Google Accidentally Revealed the Future of SEO

Google just revealed how to rank in AI search, and most home service businesses completely missed it. A couple weeks ago, Google Search Central released documentation on generative AI fundamentals, and if you know how to read between the lines, it shows you exactly where search is heading in the next year. I've been doing local SEO since 2017, and my company has generated over $47 million in revenue for home service businesses, and we have clients that rank number one on Google right now. But here's the problem. Ranking number one on Google right now is important, but it's not going to matter as much as it used to because people are shifting from a traditional search on Google to more conversational AI searches. And in this video, I'm going to break down exactly what Google is telling us, how you can adapt your home service business to be one of the first movers, and what you should be doing with your marketing company to make sure that you are going to be shown in AI search. And at the end of this video, I'm going to give you a step-by-step checklist on how to prepare your home service business for AI search. Here's the Google Search Central documentation for generative AI fundamentals. We're talking about optimizing your website for generative AI features on search, Is SEO still relevant? Applying foundational SEO best practices to generative AI search. And we're going to be going through and talking about these things and breaking them down into your terms for home service businesses. So the first thing, elephant in the room, does SEO still even matter? Based on the documentation, the short answer is yes. And they specifically say short answer is yes. Google confirms AI search is still built on its core ranking systems. And GEO, AEO, these are terms that people throw around, but the fundamentals of SEO still matter to Google, and that helps them in their AI search. AEO and GEO are not separate strategies from SEO. They are the same game. Most AI SEO advice online is overcomplicating a simple truth. And that simple truth is that you need to be creating content that's helpful for people, that's valuable, that's not slop, essentially is what they say. Key reframe, SEO fundamental still matters. The difference is content quality and originality. So let's talk about this. They bring this up constantly is commodity content is dead. Right here you can see creating non-commodity content that's helpful, reliable, and people-first. So this is what they're talking about. Be sure that you're writing non-commodity content that your readers will find helpful and reliable. Commodity content, for example, something like 7 tips for first-time home buyers, is often based on common knowledge which could originate from anyone and typically adds little unique insight for readers. In contrast, non-commodity content such as why we waive inspection and save money, a look inside the sewer line, provides unique expert experience takes that go beyond common knowledge and the ordinary, straight from their help doc. So what does this mean for you? Commodity content that's dying is 7 tips for first-time home buyers, generative, generic AI-generated listicles. So the top 10 such and such of such and such. This is common knowledge that they are trying to get rid of AI slop and explicitly saying do not do this. Content that sounds smart but says nothing, broad topics with no specificity, volume over useful strategies, What wins? Very specific content. Why is my outdoor spigot leaking when off? This is a real customer question that we got that we create content on. Black water backing up into a shower. This is things that most ChatGPT LLMs will not know about because it's a real customer question. Sewer line cleanout cost in specific area. Real customer questions in their customer language, experience-based, hyper-specific answers. So you need to stop creating commodity-type content and start creating real content from real conversations. So here's why most marketing agencies were going to struggle with this big shift. Most marketing companies start with ChatGPT and produce broad generic output. And even if you're a home service business owner that doesn't have an agency, you're usually going to start with ChatGPT. Hey, what should I be talking about? Such and such things. And then it's going to help you start the process there. The problem is that you're starting from commodity. You're starting from common knowledge that things that that already know about this stuff. The second thing is that you, most of the agencies do not have real-world expertise and they're not using actual customer language. They're just using regurgitated slop from AI platforms, which is not going to be helpful for AI search. Also, there's no specificity. There's no competitive advantage if every single plumbing company is going to ChatGPT and creating the exact same thing, or Claude or whatever. They're all starting from the same brain of commodity content. Google is rewarding experience-based content, not content that sounds smart. If you start with ChatGPT, you're going to get commodity content. Bottom line, if a competitor can copy it in 10 minutes, it won't rank. Okay? If a competitor can buy it in 10 minutes, it won't rank. So what do you do? The BETTER framework. Take your customer conversations and turn them into content. So you want to take real customer calls, capture the calls, pull the exact questions, use their actual words, add real experience and context, and then create the content that's gonna publish and rank. So this is the exact system that we use, which is called the Call to Content system. We actually built an AI agent that we plug into home service businesses that does this exact system. It records calls, takes the transcripts, pulls the exact customer questions, takes the real experience, whether that's from the CSR on the call, from the salesperson, or the knowledge