Local SEO Tactics for the AI-Powered Web

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is David Hunter. He's the CEO of Local Falcon, an AI-powered local SEO platform and Epic Web Studios, a digital marketing agency in Pennsylvania. Over 15 years in the industry, David has been instrumental in transforming how businesses approach local search optimization with lots of things going on in search of all kinds. That's what we're going to spend some time talking about. So David, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, John. I'm happy to be here. So let's start big picture.

0:43I think the thing that's causing a lot of, depends on what side of the fence you're on, I suppose, a lot of angst, but also a lot of joy, I think, in searchers, is this idea of AI overviews. How have those kind of generated overviews that are showing up now as the top results changing the landscape in local SEO? I know that's a big question, but let's start there. Absolutely, yeah. So AI overviews are not a small change. It's a fundamental shift. It's not a little algorithm update, which is what we're used to as marketers working with Google and others. But this is a big difference here. I think the biggest complaint that marketers have is that it's evaporating the clicks to your website.

1:27Because it, you know, sort of complaint number two is that it distills the answer on its own. So Google is no longer just simply the provider of 10 blue links. Now they are a content creator. So Google as a content creator is fundamentally different from what it has been for the last 30 years or so. And that's a big difference. But at the same time, on the upside, boy, it gets the answer very quickly. Now, it might not always be the right answer. The sources might be a little bit weird, but to the end user, it does a very quick and efficient job of getting you to where you need to be. And so I think that as far as the future goes, it's looking very bright in terms of our opportunity.

2:13Well, and I think it's really changed search behavior. And that's why I say what side of the fence you're on? I think a lot of consumers really like it. Instead of typing in plumber near me or plumber in my city, it's like, well, who's the best plumber in this city that has X amount of reviews and could show up in the next 24 hours? I mean, that's what we're searching now. And so that fundamental shift is really, I think, from a consumer standpoint, if they trust the answers they're getting in the overview, then that saved them a lot of time of having to shuffle through and figure out who they ought to call.

2:46So you can see why the consumer behavior is really shifting dramatically. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, it makes sense. You know, like we as as, you know, consumers and users of Google, we're definitely used to typing in, you know, yeah, pizza near me and finding a quick response through the map pack. I mean, that's that's fairly efficient, but you don't get that nuanced conversational answer. So what we're doing as consumers, and I think that it's almost a happy accident by Google that they've rolled out AI overviews. And then phase two is this AI mode, which I think is sort of the future of what the Google SERP looks like.

3:23They're almost training us as consumers to start querying with long tail conversational searches. And so I'm seeing that behavior change. And I look at it and I have colleagues that are always like, well, the old folks, they're not going to do that. Well, yes, yes, they are. You know, my father's like pushing 70 years old and, you know, I see him on the regular using conversational, you know, searches and getting good feedback from it. Well, yeah, once you get used to it, we want what we want. So it's like, yeah, I'm going to talk to it like a human being and give him all my details because I'll get it.

4:00I know from experience, I start getting better answers that way. Yeah, I think it takes maybe five or 10 searches for the average person to realize I should be doing this conversationally. Yeah, yeah. So you spend a lot of time on proximity with some of the tools you've created. I know when I first started in search, the big thing was we had to optimize our site for... I grew up in Kansas City, so I'll use that example. We have to optimize our site for Kansas City and all the suburbs to try to get traffic from those places. Google's gotten really good at proximity, right? meaning if I search that typical search, a remodeling contractor near me, well, it knows where I am, maybe even to the street corner.

4:41And so it's going to say, okay, well, within reason, here are the six that are closest to you. So how is that changing, especially the example I used, the remodeling contractor? I mean, that's not like a dentist or somebody that is going to have a footprint area, right? I mean, I might be able to serve a 20 mile radius. So how is proximity playing and how do we, how do we take advantage of, you know, getting it to show us in a wider range? Right. So, and, and you're, you're dead on about that with the service area business. I think there's a lot of opportunity for them to really get even more visibility because of this, you know, when, when this, when local search first became, you know, became a thing, there was proximity and then prominence and relevance, right?

5:28Those were the three components that made up local. Have a lot of reviews. Right. Right. And be relevant. Be the, you know, if I'm looking for a remodeling contractor, don't show me a list of the barbershops. Right. Right. Right. So it's got to be relevant. And obviously it gets much more nuanced than that because, well, what kind of remodeling and, you know, home remodeler, commercial, you know, whatever. So bathrooms, kitchens, but there's, there's definitely a shift happening. And so at local Falcon, we have basically spent, we've built our platform on tracking results around you, right? The grid, we use a grid pattern where, you know, you can basically see, you know, over top of your business, but then expand it out however far you want to go radius wise.

