Adam (00:20):
Welcome to Masters of Home Service, the best podcast for home service pros like us. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester, and I want you to crush it in business. The way your customers are finding you online is changing. Your business is going to start getting more and more leads from AI. Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, all these different platforms are going to start funneling you business. But only if you know these seven tricks on ranking high in those algorithms, because it’s not just about SEO anymore, it’s about all kinds of other things. So my guest today is Phil Risher. He’s an expert as you know in all this kind of stuff. We’re going to get into seven things that you can do to really rank high in AI search. So Phil, welcome back to the show.

Phil (01:04):
Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s a big transformation going on in the digital marketing space, home service space, because it’s always like, Oh, go to Google and find a person. And from a digital marketing perspective, most companies are kind of like, that’s the old school playbook, but what’s the future?

Adam (01:18):
Yeah. 

Phil (01:18):
And that’s what we really need to be planning for, what you’re going to talk about today.

Adam (01:20):
Yeah. Awesome. Real quick, tell people what you’re up to, who you are.

Phil (01:23):
Yeah. Phil Risher, owner of Phlash Consulting. I used to work at a home service business, helped them go from three million to $5 million in revenue and then sell. And now we work with home service businesses to help them grow their business using technology digital marketing.

Adam (01:34):
Great. Awesome. Okay. So let’s get into it. How is it changing? What’s changed? Does SEO even matter anymore? Let’s talk about that briefly.

Phil (01:41):
Yeah. So BrightLocal did a report on this and BrightLocal is like an SEO tool for local search. And they did a report a couple months ago. And what they found was that 80% of local searches happen on Google Search and Google Maps. The very unique thing to this is that they broke it down by demographic from age. So they saw that boomers, 72% of them use Google Search for local searches, which of course they go to Google, that’s what they’re programmed to do. But Gen Z is 46% of Gen Z uses Google Search for local search. What does that mean? Less than half of them are using Google search for local searches. So right now, they’re not searching for HVAC contractors or any of that stuff because they don’t own homes. They’re searching for local coffee shops, local bars, that kind of stuff. But when they own a home, they’re not going to magically just go to Google to start searching for local businesses. This is why there’s a big shift happening. What they found was that 26% of Gen Z uses social media for local search.

Adam (02:35):
That’s crazy.

Phil (02:35):
It’s really crazy. And people, it’s like Yellow Pages. The boomers are going to phase out and then Gen Z is going to come in and then it’s going to change the whole search landscape. So the seven parts that we’re going to talk about today, if not just me, woo-woo come up with this stuff. There’s two big things to this. First, I interviewed on my podcast, Neil Patel, who’s like the OG of SEO. 

Adam (02:54):
Oh yeah, he’s big time.

Phil (02:54):
For an hour, I asked him specifically about SEO, how’s it changing? AEO, search engine, optimization, search everywhere optimization. Then I have Marcus Sheridan on the podcast who’s like the SEO OG for home service businesses and content creation. And I drilled him about what does this mean? What does this mean? That’s how I came up with these seven things. And not only that, we have clients that we run these seven things on that are generating tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of them is a contractor in California. He does landscape lighting. He generated a $17,000 job straight from ChatGPT.

Adam (03:25):
Wow.

Phil (03:26):
They said, search on ChatGPT, found you $17,000.

Adam (03:29):
So this is real-world stuff.

Phil (03:31):
It’s real-world stuff. And Semrush, they’re another tool that does SEO. They said that by 2028, search is going to shift. It’s not going to be on Google search anymore. It’s going to be AI search is going to be the top place that people are searching. So it’s shifting. And I’m kind of teeing it up because I want people to understand that this is not right now, right now, but in the next two to three years, you’re going to wish that you have done these things to prepare your business.

Adam (03:53):
Yeah. Okay. So the first thing is like reputation. What’s the first step on this?

Phil (03:58):
Yeah. So I’m sure everyone’s not surprised to hear this. Google reviews and reviews. So before we talk about those seven parts, any search engine results, page, Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity, they all want to be trusted. They want the user to go there, search something and get something from them and feel good about the results and trust that platform to give them the best results. So with Google, you go to Google, you get an answer and you’re like, Okay, I trust Google. I trust this answer because of these things. So all these platforms need these trust signals so that they can trust your business. So you have to make sure that you’re setting your company up. And the first way to do this is reviews because that’s the number one way that Google can say verifiably people had a great experience or they had a bad experience. So these AI platforms, what they do is they’re looking for three things.