base that's been trained on your business. And that is explicitly from calls with our team or things that you've given us from a knowledge base. Then we create content that publish and ranks specifically for AEO, SEO, GEO. But at the end of the day, it's all about creating real content. Better SEO, better AI visibility, better conversion, more trust. That's the most important thing. You do not want slop that can be copied. You need real stuff. That's how I got those questions from above, which was the actual things that people are asking. That was from a plumbing company. So what actually matters and what doesn't? Let's keep going on what they talked about in their optimization. So, What does matter? Having index pages. If you don't have index pages on Google, nothing's ever going to find it or be able to crawl it. Internal linking, making sure that you have 3 internal links on your content so that way when the content gets crawled, it can go link to link to link all throughout your website. Crawlability, obviously you have pages that are easily to be accessed and crawled. Clear structure and readability. They did say you don't have to specifically chunk out your content for AEO or GEO, But having a gen— a basic clear structure and readability framework for someone to read this and understand exactly what it is. So the way that we like to do this is we'll say the actual question in the H1, the title, and then the answer right down below it. So it, it creates a perfect snippet opportunity for AIOverviews to then reference and then go through and answer the questions throughout the conversation that, that people would have. Helpful, useful content does matter. AI slop, don't do that. Unique real-world insights does matter. Does not matter. They specifically say this. So LLMs.txt files. Right now there are companies out there that are charging $1,000 to $2,000 a month to create what are called LLMs.txt files. Basically, they're going to take everything that's on your current website and create these text files that they believe are for LLMs so that way LLMs can scrape them and find the information. Google explicitly says that this does not matter. They literally call it out. LLMs.txt files do not matter. Weird AI markup hacks. So there's this trend right now where like schema markups and doing certain markups on technical SEO matters. They explicitly say does not matter. Rewriting everything for AI systems, taking what you have on your website and then writing it for AI systems does not matter. Over-optimized schema gimmicks. Okay, same thing, does not matter. The schema gimmicks and, and over-optimized things, do the normal things for SEO. That's what they say. AI-specific content formatting. This is what I'm talking about when people are like, no, you need to write in sentences at a time. Say the question, then write the answer. Say the question, then write the answer. They say don't do this, write it for normal readability. All right, so if we side by side, old way, new way search strategy. So the old way is start with ChatGPT for content ideas. New way, start with real customer call recordings. Can't stress this one enough. Old way, publishing generic listicle blog posts just to have things that are happening so that way you stay relevant. New way, publish hyper-specific experience-based answers that happen inside of your real interactions with customers, calls, sales process, those kinds of things. Chase LLMs, text files, and AI schema hacks. No, focus on indexability, crawlability, and actually being helpful. That's more important. Compete on volume over of content. No, compete on uniqueness and real-world expertise. The beautiful thing of using real customer calls and using a call-to-content framework like what I mentioned is that you can actually get the volume game with the real stuff. Because if you have a lot of calls coming in that are real stuff, then you can create really good content and at a high scale. This is why this system works great. And then pay for AI SEO gimmicks. No, turn customer conversations into inbound leads. Exactly what you want to do. All right, so I mentioned we're gonna do this AI search checklist for you, and I'm gonna go through the top 8 things that you need to be doing to help your business for AI search. Number 1, stop producing generic AI-generated blog content. Number 2, record and catalog your real customer call questions. Number 3, Create content using your customer's exact language. 4, focus on specificity, location, problem type, real context. Number 5, ensure your site is crawlable and properly indexed. 6, add internal links between your topic pages. 7, ignore LLMs.txt hype. You do not need special AI files. And number 8, measure content performance by leads generated, not traffic alone. Can't stress this one enough because a lot of marketing companies say, oh, well, your traffic's going up, so that's a great thing. Your SEO is working, blah, blah, blah, black magic and voodoo. No, I don't care. I want leads, customers coming through. So you should have a way to track, am I getting more visibility on these AI platforms, ChatGPT, AIOverviews, but more importantly, am I getting leads from them? So we had a client that came to us, we used a similar checklist like this on his business and within 2 months he generated a $17,000 job straight from ChatGPT because he started creating real content. So if you need help with this, you want a marketing agency that's forward thinking, that's talking about this, building agents for home service businesses, using real customer interactions to create real content to help you rank in AI search, that's exactly why I built my company. I'll put a link down below. I'd love the opportunity to talk to you and see if we might be able to help you. Either way, I'm sure you get value from the conversation. Thank you so much. Be sure to hit like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next video.