do not include the business name. The homeowner hasn't picked anybody yet, and they're deciding right now, and Yelp is where they're getting their answers. These aren't low-intent browsers. Over half of Yelp's 76 million monthly audience earns 6 figures and owns their home. Jose Varga started Five Star HVAC on his own in Dallas, and he turned on Yelp ads, and they hit 30% year-over-year growth with $650 revenue per call, and he grew his monthly leads by 444%. If you want to own the moment when homeowners are making their choice, then you should be checking out Yelp. Start earning your share on Yelp's 350,000 daily home service leads by going to business.yelp/ownedandoperated. Is AI killing SEO?

Short answer, no. So I've been working in SEO for the last 10 years.

Okay.

And this question has existed in different forms since then, and probably since before then.

What are some other forms?

So basically, is SEO dead has been a question that has been kicked around the digital sphere for a long time. And this is just like the modern-day AI era of that question.

Yeah.

Personally is what I feel. Um, so in 2026, um, the key to local success in SEO is being the most trustworthy, reliable, accurate answer, um, exactly when somebody needs it when they're searching. That has pretty much remained the same, um, forever.

Mhm.

Um, but what has changed now is the fact that AI has not killed it, but probably changed it beyond recognition. Like, for me personally, if I think back to when I first started working in SEO, I would probably never have imagined this, but I don't think it's a bad thing at all. So before, to be able to rank, you would just need Google to crawl your website or crawl your page and index it.

Yeah, I mean, even just 2 years ago, you used to be able to, you know, we were doing like a programmatic project and it was like inputting for indexing every day or something. It was kind of ridiculous, but you used to be able to like submit for indexing or something like that. And, um, yeah, it wasn't complicated. No. But honestly, I don't feel like because of the rapid state of change, I haven't really been paying attention at all to how SEO works now in the last 18 months. I just, I have no idea.

Yeah.

But I used to know, I used to know how it worked.

Yeah, for sure. Um, so like I said, I think like previously, like you say, even like 2 or 3 years ago.

Yeah.

What was important is your page would get indexed and that's all that Google cared about was indexing the page and going, okay, yeah, that can go on position 3, page 1, whatever. AI now needs context. It needs to understand those pages in order to be able to rank them within like AI overviews, AI queries on the platforms themselves. And it's so much more than just Google scanning a page. It's about AI going in, reading that page, understanding the context, understanding the what, the why, the where. Specifically for local SEO, the where is very important. Um, and what that has given us, I think personally, is a much more meaningful set of data in 2026. So previously, obviously we report and we still do, and any SEO will tell you that you report on traffic figures for your clients.

Yeah.

Or on like conversions. So traffic figures, I think in the past have been a bit of a false sun. So you can say, hey, actually we sent 20,000 visitors to your website, but a lot of the time 15,000 of those are going looking at blogs and they never take an action.

Yeah, yeah. So we bought a company in 2021. Yeah. And they had 30,000 monthly hits.

Yeah.

And it was like, wow, you know, what's going on? And honestly, the— they should— what they should have done with it is sold air filters or something. Like they should have actually made use of that because like traffic was coming from all over. But it was, yeah, blogs because their backlink strategy.

Yeah.

But like their actual intent visitors was very low.

Yeah, exactly. And it's, you know, it's like it always looks great on paper and it's a great number when it comes down to the crux of it. If you're only sending people to a blog post and they're only getting information and DIYing the service that you're selling and taking it away, while those numbers look good on paper for like figures, actually you're not getting people that are there specifically to convert.

Yeah.

So if we're talking about like AI overviews and like how-tos and Google keeping people on the results page, um, then what you're doing is getting a set of data where you You know, quite confidently say the people that are actually coming to your site and clicking through are a potential true lead or customer and not just some Joe Bloggs looking for how to fix a dripping faucet, for example. Mm-hmm.

I think what people get freaked out about, just from like what I see from Reddit or just talking to people, is like traffic has gone down and your thought is, Yes.

Yeah.

Bad traffic went down.

Yeah. Not that it was necessarily bad traffic, but I think it was—

Low intent.

Yeah, low intent traffic that would often inflate numbers. It'd make us SEOs look way better than we actually are because, again, those aren't converting pages. Those aren't people who are ever going to convert.

Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't paid much attention. I don't know how our— like, we should look it up, but, uh, like, I'm sure our marketing manager does, but I don't know how our monthly— I'm, I'm assuming it dropped over the past few years because, like, I think everybody's dropped. What has— does DA matter anymore, like domain authority?