(04:44)
They are going and scraping your Google reviews, your Yelp reviews, your Facebook reviews, your Angie reviews, all these review platforms. And they’re saying, Do you have a lot of reviews or not compared to other companies? The second thing, which a lot of people miss this, Google puts this in their criteria for ranking is you got to respond to your reviews because if you don’t respond to reviews, it doesn’t show that you care about customer service. And they don’t trust you because if you get a bad review, are you going to respond or not? And they don’t want to show someone that they’re not going to trust. And then the last one is you have to make sure you’re getting consistent reviews. Don’t just get a hundred and say, Okay, I need to go focus on something else. You have to have a consistent flow of reviews so that way you’re training these algorithms to be like, Yeah, they do a good job. They have great reviews, they response reviews, those things.

Adam (05:25):
Now, ChatGPT and Perplexity, they don’t have their own review sites. So because Google still has reviews, aren’t they still going to be king just because they have the reviews?

Phil (05:35):
Yes. I would say still right now, if you were to go to ChatGPT and say, How do you find your reviews? We go to Google and we look up who has the most reviews. They do a search result. So yes, you’re absolutely right. They don’t have a review place yet. I’m not saying that they’re going to get there, but regardless, you need to make sure you’re getting reviews on the number one platform, which is Google right now.

Adam (05:53):
Okay.

Phil (05:53):
Yeah. The second thing that they look at is what’s called local service area. Local service area is extremely important for Google search, but also for these platforms, and even more important for AI because you can’t tell AI where you service. You can’t go to ChatGPT say, By the way, Charlottesville Gutter Pro services these areas. You have to create content so that it trains them on where you service. 

Adam (06:16):
Well, it’s a little bit different than what we’re used to because you can go into Google My Business and tell it where you service and where you don’t.

Phil (06:23):
Exactly. You can’t tell these AI platforms. So you have to create the content to train these platforms. So the way that you do this is you make sure your Google Business Profile has the service areas, but on your website, you need to have service area pages. So you need to have pages broken out for all the specific cities that you serve, so that way they know that you serve this area. Because if you don’t have that, how is it going to know that you service those areas? It’s very, very important. And a lot of people miss this from a local perspective.

Adam (06:49):
Do you need to have FAQs on each of those local pages too? 

Phil (06:53):
Yeah. FAQs, I’m not sure if we’re going to talk about this or not, but there’s this AEO and GEO is the transition of SEO. So search engine optimization is qhere you want to optimize for Google search engine results.

Adam (07:07):
Okay.

Phil (07:07):
There’s GEO, which is the generative experience optimization, which is if you go on Google and you search for HVAC repair near me, you’re going to get a standard results of what you would see. But if you say, how much does HVAC repair near me cost? You’re going to get one of those AI overviews. That is a generative experience optimization. And AEO is answer engine optimization. So what answer engine optimization is, is if you go to ChatGPT and you ask it a question, you want it to show you in the results of the questions. So for example, right now, an average Google search has five words in it, HVAC repair near me. An average ChatGPT search has 357 words in it. So people are asking a lot more qualifying questions. So to answer your question about, should you have FAQs on your pages and this kind of stuff? Yes. Because AEO is so important and GEO is so important and you want the answers to real questions on these pages.

Adam (07:59):
Gotcha. Okay. And in video form or in text form or both or? 

Phil (08:05):
Okay. Great question here because people are like, Well, what content should I make? How should I train these platforms? Right now, all the Shorts about three months ago, they all got indexed. Any real shorts, any short-form content is getting indexed into Google. So it doesn’t really matter if it’s on Word form or video form, all the transcripts are getting trained into these algorithms. So ideally you have a video and you also have words, but it doesn’t matter. You want to create the content so that you train these platforms.

Adam (08:30):
Okay. Because AI can’t watch video, can it?

Phil (08:33):
Oh yeah. It can watch your videos. Yeah, it can definitely watch your videos.

Adam (08:36):
It can scrape video as well. Yeah.

Phil (08:38):
Here’s a good example. Take a video, plug it into Gemini or ChatGPT and say, take this transcript and tell me what this video’s about. It will tell you what the video’s about. 

