The AI Ranking Formula: How Plumbing & HVAC Companies Can Win in Google AND AI Search

Welcome to today’s workshop. We’re gonna be talking all about the new AI ranking formula, and as you guys are all seeing in the plumbing, HVAC, home service space, the way your customers look for you is changing, right? Some patterns are starting to emerge. I think it’s really important that as home service companies that are making a large investment in marketing, whether that’s SEO or paid search or other advertising strategies, that you’re really showing up where your customers are looking. And so while everybody’s getting logged in, if you could just let me know in the chat, if you think about like, where most your leads come in your company today, drop them in the chat, is it from organic? Is it from SEO? Is it from local service ads? Is it from Google ads? Is it from referrals? Just let me know in the chat here, that way we can get a little bit of a dialog going on where most your lead flow is coming from today, Brian, predominantly from referrals. Okay, excellent. Who else let me know that in the chat? And I’m gonna, I’m gonna dive right in to our session here today. I did put together a great workbook for this, because I’m going to talk big picture, I’m going to show examples and I’m going to show case studies, but sometimes you want to get into the details, and you want the checklist, and you want all of the other stuff. So I did put that together for you. If you want to download that, you can go to plumber seo.net/seo, debt workbook. That’s plumber, seo.net/seo-workbook, Nick or Christian on my team, if you guys could drop that into the chat for everybody, that would be super helpful. And so as we think about AI and really search engine optimization as it relates to AI rankings and AI results, this fits into the bigger picture of growing your plumbing, HVAC, electrical, home service company, right? And we have what we call our accelerated growth model, which are the key things you need to put in place and you need to be tracking towards to generate accelerated growth, right? And so in order to have accelerated growth, we need to drive leads. We have to have a strategy get the phone ringing, to get the online bookings, to get the online chats, then we have to maximize conversion, to convert those interested prospects into inquiries, those inquiries into book jobs, those book jobs into repeat customers that refer us to others. And then we’ve gotta optimize the results. We gotta figure out for where we’re spending our money, where we’re spending our effort, where we’re spending our attention, what’s actually generating the results, and really focus on the return on investment, and really this piece of driving leads, the number one pillar, the number one piece of that strategy, is organic, right? We’ve got organic we’ve got paid and we’ve got database marketing. Today we’re going to focus on is the organic side of that equation, right? Really, how do we get, how do we get the people that are looking for us without having to pay on a per flight basis, or without having to pay on a per lead basis? But again, it’s just one piece of the overall strategy that we need to think about in order to maximize our lead flow, in order to maximize the results online. Couple of housekeeping things, if you could mute yourself unless we’re having a two way interaction. Close your other tabs. Let’s give this your undivided attention. This is the latest and the greatest on what’s going on with how to rank in AI, how to come up in AI. I personally have invested a lot of time and energy sitting in seminars, sitting in webinars, personally researching across our network of several 100 plumbing, HVAC, home service companies to figure out what are the latest trends, what’s actually working in today’s market? So let’s give this our undivided attention so you can have the competitive advantage of that information. Brian, I appreciate you. You doing that. Here’s what we’re going to cover, kind of key things I want to make sure we unpack on today’s session, latest changes in the Google algorithm, because I really think Google is still where it’s at, how AI answer engines and AI ao are shaking up the marketplace, and how we are seeing some of Google’s market share, specifically for these services, shifting to other places that we want to be aware of, that we want to be focused on, the things that may you may put in place in the past that are actually hurting your ability to rank in Google as well as get recommended on AI search, and then how to optimize using the new AE, O or AI ranking formula. And for those of you that don’t know, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of plumbing at HVAC SEO. I’m the author of How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing. I’ve had the opportunity to work with literally hundreds of plumbing, HVAC, home service companies in some of the most competitive markets over the years. And so what I’m going to share with you isn’t based on theory. It’s not based on a blog post that I read somewhere. It’s based on the latest information that I’m getting, that our team is getting, and then actually what we’re seeing working for the clients that we have the opportunity to serve. And this is what we do day in and day out. We literally have 47 full time employees that this is all we do all day, right? Setting up websites, doing SEO, creating content, driving Patreon strategies, tracking return on investment, really driving results. And so if at any point you’re like, hey, you know what, Josh, I’d love for you to take a look at what we’re doing today, or. Show us how you might be able to help us implement these strategies to get better results. We would love the opportunity to do that. And of course, it’s complimentary evaluation, and we’ll just kind of show you, hey, here’s what’s good, here’s where there’s room for improvement. And if you ever want to schedule that, you just go to plumber seo.net/schedule, and that’s what we do