Phil Risher, owner of Flash Consulting, explains how Google's AI tool Bard affects local businesses and their SEO strategies. He covers what Bard does, why it matters for search rankings, and how to adapt your digital marketing approach.
If you're curious about how Google's new AI tool Bard is going to affect local businesses, in this video I'm going to outline some of the ideas and strategies that Bard is taking into consideration and ways that businesses can use this information to grow their business. My name is Phil Risher, I'm the owner of Flash Consulting and we partner with local service businesses and help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And AI technology, digital marketing are all things in our sphere. And so we're going to share this video to help hopefully help you stay top and relevant with the new trending things on Google. Alright, so what is Bard? Bard is a new tool that Google's adding into their search results. If you search for carpet cleaning near me, you know that you have all of these things. This looks different on mobile and it looks different on desktop, but essentially you can select from here. 9 times out of 10 in our industry when people are searching for carpet cleaning near me or whatever the keyword is near me, they want to see either these sponsored posts or they want to see this local map pack or they may go down here to some of these secondary listings. And so historically companies will put Google local service ads here. They're going to run some Google search ads we've made videos about and they're going to do off site SEO and on site SEO so they rank in the four parts of Google. So what is Bard and how is this going to affect Google search? So basically what happens is when someone searches something. Now this hasn't fully rolled out yet, but it's going to be coming. You can see is piano, guitar, easier to learn? How much practice does it need? And it gives you this information, gives you relevant articles and then it's going to give results from the web and you can see that it just built that query those results queries out based on whatever was sent here. So it asked a question about constellations and then boom, boom, boom, there's a section of the Bard chat, then there's other topics here that are scrolling through. So as you can see this tool is going to be on the search engine results page and people are going to start using it. So what does this mean for businesses anyways? Let's go right into Bard and start looking at this so you can do this. You go to bard.google.com, i would recommend doing it and typing in carpet cleaning company near me and, and it should be pulling your current location. And so we're going to see what this says and it's going to spin around. And it's going to just give us a result. All right, so you can see that they are pulling from Angie Thumbtack, Google Maps, and then, yo, those are the secondary listings. So let's take this a step further and reset this. And we're going to do carpet cleaning companies in. I live in Frederick, Maryland, but I would recommend doing this for wherever you live, Frederick, Maryland. And they should give us real companies. And so let's see what they give us. One thing about Bard, you can only sign up with a Gmail account. So you can't use. If you have like a workspace account or something, you have to use a personal Gmail account. All right, so you can see Express Carpet Cleaners, Oxy Fresh Carpet Cleaning of Frederick, Maryland. Right. Some of these other companies. And then we're going to say, how did you come up with these results? So this is going to be very interesting and telling, which is why we've been telling everyone, hey, you need to get Google reviews. You need to have everything optimized, because Google is pulling from Google search and Yelp. So I came up with the results by using combination Google, Yelp. I first searched for carpet cleaning companies in Frederick, Maryland on Google. This gave me a list of websites for carpet cleaning companies in Frederick. I then looked at the reviews for each company on Yelp to see what other customers had to say about them. I only included companies that had a good reputation and offered a variety of carpet cleaning services. So this is why it's so important to do search engine optimization, because Google's pulling from all these different areas and they want to make sure that if they do a search for carpet cleaning companies in your area, they find you. And then on top of that, if they go to a secondary listing place like Yelp or Angie or Facebook, whatever. Google actually likes Yelp because Yelp is very discerning about what they post. They're also looking at Yelp. So what does this mean for your business? First off, you need to get Google reviews. You need to make sure your Google business profile is optimized, your Yelp listings optimized. Since we've ran this probably about a dozen times, and every single time it says from Google Search and Yelp, you can do it in your area. It may be different based on your location, but you want to make sure that you are ranking in this area. And if you're not, what do you need to do to get up there? And so let's see, how can I rank my company in this? These results, I'm curious. I actually haven't done this search yet, so let's see what it says. All right. Make sure your website is optimized for search engines, which we made. We made a whole ultimate guide for optimizing your website for search. Get positive reviews from customers. Make sure your company is listed in local directories which we talked about. Building out your citations with your name, address and phone number matching. Run paid advertising campaigns. Google. Naturally they're going to want to make money so they're probably going to be showing ad results inside of this bar thing. It's important to know that there is no guarantee way to rank your company higher in search results. However, by following these tips, you can give yourself a good chance of improving your rankings to get more visibility for your carpet cleaning business. Perfect. So if you need help doing this, I'll put a link down below. You can set up a 30 minute strategy session with us and we'll walk you through some of the strategies on how to do this. We do this for companies all day long. We also have stuff on our website about the ultimate guide for carpet cleaning businesses. The Ultimate Guide for Search Engine Optimization. There's a bunch of stuff on there but also hit like and subscribe on this video and we will see you in the next video.