Adam (08:47):
With the transcript, but not if there’s,

Phil (08:48):
No, no, not with the transcript. It will watch your video and tell you what it’s about.

Adam (08:51):
Is that new?

Phil (08:52):
No.

Adam (08:52):
Oh, I’m behind.

Phil (08:54):
Because what it does is some of the other points we’re going to talk about in here, it will literally go to your website and crawl your website and look at it from an aesthetic perspective and see the different things on your website as it’s crawling it. It’s not just looking for words anymore. That’s old school. It’s actually, how does this look and how does it interact? What’s my UX? What’s my UI? 

(09:11)
The third one is you got to make sure that you have your licenses. We see this one all the time. You’re an HVAC contractor, you’re NATE-certified, but it’s nowhere to be found. You say it on the phones, but it’s nowhere on your website. And if we go back to the same thinking is, if you’re trying to train these AI platforms on your business, you have to give them the content to train on. So if you’re NATE-certified, IICRC-certified. In some spaces like gutter cleaning, there might not be a certification. So what do you do? Another thing you can do is add your certificate of insurance on your website because this shows that you have real insurance and that you’re a legit company and it trains these platforms that you have the certifications to serve these clients.

Adam (09:48):
So just get a PDF version of your certificate, slap it up there, and that’s all you got to do?

Phil (09:53):
Yeah, you can put it up there because again, it’s going through, it’s crawling your site. It’s going to look and read all the stuff. So have the logos of your certifications on there, link out to the certifications if you can, but as much stuff as you can on there from licensing and certification. What we found is that AI platforms love that stuff because from a trust perspective, they want to be able to recommend someone and say, because it’s different. On Google search, they’re just showing you a Google Business profile and like a little snippet of the website. On ChatGPT, they’re saying, Hey, you should choose this company because…  And they’re trying to give reasoning behind it. So you gotta give it that ammo so that it can make the best decision. And this is one of the things they look at from a credibility perspective.

Adam (10:31):
Okay. Now, is there anything you can do if you don’t have, if your field doesn’t require any licensing, is there anything that, any kind of hack that you can feed it or leave it all blank?

Phil (10:43):
There’s another section that we have on here, which is actually community trust building. And so if you have local awards, it’s really important to highlight those things because you might have certifications, but what you want to do is highlight other things that you’re doing in the community as recognize you as the pillar of the community that’s doing really good work.

Adam (10:59):
Local contests. Yeah. Okay.

Phil (11:01):
Yeah.

Adam (11:01):
Like sponsorships maybe.

Phil (11:03):
All of those things, anything that you can do from a local community perspective, it allows these platforms to recognize that you are the person doing these things in this area and that you’re the authority in the space.

Adam (11:12):
I get one of those big humongous checks that’s like four feet long, two feet tall that you give to the local charity kind of stuff.

Phil (11:19):
Yeah, that kind of stuff. If you sponsor a hole at a local,

Adam (11:23):
Golf?

Phil (11:23):
Yeah. Write a blog post, do a social media post about it, because these are all things that are triggers back in that says, Yeah, they service this area. Yeah, they do this kind of stuff.

Adam (11:30):
Okay. Next one’s service quality. Tell us about that.

Phil (11:34):
Okay. This one is a home run and it’s not just to train AI. It’s like to make your business better. We talk to so many contractors in our kickoff call, we literally say, So what are your hours? Oh, we’re 24/7. We do emergency service. We’re on call. Where’s that on your website? Where’s that in your content? Where’s that anywhere? How do these places know that you actually do this? So because there’s a study that came out that your hours can affect your rankings, specifically in AI search. If you search for something at eight o’clock at night, they might not show you because your hours are whatever it is.

Adam (12:08):
Geez.

Phil (12:09):
So are you 24 hours or are you not 24 hours? Do you have AI-answering service or do you not? These are all things that you need to have from a service quality perspective. The two other big ones that I said is going to help you grow your business and be good for your business in general is do you have online scheduling? So when we talk about service quality, how seamless can you make this process and show these platforms that you have a seamless process?

Adam (12:31):
Yeah.

Phil (12:32):
If you have online scheduling, it shows, Wow, you can just schedule right online. How easy of a process is this?