I'm gonna say something maybe controversial here.

Okay.

Um, I don't buy into DA. So DA, or like DR depending on which tool you're using, um, is unique to Like each tool that you go on.

So Ahrefs, it's not Google, it's Ahrefs.

Exactly, Ahrefs or like Semrush or Search Atlas. Um, and it is like, uh, their formula or their algorithm to come up with that figure. If you put the same website into 3 different ones, you'll get a different figure.

Yeah.

Um, and like your site can have domain authority, but domain authority isn't a measurable metric that you could say, oh yeah, you're a 10 out of 100. Um, and I think it's super easy for people to get hung up on that when in reality what you want to look at, bottom line, if there's just one thing, is the conversions, right? I, I could ignore every single other metric if conversion is going in the right direction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, we, uh, are— my, my like commentary on domain authority, we're at Ahrefs' house here, so, uh, so my commentary on that is Over the past couple years, our domain authority keeps going up and we're just like, we're not doing anything different. So what we're assuming is happening is we've ranked well in the past and our blogs that were low intent did whatever they're going to do and got more backlinks because we have not been working that hard on it. And I think that we're just showing up in more search because of the amount of volume and that's giving us more credibility or something, but we're up like 10 points. Like we're in the 40s and like we were in the 20s.

Yeah.

And it's like we didn't do anything. Yeah, I mean, we'll keep it, but it is, it is a bit interesting.

Yeah, and age domain does add into that, um, like domain authority score as well. But that, um, it kind of contradicts itself because you could get a new website spun up that gets a ton of great backlinks straight off the bat that isn't old, doesn't have that sort of like historical footprint.

Yeah.

Um, and performs really well, but their DA may still say 7.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. All right, so, so you're thinking that searches are down. Uh, God, I wish I had my laptop and we could like dive into this a little bit. But searches are down, but it's bad search— or not bad, but like low intent, which again totally tracks because I'm sure that, um, I'm thinking of my friend's websites, like we've talked about it like 6 months ago maybe, and the blog, like their traffic went down, but it was all like How to fix your Navien water heater.

Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, okay, nobody really gives a shit about that. Like, I don't give a shit about that. Okay, and like, have we seen, uh, I had someone on the show, um, it was Zach from Mantle, and he, he's not like an SEO expert, but it was just like data, uh, what he was finding that it was like 60% of people found their con— their contractor still on Google. 20% from like referrals, uh, but it was only like 3% from ChatGPT. Has that like changed or like any—

Um, this is another one that I've got a bit of a hot take on because it's a conversation I have with my clients a ton.

Yeah.

Um, and I personally don't know anyone that uses an AI platform as a search engine. I don't know about you.

Um, I mean, the results are always terrible.

Yeah, exactly. Um, and the— they all pull their data from Google. Uh, Google's got the biggest knowledge base, the most data. Um, yeah, I guess the intention is that one day that won't be the case. Um, but yeah, I don't think that, um, Google should be quaking in its boots as a search engine, um, that's going to be replaced with AI for at least the, the immediate future and probably the next 5, 10 years.

Yeah. So with like sort of low-intent searches down, your take is that high-intense searches are still happening on Google.

Absolutely, yeah. So if you think of things like, um, looking for the best Thai food in— best Thai food in Stowe, Ohio, for example, you're not going to read an AI overview. You may get a few suggestions from there, but then you're going to go click through the profiles, take a look at the review counts, look at the pictures.

So that's what I've heard is like discovery happens on ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever, but then like authentication or like, uh, verification happens on Google. So hey, I was served up like, give me some Thai options for this event or whatever the fuck, and then we're gonna go over to Google and like, are their reviews terrible or are they good? Uh, and I feel like that's how I— like, I'll occasionally do that.

Yeah, for sure. There's still a lot of distrust with the general public with AI.

Well, it's, it's because the results are terrible. Like, I tried to do— I tried to do this yesterday, and it was sort of funny 'cause I was— I logged— I, like, opened up my laptop this morning, and my search was still up. And I was looking for, like, something weird. And, like, I never use ChatGPT to, like, look for places to go.

Yeah.

But I was like, hey, give me the vibiest coffee shop in Cleveland. And in my mind, I couldn't think of another way to word it. And because that's how I was wording it, I was like, I don't think Google's gonna do much with this search. So, because I think I said vibiest. And, um, so I went over to ChatGPT, it was terrible. Like, the results were still, were still terrible.