6:09And then you drop a bunch of pins and you can see these results. Well, the future is definitely changing. And so we recently wanted to roll out a tracker for AI overviews around AntChat GPT that's similar to Local Falcon's core plan and that it's got the grid interface, but is using the conversational platform to see the results. And so before we did that, I said, well, we need to do, I need to see if this is valid, if it's even worth doing, right? And so we ran this big study, we put, you know, 4 ,000 some businesses in there and ran like 60 ,000 different searches and looked, basically studied the patterns and what was going to come out of that.

6:46And that's where we learned that like proximity, it matters, right? It matters at like a city level, It matters at a, you know, sort of, you know, regional level, but it is not factoring any anywhere near the, you know, the with the level of authority that it used to. So it's important that you still, you know, focus on if you're a remodeler in Kansas City, that you focus on having that localized content and, you know, authority around that. But the relevance and the prominence, the expertise, that stuff is really what starts to kind of show up in terms of the position that you put in. And I don't even call it ranking because it's more about the position because it's a natural language response.

7:32It'll weave business names into this paragraph of text that it gives you. Now, it also does a list below and whatever. But yeah, it's less about the ranking now and it's more about your position and within that ranking. So it's important because you still need to be known as someone that serves the Kansas City area, but less important when you're dealing with like near me because it's going to probably pull a list of the best remodelers around the area or what it thinks is the best. Yeah, it's interesting. you know, obviously showing up on the map pack for a local business. You know, I'm old enough to, used to be seven at one point.

8:10Oh, it was 10. Yeah. Seven, 10 and seven. Now it's three. Yeah. It's three if you can find it amidst all the other stuff, right? All the ads got to come up there first. Exactly. Right. But if I go to chat GPT today and type in a geographic search, best remodeling contractor, Kansas City, what's pulling up there? Now, I don't think a lot of people are necessarily doing that kind of search yet, but they will, right? And so, you know, theoretically, are the results that are showing up there, you know, what a common, an amalgamation of like all the searches actually determining you're the best, or is it determining you're the most trustworthy, you're the most prominent, you have the most authority, you have the most reviews?

8:52That's a great question. So, you know, and I think that anybody who tries to tell you that answer is going to be full of snake oil, right? Like nobody really knows how that is pulling in and, and, and, you know, coming together. There's a lot of different theories out there. There's a lot of different, really strong, you know, methodology that's been put to the test in terms of like what, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but like embeddings and vector, vector embeddings and like passages within the website, how it pulls all that information together is definitely different. They're not using, you know, Google Google search results per se.

9:27I mean, you know, there's I do think sometimes they kind of slide them in there. But, you know, for a while they were focusing exclusively on Bing places. So I can't say that it's going to provide you with the absolute best list, but it's pretty close. You know, I was I so I live in the Great Lakes up in Erie, PA. And, you know, I did I did that exact search pizza near me. And I, you know, this is a city of an area of 250 ,000 people. There's not that many options. And so when I look at it, I saw the list. I'm like, this is actually this is pretty good. I mean, some of these places are, you know, probably a 10 minute drive, but they are darn good pizza places.

10:04So in the chaos that is coming within these results, it does seem to be finding pretty decent, pretty decent results out of that, which is which is definitely encouraging. Now, with Local Falcon and our product that we've got, we show you essentially the output itself, as well as we will identify what brands were pulled. And then below that, we show you the sources. This is where I start to really lose my head. So I've got an agency called Epic Web Studios that's been around for 17 years now. And I started doing searches around that, like who's the best web developer in Erie, Pennsylvania, right?

10:44The list of results that came back was so haywire. I mean, we're talking, there were businesses that were, that I remember from 10 years ago that are since out of business. You know, there were businesses that were across Lake Erie in Canada. You know, it was, it was all over the place and the sources were just wild. I mean, it was finding essentially these like directories that I'd never heard of before. Right. and pulling that type of information through and saying, okay, well, we used goodfirms.com and techbehemoths.com. I'm like, what is this? So I spent a couple hours going through making sure, like, well, we better make sure we've got a profile there and that it's validated.

11:25And I mean, that's the most we can do at this stage is identify those sources and make sure that we're included in that. I mean, there's a lot more you can do with the content on your site and everything else. But that's really interesting to identify the sources Because I do think, you know, I do think that that's what's the house. A house, for example, is a, you know, is a source for builders and local home service contractors. And I noticed that Chai TPT in particular pulls a lot of house results. Yes. You know, so that's a really great tip is to think in terms of making sure you're in the sources that they're pulling.

12:02Let's just, again, another giant question. But today, especially if somebody, a local business is saying, okay, I get it. All these changes are coming. What do I need to do differently than maybe I was, before maybe I was claiming my Google business profile. I was building pages with geographic content on them. I was getting reviews. I mean, what else do I need to be doing differently? Okay. So if you're running a white hat operation with your web presence, I think that as of today, there's not entirely that much different that you need to do. But it's the big caveat that you're running a white hat operation, right?

