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Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
AI Search and the Death of Old-School Marketing for Home Service Businesses
00:49:51
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- [00:00]
Phil
And there's a really big shift that's happening. So Neil Patel, we mentioned him, he put out this report probably three months ago. When they add six plus words into their actual Google search is 76% of the time gets an AI overview. What does this mean for home service businesses? If people are searching for H vacher me cool. If they're searching for how much does H vac repair near me cost, you're getting an AI overview. If they're asking how much does a ductless system cost, they're getting an AI overview. And you have to make sure that you're creating content that supports these AI overviews. And this is like the big shift in how people are searching. Take the LLMs out of it as far as like where they go. It's just like the general conversation is changing. The reason is is because they're shifting to what's called agentic booking and agentic search. And this is like a huge shift that you might have seen the interview that the Google CEO just talks about where it's like a huge shift that's coming in how the how Google is interacting with actual websites and businesses in general.
- [00:50]
Tersh
Today's episode is brought to you by one of our show partners, upfrog.
- [00:54]
Sponsor Representative
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- [01:10]
Krista
Hey, I'm Krista with Marketstorm and we work with home service companies across the country. Quick question. If another H Vac or plumbing company in your area starts influencing homeowners before they ever hit Google, who gets the first call? By the time someone searches plumber near me, they've already been researching the problem. We use AI to detect those early intent signals and put your brand in front of them. So when they do search, your name already feels familiar. Visit Marketstorm AI or text us at 213-575-5448.
- [01:46]
Tersh
Hello everyone out there in podcast world. Hope you're having a wonderful day. You're listening to or watching Service Business Mastery podcast. I am one of your hosts. Churchplicit We're Josh is not going to make up with us today. I do wish him a happy birthday. It is his birthday. I think he's like 112 this year. So congrats to making it that long in life. And he's not here to defend himself. So he's the old guy in the room that's not here physically. But we're going to talk about AI Search today and we're going to talk a little bit about Call Rail too. So huge shout out to Call Rail for making this episode happen and making it so that I could hang out and talk to Phil. And with that being said, Phil, give me a rundown of your business and what makes you an expert. And here on the show today.
- [02:34]
Phil
Yeah, for sure. So Flash Consulting is my company. We do digital marketing consulting for home service business owners. Between 1 million and 10 million is our bread and butter. I've been blogging literally since 2015 is how I got into blogging. I started blogging about personal finance, which is how, you know, Mike and all these guys. Like, I love personal finance. And I ended up getting featured in Forbes and CNBC and Yahoo Finance and a bunch of cool stuff through blogging. And I got about 30, 40,000 readers to my blog every single month. And my whole background is in SEO, basically.
- [03:03]
Tersh
Okay.
- [03:03]
Phil
I ended up at a home service business doing $3 million and I was director of business development and helped him go to 5 million, then sell to private equity. And that was in 2019. I started my company. Since then, obviously, SEO has shifted a lot to AI search. A lot of the principles are similar, but there are things that specifically in the home service space that we miss a lot of. We're going to uncover some of those on top of that, obviously, like I've done SEO digital marketing for the past 10 years only. You know, SEO stuff, home service. I had Neil Patel on my podcast, Marcus Sheridan. I've talked to them about AI search, like directly from these guys. You know, ask them about AI search and how's it going to affect these businesses. And that's kind of been how we've built out our system for our clients and what we do as a company.
- [03:49]
Tersh
Very cool, Very cool. So AI search is obviously a big deal, um, especially in the future coming up. And I was a friend of mine, actually shared shared this article on Substack about the division of society from in the next five years, like those who are adopting AI, learning AI versus those who are not is going to be like a major, like wealth shift. Even if it's not like monetarily, like, like knowledge, wealth is going to shift drastically. And I know that because of your background, you're probably feeling the same thing as me as. Whereas, like, the more I dive into this, the more it's can be overwhelming because there's like every day or every couple Days I feel like it's. Something's changing. As soon as I figure out Claude code, then all of a sudden Codex comes out with this amazing version. And then the next thing you know, like Claude code takes their API and pulls it so you have to use a key or their cli and makes it so that you have to use an API to get tokens. And then all of a sudden I'm like, okay, so let me figure out Codex. And then as soon as I figure that out, something else changes. And I personally have not even looked into AI search a whole lot other than Marcus Sheridan. So we had an event last October and Marcus was one of our keynotes there and he brought up some really good points on AI search. But other than dabbling into it like that, I'm not. I'm not there. Like, I really depend on Josh for a lot of this stuff. So I'm excited to talk to you today and maybe even implement some of this stuff into my website so I can get up there for AI search.