here at plumbing and HVAC SEO. So without further ado, let’s get into this new A i ranking formula. When somebody needed a plumbing, HVAC, electrical service contractor, they were going to Google, right? And they’re typing in plumber near me, or plumber in my service area, or HVAC contractor in XYZ city, right? And this is what comes up on Google today. If we run that search, we’ve got local service ads along the top. We’ve got the local the Google Map listings beneath that, and then we’ve got all of the organic listings, right? The directories, the websites that choose to come up. And that used to be all like for the last 10 or 15 years, all we had to think about. And there was being at some level, there were some of the directors we want to focus on as well, but predominantly it was Google, like, that’s just where people looked, and that was where the 8020 principle said, that’s where you need to focus. Today’s market, there’s now more and more people using generative search engine tools like chatgpt, like perplexity and like Gemini, right? They’re actually using these tools to search. So as an example, they’re literally taking out their phone and they’re either typing in or they’re saying, hey, I need a plumber in the East Lansing area. Who would you recommend? And hitting the send button and chat GPT now is serving results. And as we look at our clients, and we kind of look at the ones that are ranking well. So as the example here, we’ve got East Lansing plumber. The client we work with in that market is Meridian company. You see they’re coming up here in local service ads, and then they’re also coming up in the the map listing, and they’re also coming up on chat GPT here as a recommended company. And so now we need to also be thinking about, how do we how do we rank in that? And I’m gonna be talking about that today, because it’s not as simple as just everything you’ve always done from an SEO perspective, carrying over, there’s very specific citation sources, very specific schema markup on your site, and the way you answer questions that gives you a higher probability of coming up on chat. GPT for those kind of results, but we are seeing clients. And you might not think this is happening, but we are seeing clients, get actual clicks, get actual calls, get actual leads from people looking on chat GBT in today’s market, and I truly believe that trend is going to increase, right? There’s gonna be more and more people asking their AI engine of choice and looking for the answer and bypassing Google and bypassing these other platforms.

But I’d say more common than the chatgpt search is what we call zero click search, which is referred to as Google AI overviews, which is when you search on Google, and Google, instead of serving a website, they summarize the answer, and they give you the answer right there in a zero click search result. And so an example of this would be like, I live in Miami. I’m here in Miami today. If I go to Google and I ask, what’s the weather forecast for Miami, in the past, I would have clicked the Weather Channel, and I would have gone to that site and I would have gotten the information that I was looking for, and they would have gotten to pixel me, and they would have gotten the traffic from that search in today’s market, Google, through search overviews, is literally summarizing what they’ve found on these other sites, and they’re putting it right at the top. This is called an AI overview, and that impacts the search volume. It impacts the traffic that’s going to these client websites. So how does that apply to you as a plumbing, HVAC home service company, in their case, this resulted in a reduction in traffic. Obviously, their traffic over the last 12 months, as we can see on public sources, has gone down significantly once those AI overviews went into play. So how does this apply to you? Is this a plumbing HVAC home service company? Your customers are typing in very specific, directional based questions like, How do I unclog a drain? What’s the best water heater process? Should I get a tanked or a tankless water heater? And in the past, by having great content in your website and coming up for that, you got the traffic. You got the ability to pixel them, you got the opportunity to retarget ideally, you got the opportunity to get that lead and get that call. But Google is doing the same thing with AI overviews here, so you can see to unclog your drain there, you use several methods, yada yada yada. And so we have a little bit of this going on for the long tail terms, right? This isn’t happening right now if we type in plumber near me or best plumber in my city, but it’s for more information gathering type search results. We do want to be in the conversation for those results. We’re talking about what does it take to come up in the AI overview? Do, and how do we capitalize on that opportunity, even if they don’t wind up clicking through to our website, some specific things we can do in those cases. And so what we’re gonna talk about is how to get your website listed in those Google overviews and chat GPT answers. That’s really AI SEO as I see it. We’ll talk about how to build your brand and authority for AI powered results basics. And I’ll do some advanced stuff as well, some really cool things we’re seeing as we nerd out on this topic. And then I’ll unpack the new AI ranking formula for home services, like the very specific, tactical things we can do day in and day out, on the website, off the website, to improve the probability of coming up in those types of results. And so I wanna preface this by just making it clear that I’m saying I think there’s an opportunity here with AI, there’s an opportunity to come up in AI recommended results. But I also don’t want you to freak out. I don’t want you to say, hey, like, all my SEO stuff is a waste of time, and I don’t know what that means. Here’s the reality, right? Google AI overviews in YouTube combined have 13 point 7 billion views on Google and 6 billion searches