What Worked in 2026 Won’t Work in 2027

Right now we're seeing one of the biggest shifts in home service marketing that I've seen in the past decade. The marketing strategies, the tactics, even the agencies that people have been using over the past 3 years are not going to work the same way that they did in 2027. Over the past 7 years, I've generated over $47 million of revenue for home service businesses, and before that I was director of business development at a home service business. And I've seen firsthand the shifts that are happening and playing out, that right now we're at a pinnacle point that that's going to make or break a lot of companies into the future. In this video, I'm going to show you the 4 biggest home service marketing mistakes that business owners are making that's costing them time, money, growth, and more importantly, if they don't fix these by 2027, they're going to be paying for outdated marketing strategies and wondering where all their leads went. The first mistake is still paying for traditional SEO. The problem is that the same strategy from 3 to 5 years ago is not the same thing that's going to help you rank in AI search. And if you haven't heard, Search is shifting from keywords to conversations. People are not going to be going to Google anymore, just looking through blue links and trying to figure out who they want to work with. They're going to be asking their agent. Google actually just released Gemini Spark, which is a personal agent that's going to help you with search. And more importantly, the strategies before of just loading up keywords, on-site, off-site SEO is still relevant, but it's not relevant the same way as the SEO that needs to be done right now. So what Google is actually telling us is that commodity content is losing value, and it's literally in their documentation not to create commodity content. What they mean by commodity content is listicles like 7 best things to do if you're buying an HVAC unit. Those are commodity content because anyone knows that information. What they are dying for is real information, real content from your real business. And the problem is, if you're paying for traditional SEO from an agency, they're not going to know that stuff and they're going to be starting with ChatGPT. So your agency only knows what you tell them on a 30-minute call, and usually it's the same call. I experienced this at my home service business and they never really get to the part of learning about your business or knowing about your business. It's just very rinse and repeat. This is why traditional SEO is going to stall in the future, in my opinion, because we're shifting from what was SEO for 20 years, which was ranking for keywords, to now being shown and recommended in conversations with agents. So what actually works is you need to be creating content built from your real customer call transcripts. That's what AI search wants to hear. They want to hear the real customer questions and your real expertise on those questions. This is literally like why as an agency we shifted from most agencies were going to ChatGPT and writing content. Now we actually built an agent that plugs into businesses that pulls their call transcripts and creates content on their behalf based off what their customer says. The second mistake that we see is that your website isn't ready for AI agents. So I alluded to the agents and them doing the research on your behalf. So if you're, if you're, if you're not preparing your business for agents, then you are going to get left behind with leads and you're going to wonder why leads are drying up. Specifically, agents are pulling data from your website right now, and this is what you need to make sure that you're going to be shown to agents. So first, You need to have a pricing guide page. AI agents surface businesses that show transparent pricing. Why? Because before, people would diagnose themselves. They would say, okay, I need gutter cleaning. Let me go find a good gutter cleaning company. Now they're asking questions to agents, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever you want to call it. They're asking them questions. Okay, is this company legit? How much does it cost to get my gutters cleaned? They, they're doing a lot more research with these tools. You're probably doing it yourself by researching things. They're asking for a pricing guide. How much does this cost? And if there's no information for it to show, it's going to show someone else and recommend someone else. I get the pushback of like, I don't want my competitors to see my pricing and blah, blah, blah. I'm not saying you just put your whole price book up there. What I am saying is build a pricing guide as if you're talking to a friend or family member of how much things should cost. What makes the price go up? What makes the price go down? Why is a $99 thing not going to work? Why is a $2,000 thing better? Whatever it is, create the guide. You need to have a guide. Second is online scheduling. Okay, so Gemini Spark— I made a video about Gemini Spark in particular about the agent that's coming and getting rolled out right now in Google Labs. You can go in and you can actually ask it to schedule a reservation for you for an Italian restaurant on Friday that has the best fettuccine. It's going to go into OpenTable and Resy. It's going to find the restaurants and then it's going to schedule it for you on your behalf. You don't have to do anything aside from prompt it and ask it to do things. That's exactly what Gemini Spark is going to do for people. Literally, it's going to be rolled out inside of Gemini where people can just have an agent that works on their behalf. It says it in their help docs. So why is this important for home service? If you do not have online scheduling or pricing page, what are the 2 questions that every single person wants to know? How much is it going to cost and when can you do it? If you cannot answer those things or an agent cannot answer those things about your business, what do you think is going to happen to the leads? They're not going to be there because they're not going to be able to show your stuff. So whenever I talk about online scheduling, I get the pushback of, well, my territory is so big and my route density, and I'm only one guy and I drive all over the place. I get all those things. I had all the same things. However, you could set one up for just virtual estimates or just put it for a tighter route or something like that. But you got to have online scheduling up there because these agents are going to be using online scheduling to book appointments for people. And then the last one is no AI readability