Yeah, absolutely.

But yeah.

Um, yeah, that level of distrust, like, I think it's there with like the general Joe Bloggs member of the public, people who are spending money on, um, digital services. So our clients specifically, uh, a ton, ton of them don't, don't buy into it, don't want it. Obviously, it's a case of, you know, we have conversations about the benefits and how we—

Yeah.

You know, how we don't just spit out AI-generated content as is, and we humanize and edit content. So that tracks with that as well. Another thing that's still always going to get clicks is emergency queries. So if I'm like emergency plumber in Stow, and I'm looking for that at 9 PM at night, I need to take an immediate action.

Yeah.

I'm not even looking at the AIO view, I'm scrolling straight down for finding that call button and picking up the phone, booking a job, absolutely will never ever go away from, um, will never be sort of like taken over by AI. Um, and then brand searches. So somebody that already knows you is typing in, um, owned and operated, is typing in Wilson Companies. Either they may not be a new client, uh, but they may be like a repeat customer or somebody that's had a word-of-mouth recommendation. They know what they're looking for. They don't Yeah. So they're typing that in, they're seeing the profile, clicking a button, picking up the phone.

Yeah. Yeah. People, um, what we found, which in some ways it's good, in some ways it's like kind of annoying, uh, so, but we'll look at our monthly reporting for our GBPs and some of that, like most of our traffic, like north of 80%.

Yeah.

Comes from someone searching Wilson. So like the good is like, hey, we've been effective at branding.

Yeah.

And do you know, hey, great job. You know, all that money went somewhere. The bad is like, okay, not that many people are like, we're not showing up in the plumber near me's. And I don't know if there's just not that many plumber near me's, but, um, it was kind of, it was really shocking when I first saw that because I really thought that, hey, all of our traffic is coming from you know, emergency plumber, hot water tank broken, you know, sort of pick a problem. And really the vast majority was like someone just looking for us. Yeah, which I don't know if that's good or bad. Like, it's good and bad there.

Yeah, I think if you're operating on a large scale like you are, um, then it's never a bad thing and it doesn't really matter. Um, if you are a smaller company, um, who can't rank for those key terms, but your brand search is like 50 a month, so you're getting not much, then you're like, hey, actually we need to look at how we target brand versus brand, how we direct people straight to service pages rather than just the homepage.

Yeah.

Supporting contextual content, like build that network of content around the topics of the services. But yeah, for a larger company, it doesn't really matter.

Yeah. Okay. Well, how can people drive SEO today? What does SEO look like? How do you do it successfully?

Um, so in 2026, SEO is building for a user experience. Um, the keywords are not enough. The, um, sort of like index and spit out a page into, uh, the SERPs is not enough.

Yeah.

You need to be able to demonstrate authority and expertise. So when these LLMs are crawling your site and taking this information, they're like, actually, this guy's— no, this guy knows what he's talking about, and we want to put this or serve this as a result within the LLM. Um, but again, it comes back to that contextual information and the, the, the AI model understanding what is on your site rather than just going, oh, keyword, cool, position 3.

Yeah. How do you think, um, it's just like a, a, a, a issue that we're having. I'm curious, like, your take on this.

Yeah.

We're using Webflow.

Yep.

And, uh, like, we, we did a programmatic project with Server Scalers, like, 3, 4 years. I don't even remember what it was.

I remember it.

And, uh, we got on Webflow and, uh, Sam Thompson like pushed that programmatic project out and I don't even know how many freaking pages. It's like 20,000 or something.

I know. Yeah.

Something ridiculous. And one of the problems that we had is we ran out of like pages or categories or something.

Mm-hmm.

Like, what do you, what do you do?

Um, so if you like run out—

'Cause it feels like one of the strengths of, I'm sorry, to my point, bringing it back to this topic.

Yeah.

One of the strengths of AI is that we can mass produce SEO. Yeah. And like you can take on a project like Programmatic that, you know, 10 years ago was probably like a million dollar project.

Yeah.

And Angie's List invested tens of millions of dollars into their website and you can do it now for like not a million dollars, right? Like you can do it somewhat affordably. And we did that project in 2023 and I think that was a huge part of our growth over the next couple of years. was we hit AI hard and fast when it first came out and covered everything in the world. And now it's like, okay, we did that. Now what should we be working on?