Adam (12:37):
Yeah.

Phil (12:37):
Well, guess what? It’s also going to get you a lot more business coming in the door if you have online scheduling.

Adam (12:41):
Do you think AI will be able to schedule stuff for you at some point?

Phil (12:45):
Well. 

Adam (12:45):
I would imagine.

Phil (12:46):
They already have it. 

Adam (12:47):
Yeah.

Phil (12:48):
Yeah. So Google, they tested out a beta where you can go to Google, like with Google LSAs and you can, instead of saying Google LSA, find me a company for this, you can say, they ran the test for repair companies like automobile repairs. And they said you want an oil change. So they would actually call out, Google AI would call out to these repair companies and say, How much does it cost to get my oil change? They’ll say like, Well, what type of car do you have? I have a Toyota Corolla. What year is it? What miles is it? You kind of put in the information, and then it would get the pricing and then send you an email with the pricing and say, This company is doing this.

Adam (13:21):
Wow.

Phil (13:22):
Yeah. They did this a year ago. They tested this out.

Adam (13:24):
Wow.

Phil (13:25):
So eventually I think it’s going to do that. Yes.

Adam (13:28):
Yeah. Okay.

Phil (13:29):
And then the last thing I would say on this with the service quality is, so you got 24/7 time of emergency services. You have online scheduling, you have to have a pricing page. I’m telling you, a pricing page not only builds trust with your customers and your prospects. It can anchor your price so you don’t get price shoppers or annoying people that don’t want to spend $9 to get their gutters cleaned or whatever. But also the questions that people are asking ChatGPT are different than the questions that they’re asking Google. Google HVAC repair near me. ChatGPT, it’s, I need HVAC repair and I want a company that does a really great job and how much should I be expecting to pay? How much does it cost? They’re asking a lot of these qualifying questions in their search. So you need to have the content so that way you’re training it so it shows your company, and it links to your page that says, Here’s how much you should be expecting. Go read the information here.

Adam (14:20):
Yeah. I feel like OpenAI as opposed to Google taught people and open their eyes to like the better the prompt, the better the response. Google, you just give it a few words and you wouldn’t even think, but ChatGPT makes you think a little bit, but you’re expecting a really robust response if you do that. It’s like more reward if you give it more response, a better prompt.

Phil (14:44):
Yeah, definitely. And I think if you use the voice search in ChatGPT, it allows you to get it all out and just talk to it like a friend, and you’re going to give it a lot more information. It’s not just going to be, this is the difference. On Google search, you type in HVAC repair near me, then you make the decision. You scroll through the reviews, you read the reviews, you’re looking at the ads, you’re making the decision. In ChatGPT, you’re giving it all the qualifiers that you would normally look for, and then it’s giving you the result that it thinks that you would want. This is why you have to train these platforms on your business because it’s much different than people deciding themselves. They’re literally asking it for the answer.

Adam (15:18):
Yeah. Okay. What about customer experience?

Phil (15:21):
Yeah. So this one is very important. Do not have stock photos on your website. Because they want to see literally customer experience. So if you do not have real examples of customer experience happening for your business anywhere to be found, you have AI images and stock photos. How do they know that you actually service customers? How do they know that you even have technicians that you logoed, and you have a truck and all this stuff? They don’t know. Okay. So you have to remove the stock stuff and get real stuff up there. Tools like CompanyCam where you can actually document your jobs up there. Another one for customer experience is having a chat widget. They love chat widgets because it allows you to interact directly with the company, at least give the illusion that you can interact with the company via text or something. It shows that you care about customer experience.

Adam (16:06):
Okay.

Phil (16:06):
So those are the big ones. But the stock photo ones, I guarantee that that is, it’s already hurting your business, let alone the AI side of things because people come to your website and they want to trust you. They want to see a smiling face with a logo shirt.

Adam (16:16):
Yeah. They want to see job photos. And a question, you mentioned CompanyCam. My perception is that AI, all these scraping platforms can’t scrape those kinds of plugins, those sort of like third-party things, but can it?

Phil (16:30):
Yeah. Oh, definitely.

Adam (16:31):
Wow.

Phil (16:32):
Literally, imagine it goes to your website and it just takes a picture of it and then it audits the picture of what’s on the website. It’s just looking at your website. It’s looking at your experience, looking at your page load speed, it’s clicking through all your stuff.