per day on YouTube. So that’s the Google ecosystem that we all have built our house on chat. GPT has about 1.1 billion searches per day, which only is about 5% of that search volume. And more important than that is the commercial intent for most people searching on Google is I’m looking for something, I’m looking for an answer. I’m looking for a source. I’m looking for a provider. Most chat GPT searches aren’t that right? They’re asking questions, they’re doing research, they’re finding information. And so I would say it’s not even 5% it’s probably about 1% of Google’s actual search volume. So don’t sleep on Google. Don’t feel like, hey, this Google stuff is no longer important, because it definitely is. Are you guys seeing my screen? Okay, or is it? Does it seem like it’s zoomed out? Because I think I, I had an alert here that maybe I was too zoomed out, right? Let me know. Just give me a yes, if you’re seeing it, okay, it’s it’s good. Now. Okay, cool. All right. So again, if you want to look at this in granular detail, there’s Google with this, 96 billion visits. YouTube, with 42 billion visits. Then after that, you got Facebook, Instagram, and then down here at 4 million you’ve got chat GPT. So again, just by contrast, I don’t want you to freak out, SEO is not dead, right? It’s not okay throw out the baby with the bathwater. I’m all in on chat, GPT and Claude and all these other platforms. I also don’t want you to sleep on those other platforms. So again, if we go to Google right now and we type in your city, plus plumber or AC repair or electrical services where most people are searching, we’ve got local service ads still at the very top. We’ve got Google Maps below that, and then we’ve got the organic search results. The latest data still tells us 71% of the clicks are going to the organic listings. They’re going to the map, they’re going to organic. 67% going to the first five listings. And this is a study that was done by Moz and tactically speaking, right, there’s very specific things we want to do on our website to make sure we come up. And so I’ve got an example here, the meridian company again. This is the company we work with in East Lansing, Michigan, and we run that East Lansing plumber. You can see they come up on map. They come up organically. If we ask chat GPT, who are some of the best plumbers in East Lansing, Michigan, it comes up very high in the result, and what chat GPT responds with is going to vary. It’s going to vary based on your past preferences. It’s going to vary on where you’re asking from. And so I can’t tell you definitively This is the only answer that comes up. But I can’t say in searches we’ve done from multiple IPs and from different computers, the company comes up really well in these types of search results. But really, why I want you to see is the data. So this is most recent, about $8,000 invested in online marketing. And so that’s their investment with us for our services. That’s their paid spend on Google paid search. And we’re really randomly tracking. So what does that net to in terms of leads? And so we track a 417 leads per month, right? If we divide that out to about $19.32 per lead, well, really, what I want you to focus on is, where are those leads coming from? 95 from organic. 137 from Google Maps. 127 from Pay Per Click advertising. So it’s like the Google ads and things. So those two combined, in the aggregate is almost 65% still from organic search, mainly Google, right? And there’s some being in there. There’s a little bit of chat GPT in there, but it’s mainly Google and so yes, SEO still matters. Yes, there. We still need to be sitting on the website. We still need to be built. Authority. We need to be doing the work to come up in new organic results. You don’t want to be reliant just on a paid search strategy. And there’s an evolution of the terminology. Here. We hear the term a, e, o, we heard the term G, E, O, and it’s always been referred to as SEO. And so I just want to break these terms down for you and make sure we’re all on the same page. What does this mean? What are we referring to? So AEO is answer engine optimization. And so when we think about an answer engine that would be the tools that you would ask and speak to Siri Alexa, those are your traditional answer engines. Just trying to sue Alexa, stop my Of course, my Alexa device always comes on when I do that. I that. And then you’ve got Geo, which is generative engine optimization, which is the large language models that serve results like chat GPT, Gemini, perplexity, Microsoft copilot, and a lot of these tools are emerging. Obviously, chat GPT at the top of that right now, but at the end of the day, in terms of your marketing, we just want to make sure we’re coming up where our customer looks. And so I’m going to, I’m going to say search everywhere optimization, right? Which is, let’s just make sure we come up in Google. Let’s make sure we come up in chat, GPT, let’s make sure we come up in Claude and where our customers are looking. We want to be the predominant answer that you know has earned the right to show up and to get the attention and to get the opportunity to solve their problem and to be their vendor of choice. So I’d love to ask you, how do you come up this would be a great time. I’m just gonna give you guys a couple of minutes here on a separate browser, pull up Google and type in your city, plus whatever your main service is, pull up chat, GPT and ask it like, who would you recommend for the my service in this particular market, do the same thing, maybe at least one more platform. Let’s just say Google, perp, Google Gemini. Just a quick sec, I want you to run a couple of those searches on your end and let us know. Ranking, not ranking. How does it look? I’m gonna, I’m gonna give a really awkward two minute pause while you guys do some searches for yourself independently. And you could do this really, you’re gonna get very similar results. If you do this from a phone or if you do this on your desktop.