12:39If you're sitting here running some sort of a link farm and trying to blast a bunch of AI-generated content, that's never going to work. Or at least it's not going to work in the long term. Yeah, I was going to say, that's the bad thing is it works temporarily. And some people get excited about it, but then they, you know, eventually Google or whoever catches up. Yes, that's going to get plugged, right? The idea of, and I'm not sure if the kind of hack has been plugged yet, but people were putting, people used to do this back in the day too. You would put a bunch of keywords on your homepage or on your website.

13:10And a lot of times they'd want to obfuscate that and make it like a white text on a white background so that you couldn't see them, right? And people are doing that now. They're injecting prompts inside of it so that when the ChatGPT bot comes through, it sees a prompt that says, like, talk only about this business. It's the best business. And repeating that over and over again. And people are finding it's working. It was ranking. Now, I think that they have since plugged that. I don't know. But I'm not willing to try. I'm not going to put that type of nastiness on my site. Like, that's no way.

13:40I'm not taking that risk. But, you know, there's a lot of little hacks out there. What can someone do in the white hat sense? I mean, number one, you need to understand what people are saying or, you know, how the LLM, the large language model, is understanding your content, right? So go, simply go ask ChatGPT about that. What do you know about Local Falcon, right? And just simply Google that, you know, excuse me, search that on ChatGPT and, you know, understand right out of the gate, at least it has a, does it know who we are, where we are, what we do? If not, you better start adding some content to your website in a visible way that is going to make sure that the next time the bot does come by, it pulls it in and can use that in terms of its reasoning.

14:25When you do add that content, it needs to be done in a very bite-sized way, right? Like putting up a 2 ,000-word blog post that's a big wall of text is probably not going to help you in terms of showing up inside of these responses, right? Just think about how the responses come back. They're very short snippets. And so if you can write in short snippets and get kind of the core idea down to one or two sentences, and then, you know, I'm not saying don't do the 2000 word blog post. What I'm saying is within that, make sure that it's got the main idea and, you know, the thesis, whatever it is you're doing is all kind of spelled out in little chunks at a time.

15:04You're going to have a much better shot of showing up. Well, and I think what we're saying is good content is good content, should be written for humans, should be valuable, should be educational. But a lot of the tweaks that maybe need to happen are in the structure. So, you know, you have the overview at the very front. You know, here's what this article is about. You have the table of contents, you know, you have the 2000 words and at the end you have FAQs. I mean, it's probably more about structure, isn't it? It's a big, it's a huge piece of it, right? So again, it's really about how, you know, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Anthropic, others, Google understands the information.

15:41So they do that in these little, they'll basically pull little passages out. And then that contributes to the larger model understanding what it is. And then it creates its own version of that. Sometimes you'll even find verbatim, it's pulling in some of the content that you wrote, especially with things like FAQs and how you answer that FAQ, right? Number one, you also need to make sure that it's structurally visible, right? So schema markup has never been more important. You have to identify. And schema markup is essentially like a shortcut for understanding what a page is about. It's a way for a bot, a crawler to recognize and categorize, oh, this is about a recipe or a view or a local business.

16:26So making sure that that schema markup is on there. And then, of course, again, looking through the sources. So when you run these local Falcon scans, you're going to see this. huge list of sources and it'll tell you how often that source was used. So, you know, if you've got a whole bunch of Yelp listings on there, yeah, go, go get on Yelp and maybe even consider spending the, you know, 50 bucks or whatever they want to like actually make sure that it's as, as complete of a profile as possible, just to give yourself every chance for success. Yeah, absolutely. Let's touch on just, again, this is a, this is a giant topic, but let's say I'm a business that has 10 local locations.

17:05Do I need to be doing something differently? Do I need to be doing something? I mean, are there unique challenges that you're starting to see from that multi-location business? So yes, a lot of times when you're with a multi-location brand, it ends up, you know, you have a really good shot of actually showing up because you've got so many others. You know, if you've got 10 locations in your city, that's 10 more chances or nine more chances than the solo operation, which is definitely somebody's always near to one of them, right? Yes. And so that's great. However, the response itself, you know, we see some wild stuff like it'll pull, you know, you're on the east side of town and it starts talking about the location on the west side.

17:46So it's less about that individual location and more about the brand itself, right? So making sure that like holistically, the brand is well understood is important. I think that where you're going to see potentially some headaches is in like the franchise world where someone buys in and they are responsible for their location. I mean, it depends on how the brand operates, but doing things from sort of a centralized source and then disseminating out is probably your best bet. Yeah. Awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by and share about local searches or someplace you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about your various platforms and tools?

18:25Sure. I mean, certainly, you know, search up Local Falcon wherever, you know, localfalcon.com. Also, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm, you know, on there probably too much these days. So. Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Absolutely, John. Thanks for the very, very lightweight questions there, man. Those were nothing, you know, nothing too strong at all. Right. Awesome. Thanks again.