Adam (16:43):
Now, okay. So if the CompanyCam widget thing, that’s what I meant to say earlier is widget. Yes,

Phil (16:48):
Widget.

Adam (16:48):
If there’s five photos, you have to click through each one. Is it doing that or is it only capturing the first one?

Phil (16:54):
No, it will do each one because CompanyCam, when you click on it, it goes to a separate page.

Adam (16:57):
Yeah.

Phil (16:58):
It clicks through all your links. It’s looking at broken links. It’s looking at, does it have connections? Exactly. 

Adam (17:04):
Okay. Wow.

Phil (17:06):
These are the large language models that are, they’re literally training on businesses.

Adam (17:10):
So it’s more like in the past it was like, Oh, Google will read your website. Well, now it’s more like just AI is like a person looking at your website, interacting the same way, clicking this, going to that. It interacts like a person does way more.

Phil (17:24):
The reason is what I started at the top is that you have to trust these platforms. You trust ChatGPT because it’s giving you good stuff. So it has to be so good that it can give you stuff that you trust even more.

Adam (17:36):
Phil, this is a great conversation. I want to pause. I both love Jobber. I’m a big Jobber user. A lot of your clients use Jobber. How is Jobber helping people, businesses get reviews?

Phil (17:46):
Yeah. Well, when we talk about reviews being important for AI, you need to set up automations in your business to get reviews. Obviously, you want your techs out there asking for reviews, but you need to catch all in your business. And with Jobber, after the job’s done, you can literally send them a message and say, Can you leave me a review? It’s pretty straightforward. And there’s a new feature out there. You can actually check your rankings against competitors. So we talked about you got to have more reviews than your competitors. Well, how do you know? And they actually will show you your competitors so you can see how you stack up against them.

Adam (18:14):
Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Yeah. And as soon as the client pays the invoice, review request right there. Bam. All automatic. It’s awesome. If you’re not using Jobber to run your business and get more reviews, then you need to start using it today. Go to jobber.com/podcastdeal. Get the exclusive discount and start using Jobber to run your business now. 

(18:33)
Yes. Okay. What about digital presence and SEO signals? What about that?

Phil (18:38):
Yeah. Well, before we get to that, we talked a little bit about the local stuff.

Adam (18:41):
Yeah. So more about that. 

Phil (18:42):
Yeah. I want to highlight one thing on that because with local, a lot of times people do these events. Maybe you write a blog post, but maybe you’re just starting out and you don’t do any events, you can’t sponsor stuff, you can’t do this stuff. But you have good commercial clients or big clients that people would know the names of them. If you have their permission, put that stuff on your website.

Adam (18:59):
Okay.

Phil (19:00):
Put that you did, like my company, we did the duct cleaning at the White House. Okay? So you can’t necessarily put that, but you did it at the Nat Stadium or something. So put that stuff out there that you service these things because they want to see local credibility. They want to see that you have worked with other bigger companies, and it’s going to help you with your actual customers to be like, Wow, they did the work over here. Oh, they must be legit.

Adam (19:20):
Yeah, credibility, totally. 

Phil (19:22):
Yeah, exactly. 

Adam (19:23):
There’s a reason that websites will say, as seen on all these different TV stations and channels, you’re doing the same thing only on local. 

Phil (19:30):
Exactly. And I think a lot of people gloss over that. It’s like, Oh dude, we just got this job over here and we did this thing. And you tell your buddy because it’s so cool. It’s like, No, you got to tell the world. 

Adam (19:39):
Tell AI. 

Phil (19:39):
Yeah. You got to tell everyone else because it’s so cool. And a lot of times people are like, Oh, I don’t want to be gloating or this or that. I want my competition. Oh, I did this or that. You got to get rid of that because things are shifting and you have to train these AI platforms.

Adam (19:51):
Yeah, 100%.

Phil (19:52):
Yeah. Okay. So the digital side, does SEO even matter then, Phil? Why should I do SEO if it’s all changing and I got to do this stuff? Right now, SEO still matters. And when you do SEO, it’s not necessarily for just Google search engine results. It’s to train all these other platforms. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google, if it’s ChatGPT, if it’s Perplexity. All these things that I’m telling you right now are trust signals for all these platforms. The main difference is that AI is built on large language models, and you need content to be able to train these large language models, and that’s the secret sauce, the next tier to this. Right now, those seven things that I told you is what’s going to help you right now, but the future is content for large language models.