Yeah, Brian. I think Brian, you put that chat in before I even said it the new definition of search everywhere optimization, which covers all of it exactly. All right, so while you guys are pulling that up, and I know some of you guys are playing along, some of you maybe aren’t, for whatever reason. But while you’re pulling that up, I’m gonna, I’m gonna kind of do this same process with the case study example we’re using here today, which is the meridian company, right? So if we go to Google and we type in East Lansing plumber, which they’re in East Lansing, that’s where their office is based, they do like the greater market as well. But you can see they come up here in local service ads, which is, we’re paying on a per lead basis for that. Then they’re coming up in the Google map listing, in the number one spot organically. And this is really, in my mind, where most of the calls and traffic comes from. And then below that, we’re coming up in the organic results. And I’m just using plumbers the term, but they there’s a lot of different terms. So it’ll be my time at plumber, plumbing emergency, plumber, AC repair, HVAC, contractor, everything in between. So that’s Google, right? And then AI overviews, again, that’s a different that’s a different example. So then we might type in Water Heater Repair, East Lansing. And so we can see they come up here, and the map listing for that, they come up well in the organic results for that in a couple different ways, if we ask on chat GPT, and I think that people search a little differently on chat GPT, they’re not just typing in their city, plus plumber. Usually people are speaking to chat GPT and they’re typing. They’re speaking something like, Hey, I’m looking to have my water heater replaced. I live in East Manson, East Lansing, Michigan. Who would you recommend? And then you can see here chat, GPT is pulling in DF water heater, and then they’re pulling in the meridian company. You can’t see my screen right now. Okay, that’s odd. Let’s see this year again, maybe because it’s a Private tab, let’s see.

Can you see it now? Are you seeing chat? GPT come up? Yes. Okay, cool. I’ll do a quick synopsis. Here it was on Google. There we’ve got them in the maps and the local service ads in organic and then same thing for like Water Heater per East Lansing. And then interesting, though, is the chat GPT, right? So somebody might go in and say, I’m looking at my water heater place that live in East LAN. In Michigan. Who would you recommend? And here we’ve got the meridian company, and it gives an explanation of why. What’s cool, if you’re trying to reverse engineer why? Why does chat GPT recommend these companies versus all of the other competition? They’ve got some sources like and they’re random sources like local dot water heater.com, and DRF drips and other things like that. You can also come back and ask chatgpt, why did you reference these companies? And so if we click on sources here, you can see where it’s pulling the results, and in a lot of cases, it’s pulling the actual website, which tells me it’s also looking at the search results for that as well. And you could even ask, how would I get my company to come up higher for this result? No reason is chatgpt has got infinite brilliance. You can ask it the question, and it will tell you, right optimize your website, claim your Google business profile. They’re just telling you right there that your SEO strategy and your Google Maps optimization correlates pretty closely, right? Have dedicated pages on your website for the different services and optimize the title tags, right? So it’s telling you your title tags, your h1 tags, your meta descriptions, all of that stuff matters. Put in your price ranges. We don’t like to put prices, but that’s one of the most common questions that come up in search for local services, right? So it’ll put a price range for the different things that you do brand mentions, like, what are the different brands? Interestingly, earlier it mentioned, one of the reasons it recommended meridian is because it’s an authorized ao Smith water heater dealer, which is interesting, so it’s beneficial to to reference that, and I’m gonna get into this, but it’s interesting, and it will give you a little bit different answer in a lot of different markets. But this is in my mind. If you’re trying to think, how do I optimize for chat GPT? Let’s ask chat GPT to give us some of those answers, and let’s reverse engineer. Does that actually work? Does that actually have the impact? So that’s that’s chat. P, T, let’s look at let’s look at Gemini, right? So here’s Gemini. I’m looking for a water heater to have my water heater replaced. I live in East Lansing, Michigan. Who do you recommend? The Meridian company. This company is frequently mentioned for Water Heater Installation repair. They’ve been doing it for 30 plus years, and you could do the same thing here. So hopefully that’s that’s interesting and insightful. Let me know in the chat here. How did you guys come up? Give yourself like a one. I didn’t come up for anything a 10. I came up for every term I searched. Let me know how you guys did. Brian says, What’s the top plumbing HVAC agency in Florida? Plumbing HVAC, SEO and Doral? Nice, yes, hopefully that is the case. I haven’t searched that recently, but it comes up. All right, so Thomas says about a four. Okay, so room for improvement. Let me know again, this is I thought it would be nice to do a little bit of a self reflection on that process. All right, I’m gonna come back to my slides. Are you guys still? I’m gonna stop sharing and share