The 5 Local SEO Shifts That Will Decide Who Gets Customers by 2028

If you're running a home service business, the way that you get customers right now from Google and local SEO is about to change, and most businesses are not ready for it. I've been doing SEO since 2015. I've interviewed Neil Patel, Marcus Sheridan on this shift to AI search. Last year alone, we helped our home service clients generate $23 million in revenue. And what we're seeing right now is the biggest shift that's happened since Yellow Pages to Google, now Google to AI for local search. In this video, I'm going to break down the 5 shifts in SEO that's happening from now until 2028. How you can position your business to capitalize with real results. Like, some of our clients are getting leads from ChatGPT. By the end of this, you're going to know the 5 shifts and how to position your business so that way you can capture the land grab of AI search. Phase 1 is to shift from keywords to conversation. People are not searching the same way that they were before. The way that they were doing it before was searching HVAC repair near me or gutter cleaning near me, these type of traditional searches that you would want to rank for and be shown. The shift that's happening is to people asking questions. Imagine how you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever platform that you like. You're asking engaging questions and having a conversation with these platforms, not just telling it to give you a list of things that then you have to decide through this process. So this is a report that Neil Patel actually put out, and it's about AI overviews replacing your search list traditional. So you can see here, 0 to 3 word phrases has 23% of them showing AI overviews. 3 to 5 word phrases has 48% AI overviews, but this one is a big one. 6 or more word phrases have 77% AI overviews. What does this mean? HVAC repair near me is a very common search, but now people are searching for how much does it cost to get my HVAC repair? How much does it cost to get my evaporator coil clean? How much does it cost? How much does it cost? All these questions that your customers are asking, they're now having conversations with search before they're calling your business to ask the questions. It's all happening now on search. That's why it's not keywords anymore, it's conversations. And if you're doing more than 6 words inside of a phrase, they're going to be getting an AI overview section, which means it's going to be giving them the answer of what they think it might be, opposed to them getting a list of things and asking it questions. So the users ask is shifting to AI recommends. The users are asking and then AI is recommending. So Google is almost an interface now. It's not a destination where they go and just get a list. It's an interface where they can interact back and forth. And again, whether it's Google, Gemini, ChatGPT, Google is the one that most people go to for home service businesses, but now it's shifting even the way that it interacts with business, with, with homeowners and these, and what it shows. So that's the first shift. The second one is in content shifting. So this is shifting from your SEO pages to now building trust signals for your business. So what does this look like? The old thing is you need to build out service pages and blogs. Service area pages are if you service Dallas, Texas, you have a plumbing in all the cities around Dallas, Texas, and you build out these service area pages all around, even long-tail keyword ones of like, you know, longer-tail type of keywords like ductless system replacement or ductless system installation or hot water heater repair, or how much does it cost to get my hot water heater repaired in this specific area? Building out these type of service area pages or long-tail blogs, this is what the old SEO strategy is. And let me be clear, this still works for now. Like, we still do this because it helps rank on Google and it also helps with AI search. Because you're training these models on your business. However, the big shift that's happening here is the AI slop. This is getting worse and worse by the day. Whereas SEO people know that you need to start building out these long-tail keywords and getting a lot more content on your website because AI overviews, what we just talked about, is showing results based off of what people are asking for. The problem is, is that if you know the questions your customers ask and you just go to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, whatever, and have it write generic AI responses, you're going to sound like every other person. And if everyone's doing the same thing, how are you going to stand out? This is the big shift that's happening is that now you need real operator content. You need your business creating content. And before you say, oh, well, Phil, you know, that's another thing I got to do, da da da, all this stuff. Let me just be clear. We have a system that we use and you can use this exact same system. We take our customers' call transcripts and we turn that into content. We take their sales calls and we turn it into content because that is where the real customer questions happen, is on their customer service calls, CSRs, you know, their calls coming in for booking calls or their sales calls. It also has their experts answering questions and talking about their solution. And this is the content that most businesses want, but they're not connecting the dots. Their marketing company's just using AI slop out here. This is why the content shift is so important to AI Overviews, and this is literally how we rank our clients for AI Overviews. Is we take the real questions our customers are asking on the phone. They're probably going to be asking them inside of a search widget or asking ChatGPT or Gemini these same exact questions, and we want to give it the answer that the business is saying on the phone to the questions. I