updates. So if your website hasn't changed in a year, Your agency owes you answers. What I mean by this is before this whole shift happened, people would be creating service area pages and blog content to stay relevant and to add some nice things on Google so that way Google trusted them and they pushed them up. As we shift from keywords to conversations, the content literally on your website has to change to frequently asked questions and question-style content that can be sourced in AI overviews. You might have experienced it. If you go to Google and you type in a question that's longer than 5 or 6 words, you're going to get an AI overview section, and it's only going to get more and more specific about AI overviews. This is exactly why you need to be creating more conversational style research type of questions, because you need to give them the ammo for them to show. People are not going in and asking Google, what are 7 things I should know before I install an HVAC unit? Right, right. They're asking the real questions. That is why you need to have correct type of content for AI readability, and AI readability is a little fluffy. Real questions on your website and not just relying on what you had created before. So Google Gemini agents are already using this data. The change needs to happen now, and I can't stress this one enough: is that if your website is not ready for AI agents in 2027, you're going to get left behind. And the reason that I know this is because the CEO of Google literally said by 2027, agents are going to be rolled out to help people. And we all know that Google's the number one place. All right. The third thing is that you're not investing in real content creation. And hear me out on this one because I used to feel like. Content creation was a joke, to be honest with you. I used to feel like creating Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube content was a waste of time for home service businesses. And this was up until about 3 years ago. And the reason is, is because we all know, I say it all the time, right now people go to Google whenever they want a service. They don't magically go to Facebook and start looking up things. They don't magically go to Instagram and start looking up things. They go to Google and say, I want a gutter cleaning company, or they ask Google questions. That's what homeowners do right now. So why would we be creating content if we're not going to get any of our customers to find us? And you might not even get views on your content. Here's why. Generic AI-generated SEO content is not a strategy. What is a strategy is creating real content that can be sourced in AI search. And there's 2 reasons for this. One is share of voice. So when we talk about AI visibility right now, there's these 2 terms that are getting thrown around for how do I actually evaluate if I'm being shown in AI search. The first one is your share of voice, how often your business appears in AI answers. And look at here, blogs, YouTube, social, short-form video, case studies, podcasts— these are all different opportunities to have a share of voice. So when I talk about content creation, it's not about creating a reel and it going viral and you getting 100 customers from it. It's about creating very specific content that answers real questions that can be sourced in AI search as a share of voice. So imagine a prompt would say something like, a tree fell on my house, can a roofing company just repair half of my roof? That's a real question that came through our agent. That question can then be turned into a reel, a short, a blog, it can be answered on a podcast, it can also be turned into a case study about that specific situation. And now we have a bunch of different things that can be pulled into share of voice. And share of voice is how many times that your business is shown on a specific prompt. And this is why you want to create very specific content that can be shown. And the next one, this one is even more important, is the mention rate. How often AI platforms cite your business. And specifically, when they, when they say cite, they say specifically clicking and going to your website. For example, you create content that shows you have a lot of share of voice. Then it shows your mention rate because it trusts you. More content, more authority, more AI references when customers ask questions, then they want to mention you as this is probably the best company to work with. That's a mention rate. So this is why content is not just about likes, shares, views. It's about creating the engine so that way these AI platforms have your thing that it can share and share a voice. And then also it can mention you and cite you because it trusts you based off of the content that you provided. This is why when you start with generic SEO content on ChatGPT that's fluff and commodity, it's not helping you with AI search. What helps you with AI search is using real content, which is exactly why we built the agent that I mentioned. All right. And then the fourth one, this one is a— this has nothing to do with AI content. This has everything to do with the past 100 businesses that I talked to this year, which is if you're spending money on ads without knowing your return on ad spend, you are flying blind. And I got on a call a couple of weeks ago. The guy was spending $22,000 a month On Google Ads. And I'm like, okay, well, why did— how did you know that that was productive? Like, do you have return on ad spend? He said, no, my agency kept telling me that it was $20 leads. And I'm like, okay, well, who cares about $20 leads if that $22,000 didn't make you $200,000? Like, what are we doing here? So if you are spending money on ads and you spend $2,000 a month and you don't know if it made $10,000 or zero, you should know, okay? Stop paying for marketing. Stop paying these agencies that keep telling you to spend more and they line their pockets with commission. Start asking the real question, which is, how do I know that that $2,000 made me money? And work with the company that pulls your return on ad spend data and helps you make decisions to grow your business. Your agency reports just show cost per lead. That tells you nothing about revenue. The guy that was getting $20 cost per lead, they're going to say all day, oh, don't you want $20 leads? Yeah, of course I do. But like, that doesn't tell me if it actually made me money or not. Those leads could be non-English speakers. They could be not in my area. They could not even want the service that I have. They could be DIYers. I mean, there's a million things. They could be looking for the cheapest thing. Like, there's so many things that say that you don't know if you don't know the full scope of this. The other thing is that as a business owner, specifically, we work with $1 million to $10 million. Good data makes good decisions. As you scale your business, the more clear data that you can have that you are not responsible for providing, that you can have at your disposal to make decisions about your business, the better. So, you can't grow what you can't measure. If you don't know that you just started a new ad channel over here, you started this new campaign, but you don't know if it works or not, You're just operating on gut feeling. And this is what was at my home service business. We'd roll out a new channel, we spent $2,500. 