Yeah, sure. So I think in a case like that where you're like, actually, we've exhausted every service, we've exhausted every arm of every service, we've exhausted every location.

I think we put like 20,000 or 17,000, somewhere in that range. It was crazy.

Yeah. If you've genuinely reached the limit of what you can produce in terms of like topic, um, obviously like time goes on, there will be developments and all sorts of things. But if you are genuinely at the point where you're like, I've reached the absolute limit at this, then you just refresh the content. You add more expertise in there. You can add quotes from, uh, somebody that carries clout in the industry. Again, just building that trust, that authority, um, like expanding on the content, adding like Mixing up the FAQs, researching what has changed since 2023 when those went up. Maybe there has been a massive shift in searches for a specific keyword that relates to something that wasn't a thing in 2023. So think of, for example, if there was a big weather event somewhere that might have, I don't know, changed—

A hurricane or something?

Yeah, that's changed the landscape of a city or a town. So there is always an opportunity to refresh content, and it is always— it's never a bad thing. Obviously, if you have like a really well-written 1,000-word page and you're just going to bin it off for like 10 words and a picture of like a local landmark, then yeah. But there is always room to improve. Um, the key thing about SEO is— and this is like said to death, but it's obviously never done, it's never ever finished— you can never get to a point where like, oh, my SEO is finished, I can sit back now, because there is always someone waiting on the wings to come and knock you off the top spot. And once that happens, if you don't keep on top of that, then it's a domino effect and you just fall further and further and further down the SERP results. So, um, yeah, even if you think you're done, you're definitely not.

Yeah. As your business grows, the financial decisions get a lot more expensive. Things like hiring techs, buying trucks, raising pricing, and marketing. If you're making those decisions without really understanding your numbers, You're probably leaving a pile of money on the table, and that's where profit and grit comes in. Tyler has built, scaled, and sold a $25 million service business, so his advice comes from real operating experience. You'll work with him directly to improve your cash flow, understand your margins, and build better forecasts to make you more confident as you make decisions as you grow. One client increased bottom line profit by 11% after fixing pricing, improving. improving job mix and stabilizing their cash flow. If you're doing between $3 and $5 million a year and you want more clarity around your finances, book a free 20-minute strategy call at the link below. There's a company, um, and this still freaking cracks me up. So there's 2 companies, but one of them specifically is like, they're not, uh, they're not a good like local plumbing company. Like they're not great marketers, they're not I don't know. I don't think they've actually grown in like 15 years. I think they've been at $2 million for literally 15 years, which is kind of impressive in its own right. They own page 1 of Google, and I do not understand how for the fucking life of me, because we have put so much work into SEO and they still show up. Like top 5 searches for plumber Akron. And I'm just like, that's crazy. So like, what do you think I can do to kick them off?

Um, so my first, like, first stop on that journey would be to do like a, obviously like a third-party audit of their site, figure out what they're doing in the background.

Yeah.

Um, so look at the backlinks that they've got, look at how long their site has been established, look at how often they're publishing content.

I don't think they touched their website in 10— like they couldn't have. The business has gone nowhere. 15 years.

Yeah, sure. Then in that case, then I would say that, um, strong brand recognition— is it well known in the area? Do people, like, if you say it to some— someone in the street, would they know who you're talking about?

Maybe.

Then backlinks.

Like, it's crazy. Like, I bet I could look right now and they're still— like, it's wild.

Yeah, that is wild. I'd like to have a look at it.

I'll show you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll show you. So there's 2 of them. So one of them, like, earned it. They did good, the business is good, and I'm like, okay, pop off. But yeah, the other one is just like, how? How are you doing this? It's really genuinely wild to me. Okay, so authority now was back, probably still is backlinks, but you're talking about quoting influencers or quoting big people in the space. to drive more authority. Can you give us some examples that are like home servicey?

Yeah, for sure. So, um, if we were, for example, someone was going to write an article about loft insulation, for example.

Okay.

So in that article, you'd want to have direct quotes from somebody. They don't have to be well known. But as long as Google can recognize that this person is knowledgeable and is an authority on this subject, So I'm sure there's some big players in the loft insulation world that aren't well known by anyone outside of it. But adding expert insights from those kind of people and marking those things up in the backend with structured data and just feeding into that, this is useful, helpful content delivered by an expert, not just some random guy who's thrown a page up on a website.

Yeah. Okay.