know it sounds crazy, but this is exactly what you need to be doing from a content shift. Social media content, whether it's videos or blogs or whatever it is, it's not just about likes and shares or comments or even getting customers per se. It's about training these large language models on your business. And doing it in a way that already uses the content that you're creating inside of your business and turning into real content that's helping market your business. This is the huge shift that's happening here. All right, so let's just step back real quick. Number 1 is the search use shift, so from keywords to conversations. People are not going to be searching HVAC repair near me, they're going to be having conversations with tools. Number 2, if that is the case, we don't need to optimize for keywords as much anymore like we did with SEO pages and content to rank for specific keywords. We need to build trust signals so that way these platforms trust us, so they show us in their conversations. And the way that we do that is we give them ammo and content to show us in their conversations. And this is the trust signals piece, creating content omnichannel. That way we train them and show them that they can trust us, that we're the authority in the space. All right, number 3 is the ranking shift. I would say this is probably the most polarizing one to wrap your head around, which is SEO as we know it over the last 20 years since 2000s rankings are no longer going to matter. It's not going to be about positions. And I'm going to be clear about this as well. This is the static rankings, the old way of doing this, which I still believe that this is important right now to make sure that if you're paying for SEO, it's not all black magic and voodoo, that you actually have some way to track. Is this actually working for you? Is the content that you're creating helping you rank better for certain keywords? And You can still do this. We do this for our clients. We have a neutral search and then it gives us a baseline of rankings. And a neutral search is like, let's say that you did a search in Dallas for HVAC repair. Every single person that does that search is going to get a little bit of a different variation based off of their cookies or the history of what they clicked on before. But you can do a neutral search on Google as if you've never searched this before and see what it shows you. And that's going to give you your actual results. However, when we talk about rankings and positions, As we were discussing before, where keywords and SEO and rankings are not going to matter as much anymore because it's going to be conversations and then recommendations happening from these AI platforms. It's all about personalized results now. It's not just about, hey, go to Google, search this thing, and then get this list of things, and then let me make my decision based off of this. No, it's going to be AI platforms giving recommendations to people without having to go through the whole listicle of making a decision and, and, and who's number 1, who's number 2, and then the user deciding. The AI is going to recommend who it, it, it trusts based off of all the signals that it's produced. So it's not going to be about positions and you trying to make the decision. It's going to be AI saying, hey, here's the company that I would recommend based off of what you told me is going to happen. By the way, one of the tools I mentioned about the call to content system, it's one of our playbooks. It's one of the 7 playbooks that we have inside of this Ultimate Home Service Growth Playbooks. Last year, our average client generated $250,000 to $1 million by implementing 7 of these playbooks in 12 months. If you want it, I'll put a link down below. It's great. It has all the playbooks in there and you can learn how to do it. All right, so just to recap, keywords are going to conversations. So since we don't need to worry about keywords as much anymore, SEO pages and blogs and all this stuff, though it's important, it's not— the ultimate outcome is not to gain a position off of these keywords. The ultimate outcome is to get a recommendation. So people are going to be having conversations with these AI platforms and we're going to want them to recommend us. So we need to create what are called trust signals. We need to create content as the authority so that way they know about our business and they trust us. Large language models are trust— are built on content. And then the ranking shift is there's not going to be much ranking. It's going to be recommendations based off how much do they trust our business. All right. So number 4, This is a big one, another big one, the conversion shift. We're shifting from clicks to agentic booking, clicks to agentic booking. So how does this look? Before, someone goes to Google, they type in a keyword, they get a list, they make a decision, they click on the business and go to the website, they go to the website and look around, and then they go to a form and they fill out a form and they say, okay, this is the business I want to work with. This is what's happening right now. This is pretty standard. However, Well, humans are comparing websites. You're going to different websites, making a decision based off of their Google Business Profile, blah, blah, blah. The new shift to this is that AI is going to select it for the user. It's already doing this, but it's not fully there yet. AI is going to go all the way to the endpoint, which is the website, and it's going to pull the data and it's going to come back to the user and give it the information. Okay, so imagine this. You go to a Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever, and you say, I want to get my gutters cleaned. You know, how much should it cost? When do I need to do this? Blah, blah, blah. Can you find a good company? It says, okay, well, here's the company here. You can use this company. Here's their price point