3 months later, the owner would have this gut feeling because he looked at his revenue and it's either up or down. And he would say, oh, that didn't work because they're not looking at all the inputs of the changes. They just look at the end total revenue. You might be the same way. And this is exactly why having granular data on what you're spending will help you grow your business. And the last thing is that your marketing must tie to your CRM. If it doesn't, you're guessing. So I worked at a home service business, as I mentioned. I was very frustrated with my agency because they wouldn't touch my CRM. They wouldn't pull reports, they wouldn't do anything with it, they wouldn't coach me on it. They would basically give me a list of people or talk to me about the cost per lead and then say, how is it going? And I would try to figure it out myself. And it's like, I'm trying to grow a business. Like, I'm paying you to do ads. I would love if you knew that so you could tell me to spend more or not. And this is what I mean by your marketing tying to your CRM is that There's these 3 big pillars. It's your data and your CRM, your automations and your infrastructure, and then good marketing that all works together. And that's what businesses need. But this is the biggest thing. If you're spending money on ads and you don't know that it made you money, you're missing out and you probably feel frustrated and you're operating on gut feeling. Don't do that. One of the big things, we tie everything to revenue. So like our average client grew 27% last year because we're in their CRM. We know all the real stuff. All right. Old strategy versus new. Old way is generic recycled SEO content. If your agency is starting at ChatGPT or you're starting at ChatGPT to create content, don't do that. This is commodity content. ChatGPT already knows this stuff, right? They don't care. This is just fluff. It's junk. It's slop. The new way is use content from your real customer call transcripts, whether that's a manual process that you do on your own or if you use an agent like ours that pulls all the stuff and builds it all for you based off of your calls. No website changes in 12 months. A lot of websites are just on maintenance mode and they don't have new fresh content coming onto their website and they don't have new pricing pages. They're not talking about online scheduling. They're not creating this type of content. Like, this is the new way you have to do these things. Cookie cutter AI blog posts. You need to have multi-format, which is like, we actually hired a videographer so that way we could do video coaching for our clients based off of the hooks from the calls. So like, you got to be creating content and you have to be putting the stuff back into AI platform so that they trust you. Video, social case studies, podcasts, all those things. Reporting clicks and leads. If your agency is just reporting clicks and cost per lead and they're not looking at the full scope of return on ad spend, revenue quoted, those numbers, it's probably pretty frustrating. You need to get it full scope. So talk to them and say, hey, I want you to start reporting on return on ad spend. What do you need for me to do that? And if they can't answer you, maybe you need to look at shifting. 30-minute monthly calls reviewing vanity metrics. I used to get on calls, 30 minutes. It's the same conversation every single month. Okay, your cost per lead is this. Your search impression share is this. Blah blah blah blah. Fluffy fluffy fluffy. Let's give it another month and see how it goes, and then you just kick the can down the road. If you're having those type of conversations, don't do that. Work with a company that connects to your CRM, measures actual business growth, and helps you grow your business with real data. All right. So here's your checklist to prepare for 2027. Number one. Build content from real customer call transcripts. If you are interested in the AI agent that we built for home service business, I put a link down below. You can actually see it in action of what it looks like. It does this. Or don't use our stuff. Go get your call transcripts. Take those call transcripts and create blog posts, create social posts, create video content, and do that at least once a week, and you will win. You can't not. Add pricing pages to your website. Build a pricing guide for each service that you have. And if you have one main service, do a pricing guide for that. It's going to help you for these AI agents to refer your business. Implement online scheduling, even if it's just to schedule an estimate, a virtual estimate at that. Have some type of online scheduling that these AI agents can put up for you and say, hey, yeah, here you go. At least schedule right here. Optimize your site for AI readability. Stop creating the AI slop content and create real content based off real customer questions. Publish content across multiple formats and channels. I get it. You might not want to be, you know, on video. Have one of your technicians do it. Like, we have clients that their technicians show up and their technicians are the ones that do the video. Their salespeople, their CSRs, someone in the business who wants to create content can create content and have that across multiple formats and multiple channels. And then the last one is track revenue, not leads, clicks, or impressions. I can't stress this one enough. If you work with a marketing company and they don't help, they don't know your revenue number, and they're not tracking it on different channels, like What are you doing? You're probably frustrated. This is exactly how I felt. That's why you should work with our company if that's something that you're facing. I'll put a link down below if you want to schedule some time with, with my team. Happy to hop on a call and share what we do and see if we might be able to help you. If not, all good. Hit like and share, and I'll see you in the next video.