again, because it seems like maybe I thought I was sharing a specific tab that whole time, but I wasn’t. All right, all right, we should be good. So how do we come up number one in perplexed, this is brand number four in pet chat, GPT, that’s pretty strong, not coming up at all if we put the one says, Matt, okay, cool. So room for improvement. What’s cool is, if you kind of run this through the filter of this example for a variety of different terms, specifically plumber in East Lansing, Michigan, we can, I would think we want to know how we’re doing on Google Chat, GPT, grok, Gemini and perplexity, right? And ideally we’re coming up in the, at least in the first couple of results for all of those. And you can see here, I highlighted Meridian across the board in terms of where they come up. To do this, right? I gave you guys, like, two minutes. There’s some work, right? It takes time to think, what are the terms, and then pull up all these different tabs and run these searches to really get an assessment of where you’re coming up where you’re not coming up, I would love to do that for you. Complimentary, we’ve developed some proprietary tools now. Our team’s been working hard on this where we can do this analysis for you. And so if you’re interested, completely free of charge. If you go to a plumber, seo.net/schedule, give us some details. Give us your website, give us your phone number, give us kind of like, what your service area is. We will do that analysis, and we’ll come to a meeting, live with you, and show you, here’s how you’re coming up in all of these different engines. And more importantly, here’s why, and here’s some different things you can change in order to move up the results. And again, if you’d like us to shortcut that for you and give you a full assessment of that, you can just a plumber, seo.net/schedule, all right, so let’s get into the strategy. Here. You’ve seen meridian. I’m going to show some more examples as we go. What’s the secret formula for getting ranked? And I’m going to lead off by saying, specifically, as it relates to AI, there’s no magic answer here. Nobody knows anybody that claims they’ve got that presto, bangle button to have you come up. On chat, GPT and Claude and perplexity. They’re making it up, right? Because this is all brand new, and we’re all just testing, right? We’re all just trying to figure out what’s working. And so I’m gonna share what we’re seeing based on most of our clients coming up really well in these platforms. But number one, first and foremost, is to answer questions. Right? This is the secret sauce, your prospects, your customers, are going into these answer engines. And it’s called an answer engine because they’re asking questions that they need information and answers to. And so you want to answer the questions right? And so whatever those questions are, you want to incorporate them into your website with proper schema, with proper proper formatting so that the engines can find the answer right. And a lot of them are calling Bing, and they’re crawling Google, and Google is then displaying that information to those answer issues. So you want to answer the questions, a great place to figure out what it is that your customers are asking. If you’ve ever been like, we do a lot of things, but I don’t know exactly what they would type. If you go to answerthepublic.com you can put in pretty much any term, and it will give you tons of variations of questions. And you can do that for all of your different services, right? So you type in plumbing services, and it’s got all it’s got 16 most frequently asked questions. You can type in dream cleaning questions, 16 most frequently asked questions. And you can type entrenched sewer repair 16 most frequently. And you can drill down even deeper, and the companies that wind up ranking best in search, that get the most traffic, that are now coming up in the answer engines, are the ones that are most diligently answering those questions, and they’re answering them in a couple of different modalities. The easiest modality is text. Right as we answer the question in text, we put it into an FAQ section on our website, and then we and then we and then we put it on our website. Would you recommend answer the public over chat GPT? The way that it structures the information on answer the public is a little cleaner, a little bit easier. You’re gonna ask the same question to chat GPT, to perplexity, to Claude, and you’ll come up with a great series of questions. I just really answer the public. So we wanna do it in text, we wanna do it in image, and then we wanna do it in video. And so I’m just gonna pull up now for you guys, the meridian company, you guys have seen where they’re ranking, and they rank really well, and they’re getting lots of leads and sales off the internet. I don’t know. I think I’m allowed to say they went to an eight figure level in their company and have recently been acquired. We’re getting more and more of our clients acquired, which is a great thing for them, and it creates great opportunities for us with other big PE organizations as well. But I want to show you how we structure this on their site. So here’s their website, right? And we’ve got pages for each of the services. We got pages for each of the cities that they operate in. So let’s just look in side of drain cleaning. So we’ll go to the drain cleaning page. And so this is a page just like chat GPT. We asked it. How do we come up for this stuff? We want a page with the keywords in the title tag. We want a great, unique content that talks about that particular service, we get visual before and after. We’ve got video that speaks to it, and then we’ve got FAQs, like lots of very specific questions that are coming up with answers with reasons to choose them. And then the FAQ section that answers the most common questions when we set up the formatting, and this is called schema on the website, that’s how we really pass great data, great signals, back to Google search, overview, chat, GPT and the other answer engines. I think a lot of companies do answer questions in FAQs on the pages of their site, but they don’t have the schema set up correctly. So one tool you can pull up if you’re ever curious to check your schema would be the schema markup validator@validator.schema.org