Adam (20:35):
Okay. Well, let’s get into that. LLMs, large language models. What is that? Is that just AI, just another word, or is that different?

Phil (20:41):
Yeah. So AI is like ChatGPT, Perplexity. It’s the actual platforms of them doing things, but they’re built on what’s called large language models. And large language models are, they’re built on content, finding pattern recognition in content over time. So what this means is that if you create content that trains large language models, it’s going to know about your business. And then when it gets put into ChatGPT as, Hey, someone’s asking me a question about this, it’s going to know your business and it’s going to recommend your business. The problem is that people are not training, they’re not creating content, they’re not doing these things. So large language models, ChatGPT, these other platforms don’t know about them. They’re not feeding them information. They’re feeding them stock photos and other generic ChatGPT stuff, and they’re not creating unique content. And there’s a huge, huge land grab for this because it’s like Yellow Pages, and you’re AAA plumber and you’re trying to game the system. 

Adam (21:40):
AA, first listing. Yeah.

Phil (21:42):
Yeah. You’re spending $10,000 on a front page Yellow Page ad. That’s exactly what these big companies are doing on Google Ads. They’re sitting pretty. They’re spending $20,000 on Google Ads every single month. They have a thousand Google reviews, and they have their head in the sand because their old school mindset is, Oh, we don’t do social media because social media is just for likes and shares. We never get customers from social media. We just dominate on Google. Sounds familiar, right?

Adam (22:05):
Yeah.

Phil (22:05):
Okay. That’s what they think. What I just told you is that Gen Z is not searching for stuff on Google, right?

Adam (22:12):
Yeah.

Phil (22:12):
50% of them are on social, and they’re using other platforms. So there’s a huge laying grab happening over here from a content perspective, not only for Google to find you from a social media perspective, but to train these large language models on your business because reviews is one part of it, but there’s so many other things that play into the actual results that they show.

Adam (22:31):
I feel like some people think that social media is on its way out. You’re saying it’s the opposite. Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger player.

Phil (22:39):
Social media is the low-hanging fruit for every single business right now. If I was going to tell you to do something, it’s go create content because it’s not just like get likes and shares. It’s about training the large language models. It’s about training and being unique. It’s not just relying on Google Ads and the Google Gods and Google reviews. It’s building a brand because what’s better if ChatGPT, if someone goes there and they say, What’s a good HVAC contractor? Okay, great. But if they say Phil’s HVAC contractor, phone number, that’s way better. So you want them to know about you. That’s why I think social media is so good. And there’s five types of content that people should be making. It’s from Marcus Sheridan’s book. He just came out with a new one called, Endless Customers, but you got to make one about the cost and price. So how much does it cost to do HVAC repair in a certain area? You got to talk about the big problems that people have. Hey, if your HVAC is broken in the winter, it’s probably this stuff.

Adam (23:36):
Okay.

Phil (23:37):
Or if your HVAC breaks down in Dallas, Texas, it’s probably because of this. Then you got to talk about reviews of like, Hey, here’s a new system that just came out. Let me review this system. Should you do this? Should you not do this? Then you got to do this versus that content. So comparison content. Does it make sense to do a ductless system in here or does it make sense to do a ducted system in here? And then the last one is you got to talk about the best in class. So what’s the best HVAC unit for your home? What’s the best whatever? And talk about these things. If you make content like that, not only is it going to stand out in your marketplace, but it’s going to train these platforms for all the questions that they’re already going to be asking ChatGPT.

Adam (24:16):
Okay. I want to clarify something. Earlier you said that when you index, AI will index a video. I thought you had to pull the transcript out of that video and post that on your website so that it could read it. Is that not necessary anymore?

Phil (24:32):
It’s not necessary anymore.

Adam (24:33):
Okay.

Phil (24:34):
About three months ago, if you go to Google search engine results page and search your thing, HVAC repair new mirror, whatever it is, go there, you’ll see the normal search engine results page, but at the top you’ll see images, videos, short videos.

Adam (24:47):
Okay.