because they have a pricing page on their website. And also they have online booking. So their next available appointment is here, here, and here. Would you like me to schedule this for you? When I'm saying it, it's pretty much already there. The problem is, is that as a business, you have to prepare your business to be able to convert this way. Right now, a lot of people are just relying on a contact form on their website, and these agents are going to say, okay, would you like me to contact them for you? Have them call you back? Sure. But no one wants that. They want to book online, which is why online booking is so important. Also, they want estimate calculators. Do you want me to get an estimate for you? Give me this information and I'll get an estimate for you, and then the business can reach out from there. The shift that's happening is that it's no longer go to Google, type in some keywords, go to a website, fill out a form. It's going to be these AI agents that are booking. There's agentic booking already for OpenTable and Resy where you can actually ask it to find you a reservation for an Italian restaurant and it's going to go and find the dates and times and the best reviews for this Italian restaurant, and it's going to come back to you and say, do you want me to schedule this for you? This is literally called agentic booking. This is the shift from conversions. It's not going to be about go to website and all this stuff. So you need to prepare your business with a pricing page, pricing calculator, online booking resources, content, so that way it recommends you and then it can also interact with your business to get you customers. All right, so keywords to conversations, we got that. SEO pages to trust signals, we got that. Positions to recommendations, we got that. Now it's not just about recommending you and then go to your website, it's recommending you and then do you want me to book this for you or interact with this business on your behalf? It's not about clicks. So the old method is you get keywords, SEO pages, positions, and clicks. Now we're having conversations, trust signals, recommending your business, and then agents are actually booking for you. And then the last one, I can't stress this one enough because this is a pain point for me, is these cookie-cutter agencies and the vendor shift. From these generic SEO packages to building an actual content system for your business. So the old way is you pay $500,000+ SEO packages for them to build out certain keywords and SEO and all stuff, da da da da. We already just said that this is important right now, but this is not going to be the holy grail to unlock the next phase. So if you're just doing this, you're going to be left behind, okay? It's generic, it's repeatable work, it's going to become automated. It literally is already automated. You can pretty much do all this stuff on ChatGPT with some oversight from humans to make sure that it's correct. But like, you can get the gist of it here, and this is why it's going to be a race to the bottom on these things. But worst case, it's going to be not as effective for business owners, and they're not going to know why they're not getting any leads, and it's because the shift is happening and they're still paying for the old playbook. So now what do you need to do? You need to have an embedded content system in your business. Okay, if we already talked about that you need to build these trust signals, and you need to rank in AI overviews, then you know that you need to create content so that way it sees you as the authority and you have these trust signals coming to your business. And then also you need to have a content system on your website so that way people can— the agents can interact with your business. You need to be creating estimate calculators, you need to be creating design guides, you need to be setting up online scheduling, you need to be utilizing all the tools that people are going to want to use, specifically these robots and AI agents. To interact with your business. You need team-driven real inputs. When I talk about content systems, it's not just, okay, the owner's gonna get on this and he is gonna be a talking head and say these things. That is better than nothing. Okay? But imagine your team gets involved in this and you start creating real content based off of your calls, based off of what customers are asking, and you start building this content engine for your business that's training these language models as the authority in the space. So just a quick recap, the old playbook, keywords, SEO pages, ranking for certain positions, getting clicks and how many clicks you get to your website and just paying for generic SEO packages. The new shift is people having conversations with platforms and them pulling from trust signals that they trust you. Some of those trust signals are based off of the content that you produce as the authority in the space, recommendations, them recommending you, them going and interacting with your business via agents, and then, then your, paying for content systems on your behalf to create content for your business that's real so that way you can rank better and have better conversations. With that being said, if your marketing company is not talking about these things and you're running this old playbook and you have nothing going on with this new playbook, you need to evaluate what you're doing because you're going to get left behind. You're going to be running on the old playbook and you're going to get frustrated. So if you want an evaluation of what my company can do to help your business, we're on the forefront of this stuff. We're pulling content systems. We're building agentic bots on websites. We're building avatars for our clients. We are positioning home service businesses to be crushing it in 2028 and even into 2030. I'll put a link down below. You can discuss your business and I look forward to helping you.