and you can check to see is Google recognizing this page in my service area and the services that I provide, and the fact that there’s answers to questions so that it can properly categorize that content. I’m not gonna waste a lot of time. It’s not only get too technical, but I technical, but that’s the key. Is we want to answer the questions in a variety of formats. So that’s, number one, is answer the questions. Number two is, we’ve got to build our authority, and we want to make sure that our plumbing, HVAC, Home Service Company is the authority in our market, in our service area, and we do that by publishing in the places that Google looks to and these other engines look to as where authority organizations post. And so first and foremost would be YouTube, right? I said the first search website on the internet is Google. The second is YouTube. And so if we’re not loading up YouTube videos with answers to questions and with information about our organization, we’re leaving a big opportunity on the table. And so we type in on Google, on YouTube here, plumber in East Lansing, Michigan. You can see there’s Meridian right at the top of the video, not long, but just a quick video about their services. And then as we answer questions and as we put out content, we want to make sure we’re not just blogging in a vacuum. Ideally, we’re creating content and. That we can then distribute to online news sites and PR sites, so that passes more authority back to our website, passes more authority back to that particular piece of content. And so if we pull up the meridian here and we kind of look at not their blog, but their news section on their site, which is we eliminated the idea of a blog, and we said we’re going to make this a news and public resources section. We can see here like tips for identifying water heater leaks, why schedule electrical safety inspection right answering questions. And then we don’t just blog it, we are actually posting it in a way that it gets picked up on news sites that carry weight, that carry authority. And so these are all the places where one of those posts got picked up. And then this is actually it on the Smith meal, the Smith field times, where you can see that actual post is on their site, and it’s linking back to their company, and it’s linking back to the actual Drain Cleaning page, or whatever the like the water signs of leak water. It’s pointing back to the right page on their site. And so the only thing we could do is videos, news releases that actually pass authority back to our website. And what’s interesting is, there’s a there’s like, probably the most cutting edge research on AI results and the large language models and the information they post is this website called profound. And profound has been doing literally millions of searches on these engines and looking at the sources behind why they gave that result, why they recommended that answer, or that particular company. And what they found is predominantly they’re looking at the public, user generated content websites. And so what are those? Those are Reddit. Predominantly number one, most referenced is Reddit, right? And so Reddit is people ask questions, and then people answer questions on Reddit. And so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t, or somebody on your team or the company you work with shouldn’t be looking for those questions, answering them on your behalf, which is going to pass authority back to you and your brand entity. The smaller versions of that are Quora, Tumblr, we see LinkedIn, also come into play on these as well. And so we want to make sure we’re entering the conversation and building your authority and the authority of your organization and the owner of the organization to pass that authority back for those types of results. And then number three is we’ve gotta optimize our website, like the website. What we do on the website, how we structure the content, makes a really big difference. And so the new search everywhere optimization formula is pretty simple as I figure out what the most important keywords are based on your services, based on your service area, based on search volume. And then you can use tools like Google Keyword Tool, workstream, Spy, foo, Google ads, to figure out what those keywords are. Again, if you schedule a time with us, we’ve got this data like we look at this data day in and day out, we can really contextualize it based on your market and tell you what those most important keywords are. And then you want to set up a great website with unique pages targeting each of those keywords, where there’s keyword permutations, so that we can come up and really we do that by having a page for each of your services, page for each of the cities that you operate in, so not just your main city, but the surrounding cities and towns as well. And then answer the common questions using text, using image, using