Phil (24:47):
Click on short videos. It’s literally indexing all the short-form videos. So it already did the long-form videos from YouTube, but now it’s indexing short form videos as well. So one thing that you can do, which I would recommend is repurposing your content. So you don’t have to do it to get indexed, but you should do it because it’s good. Some people like videos, some people like blog posts, some people like email newsletters, somebody like social content.

Adam (25:07):
So repackaging your content is you just using all of these different channels. Is that what you’re saying? 

Phil (25:11):
Yes.

Adam (25:11):
Okay. 

Phil (25:11):
But it’s not necessarily because it’s going to watch your video, it’s going to get the transcript and it’s going to be trained anyways.

Adam (25:16):
Someone out there is listening, they want to take action on all this Phil. What should they do first?

Phil (25:20):
Yeah. So the first thing is go back to those seven things that we just talked about and start going in a checklist like, Hey, okay, I know Phil said I need to make sure that I add all my certifications to my website. I should be building out these service area pages. So let me build that into my process on a monthly basis.

Adam (25:34):
No more stock photos.

Phil (25:35):
No more stock photos. So come up with a game plan to start getting rid of those things to get your business to this place that it needs to be. But a good starting point is think about your FAQs, frequently asked questions. I could probably ask you as a business owner, and you’d have 10 to 20 of them just off the top of your head you’d rattle off. Those are the things that you want to be creating content on. And you might be like, Okay, I don’t want to be on video. I’m awkward. I’m weird. I don’t like talking about stuff. That’s fine. What you can do is get voice memo on your phone, turn on voice memo and just tell it the answer like you would on a call. And now you have the transcript and turn it into a blog post, add FAQs inside your website and your pages, something to start training things. A very simple way is if you have CallRail or a call tracking software, take the call transcripts out and take it to ChatGPT and say, Hey, can you turn this into a blog post that’s optimized for AEO and GEO? And it will do it and it will take your real content and optimize it properly, and then you can post that. It doesn’t have to be this whole big production. I talked about a lot of things here, but it’s about taking the small steps to make sure that you can train these platforms on your business. 

Adam (26:40):
Well, that was great. Tons of info. I’m going to boil it down to three things that I really want our listeners to take away from today’s episode. Number one is reviews still matter. You want to get consistent reviews, fresh reviews. You want to respond to those reviews. And if you can, get long reviews. Ask your clients to write out a paragraph, more keywords, put in there where you’re located, whatever you can to get them to feed the engine. Number two is you want to feed the engine on your website. You want to post your certificates. If you have any licensing, if you have won any local contests or best of local things, if you sponsor the Little League team, all those kinds of things go towards your reputation and credibility. And number three, the land grab right now is social media. Fewer and fewer younger people are searching on Google only. They’re going everywhere else. And social media, according to Phil, is the place to go produce content and get more business and get noticed. Phil, great job today. Thanks for being here.

Phil (27:43):
Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the conversation. And I hope that as business owners, you took something away that was like, Hey, I need to do this because if I could jump through the screen and rattle you guys, it’s like, you got to get in this because,

Adam (27:55):
This is important.

Phil (27:56):
Yes, it’s changing. It’s changing.

Adam (27:58):
This matters. Yeah.

Phil (27:59):
It matters. 

Adam (27:59):
Well, you’re very passionate. Thanks for sharing all your insights. How do people find out more about you if they want to find about Phlash and all that?

Phil (28:05):
Yeah. So this is what my company does. I’m a thought-forward thinker of this and we’re building these things into our process. And if you want to be on the head of the curve, you can go to phlashconsulting.com, P-H-L-A-S-H Consulting. Yeah, Phil Risher on LinkedIn. Instagram @philrisher.

Adam (28:20):
Well, thanks for being here. I appreciate it.

Phil (28:21):
Yeah, man. Thank you.

Adam (28:22):
On the next episode, we’re talking about how to grow your business without burning out or missing what matters most from building real systems and setting boundaries to remembering why you started in the first place. This one’s all about scaling smarter, not harder. Follow or subscribe today so you don’t miss out. And thank you for listening. I hope that you heard something today that will make your business more prepared for the changes coming to search and AI and all that. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me at adamsylvester.com. And I want to hear from you. Tell me what you like about the podcast and what you want to hear more of. Your team and your clients and your family deserve your very best, so go give it to them.