video, and proper schema. And I know the video I get some pushback on, because it feels like work, but you’ve got compensated technicians in the field that are doing this work every single day. We just need to put a process in place where that technician starts to document what’s happening in the field. And I don’t think all of your technicians, if you’ve got five technicians, 10 technicians, I don’t think all five of them are going to do it ever, but we can. We can put a super tech in play. Look, Johnny is really confident. He likes to do videos. We’re gonna, we’re gonna make him our super tech. He’s gonna get paid a little bit extra every time he shoots a video in the field, and just talk about the job, talk about the problem that was out there, talk about why the company chose the customer, chose you, versus the competition, and get that loaded into the website with proper schema, with a transcript of what was happened, to turn it into an actual rich piece of content that will separate you by miles from the competition, and then we have to optimize the website for user experience, not just for the keywords and for the data, but what’s the experience when someone gets there? Are they clicking around? Are they submitting something? Are they staying on the website? Are they immediately bouncing back? And so things you want to look at there are your site speed and your core vitals that all plays heavily into how well optimized your website is. And then we have to optimize on page, which is proper title tags and h1 tags and meta descriptions and schema on the website. And then we’ve got to build authority, right? And that’s building links, building citations, building online reviews, getting these revenue. Words, run these user generated content sites and track the results. This is the new SEO formula. It’s just some little nuance and some little changes to the way we’ve probably all been doing this for quite some time. And so the ranking factors that we’re seeing was technical, right? There’s the technical stuff we have to do that. If you’ve got a decent web developer, you got a decent web team. They’re thinking about the foundation of the site, indexing, broken links, 301, structured data, hosting, speed, SSL, robot, dot, txt, sitemaps. Can analyze. That’s your technical then you’ve got your on page stuff, which is, you know, the page, topical relevance, right? We’re taking our plumbing terms and we’re doing all of our plumbing services and we’re interlinking them, and then we’re taking all of our drain specific stuff and we’re interlinking it, and the main page passes gets its authority from the sub pages, which are getting their authority from the citations and the content that we’re syndicating out. And then we’ve got our titles and our h1 tags and our keyword density and our content length and how well we’re answering questions, and our image optimization. This is all on page. And then there’s the Off Page stuff, right? Backlinks, mentioned, social popularity, likes, follows, tweets, shares, citations, PR, syndication, the whole nine yards. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of companies have decent, technical, decent on page, maybe solid, somewhat solid off page, the tie breaker is gonna go to trust and authority, right? All other things being equal, this stuff being like, they’ve got pages and they’ve got all that other stuff, it’s gonna be expertise, trust and authority. And that’s really where you win the day in today’s marketplace. And so that’s where you have to focus. So that’s the website component. The fourth is some advanced AI strategies. If we’re like, going a level deeper on this stuff, the main answer engines that people are searching on are gonna search on into the immediate future. Number one is Google AI overviews, right? That’s people actually searching Google, but looking directly at the overview instead of the results chat, GPT, grok, I think is going to catch up, as they’ve already made some massive strides, perplexity and clod and at the data specifically for for AI overviews, because I think that’s the number one priority. That’s the first priority. What are the sources that it’s referencing? It’s referencing Reddit. Number one, believe it or not, Google not referencing their Google property, YouTube, they’re referencing Reddit. So don’t sleep on Reddit. YouTube and Quora, another answer engine and LinkedIn. If you think about the 8020, principle, you focus on this portion of the pie, you’re going to have yourself in a great place to be recommended in the AI overviews. From there, we’ve got chat GPT, which in my mind, is the second most search generative engine. And chat GPT is heavily waiting Wikipedia, which doesn’t really play too much on the Home Services game, Reddit, very big opportunity, and then these other sites, but it’s interesting that chat GPT is so heavily waiting Wikipedia for its results. What we found looking specifically for home services and really drilling down on our clients and the ones that come up recommended for the most important keywords and the ones that don’t the key criteria that we’re seeing when we ask it, what? Why did you select this company? What I need to do in order to come up in this result, these are the top seven criteria. Number one is customer ratings and reviews. And at the end of the day, if we’ve got more Google reviews, we’ve got no more rep reviews, we’ve got more reviews across other

platforms, we’re going to have a higher probability of coming up in those results. That’s the number one thing that chat GPT says why it recommended these companies. I think though we don’t want to just play google like for the last 10 years, it’s all been let’s get the Google review. Let’s drive for the Google review, because we know that’s where the search volume happens. I think Google is also look chat. GPT is also looking at other platforms now, like thumbtack and Angie and other platforms. So don’t put all of your eggs into the Google basket. Number two, they’re saying is years in business. There’s not much we could do about that, right? We’ve been in business, however many years we’ve been in business, but that’s a really important factor. Service range. Are they full service? Emergency? Do they have after hours bonus points for HVAC or model services make them a one stop shop? Emergency availability? Are they available 24/7, or are they only a limited hours? Local presence, focused on presence based on the actual area where you’re based, professional website, like strong on page Off Page Optimization, which is what I was just talking about, and proper certifications and licenses. So these are some of the top criteria for coming up in chatgpt. After that, it’s perplexity, which, again, for home services, isn’t nearly as, I think, high on the radar as the other two. But. Yeah, you’ve got Reddit, YouTube, like, That’s it, like, just that same thing you’re doing to build your authority platform for AI, overviews and chat chip, PT, if you’re thinking about the 8020 principle, they are also paying attention to y’all, which I think is interesting. And LinkedIn, those are other platforms you want to pay on pay attention to, so specific to those generative engines, what we want to do is, again, answer real questions and write like you’re trying to solve somebody’s problem, answering in a variety of formats, which means we’re doing video, we’re doing text, and if we can make info graphs and graphics, that’s really what good as well, structure the headings and the bullet points, so it’s not just text, right? You can have H ones, you can have H twos. You can have tables. The better you can structure the content to feed it to these AI engines, the better they can consume it and really pass you the credit for it. Use first party data and expertise. So you’re not just copying and pasting or regenerating, but you’re actually speaking from in the world trenches Content and Experience get mentioned and cited again. This is being referenced in Reddit, being referenced on LinkedIn, being referenced on these public like PR websites and news sites and things feed content into the tools. So you can actually ask a question from chatgpt and say, Hey, why didn’t you think about this company? Or, hey, I really like that company, and recommend yourself that. I don’t know that’s actually going to drive massive results, but couldn’t hurt you giving it you’re training it on the information you want it to know. And in a nutshell, right? In a nutshell, we’ve got on page, I think Google Maps optimization is still massively important, because for the most part, chatgpt will tell you it’s pulling from Google Maps for the results that we’re seeing ongoing content. We want to push new content through a syndication signal engine on a consistent basis, and we got to be building up the expertise, authority and trust, so we’re building links, we’re building citations, we’re doing map embeds, and we’re building fresh content on a consistent basis. I did put together a workbook because I can only get so technical on a session like this. If you want to drill down deeper on this, you go to plumber seo.net/seo-workbook, again, you can get more details there. We’d have a list of the most commonly searched plumbing keywords, the most commonly searched HVAC keywords. You can grab the list or what I would recommend, schedule a time, and we’ll do the analysis for you. We’ll give you the list, we’ll show you where you’re coming up and give you some information on how we could do better. So if you want to take us up on that, you can go to plumber seo.net/schedule, and I’m going to do one last example here. And if you guys had any questions, let me know. Hopefully this has been helpful. Is this me just sharing the latest and greatest in what we’re seeing. And for some of you guys that are clients like Matt, really great to see you on here. Man. Appreciate your business over the years, and appreciate you. Okay, so this is buds plumbing. And again, if we search buds plumbing, you can see they come up really well, organically. They come up in chatgpt. And if we drill down on the data, about $13,000 invested, 832 leads track. That’s $16.38 per lead, a lot of that coming from the Google map and the organic results in their area. Key things right on page optimization, great site speed, answering the most frequently asked questions in variety of formats. You can see here GT metrics coming up with an A grade. Here’s Ira Hansen plumbing in Sparks, Nevada. I added them to the slides here in the last moment because our account manager got off the call with them earlier today, and they said July was the best month they’ve had in the history of the company. A lot of that is because they’re coming up so well in Sparks and Reno in the organic results. So like number one on the map here, coming up really well in chat, GPT top plumbers in Sparks, Nevada, you can see it’s recommending Ira Hanson and sons and so that’s the key. That’s the outcome, guys, it’s been a pleasure sharing this with you today. If you have any questions or follow up thoughts, let me know. Otherwise, jump into the workbook. Feel free to schedule a time, and we’re gonna we’re gonna wrap it up there.