- [05:40]
Phil
Yeah, definitely. What I can tell you and the listeners out there right now, there's this shift that Tersh is talking about. Bright local. Who's like a company? They do, yeah. Ranking tracking for local service businesses. They put out a study a couple months ago and basically before 87% of business people were going to Google to find a local service business. So they start their search on Google. Everyone wanted to be in Google, lsa, Google Search, adpac on site, SEO. It was basically like the game. And the report that they put out was search for local service businesses based off of demographic. And what they found was that boomers are 80% of their searches are happening on Google search still for local service businesses. But Gen Z is 46% of their searches for local service business are happening on Google, which means less than half of their local searches are happening right now is not that big of a deal. But in the next three to five years when they actually own homes, they're not going to magically just go to Google to search for local service businesses. 26% of them are using social media for a local search. So. So there's this massive shift that's happening in how people are searching not only that part of it from a demographic perspective, but just in general. The old strategy was go to Google, type in four words, H Vac, repair near me and then see the blue links, read the reviews, and then go to the website and maybe convert or maybe they don't, they don't go to website. Now it's More conversational. It's not, look at the blue links. It's like more of an agentic style interaction which is like, hey, I'm looking for a company that does this, this and this, that's local, that's not owned by private equity or something, that does that as a. All of that. And we can unpack that way more. But that's basically the shift for business owners of what's actually happening. People have said, Marcus has said this, Neil has said this. I'm saying this as well. There was yellow pages to Google and everyone was laughing at the people that were getting on the Internet because yellow pages was a thing. And then that ran for about 20 years from like 22,002 to like 2022. That next big shift is happening now to agentic search and AI search. And a lot of people are laughing at that because they're like, no one's going to do that. No one's searching like that. Yes they are.
- [07:46]
Tersh
I literally, I mean I googled something the other day because it was my kids soccer. So my kids are in the, my son's in the final four of the state playoffs for Georgia. For soccer. Yeah. So no pressure. They actually go to their game is Friday night. Right. And so I was like, what's the statistics? Like I was asking Chat or Gemini. I think it was actually Gemini because I don't know why, but I feel like I have all of the subscriptions and there's certain ones that the certain LLMs that just, I feel like work better for certain things. And I felt like, all right, so if I ask Gemini then it can search the, the upto date rankings for all of the other teams. It, it assumed that my kids school had just lost the game that they played. And then it assumed that the team that they were going to play if after I told them they won was the state champions for last year. And I was like, no, I look, that's who they played today and they just beat them. And uh, so it was like, oh, congratulations, they beat the team from last year's playoffs. So they're, they should be going great. And I'm like, stop agreeing with me, stop being my friend. Like, give me the information. So I literally, I had to go to Google end up in Max preps and. But other than that, like I legit, I go to my LLMs to, to ask questions and I know a lot of people are transitioning in that direction and I, I also want to make sure that I don't assume because like I'm so deep into AI, that everyone's acting like me. And I feel like that is the assumption sometimes, especially when I go present on stage and I'll ask the whole audience. I went to us on stage the other day, I said the other day a couple weeks back, and there were 2,000 people in the audience and 20% of them had heard of Claude. And the rest of the audience didn't know what Claude was. And these were all contractors. And I was like, okay, so that changes my entire presentation because we were going to go a different direction with this. So go ahead.
- [09:58]
Phil
You know John Tory from Searchlight?
- [10:00]
Tersh
Yeah, Yeah, I know John very well.
- [10:02]
Phil
Yeah. So he's different as well. Probably. So John has this awesome newsletter and he just came out like five days ago with the LLMs revenue generated.
- [10:11]
Tersh
Yeah.
- [10:11]
Phil
So since April. So April they was about $216,000 from LLM revenue. And then now that was in March. Now in April is $416,000 in LLM revenue that's generated. But here's the biggest thing. Out of the actual, like LLM share of who's actually getting leads from certain places, out of about 900 total LLM leads that came through to home service businesses, 800 and like 80 of them were from ChatGPT. And then it was Gemini. Like Claude was literally last.
- [10:44]
Tersh
So I could see that. I could see because Claude is, is more of my Excel spreadsheet, like fix, fix my stuff, help me write an article, outline an article, type thing. And Chat GBT is more of a search one for me. It used to be perplexity, but not so much.
- [10:59]
Phil
Yeah. The biggest thing though, for people that are listening is that it's not even about just the platforms that people are searching on, but it's truly like how people are actually searching. It's not as much as like what I was saying about the four words. It's more of a conversational type of search. So the, the typical like average Google search has four words.
- [11:17]
Tersh
Okay.
- [11:18]
Phil
The average AI search has 347 words because people are usually talking to it or they're typing. And there's a really big shift that's happening in this in particular. So Neil Patel, we mentioned him, he put out this report probably three months ago. And what they found was that if it's one to three words, the AI overview section on Google showed up about like 20% of the time. So like H vac with pair near me is never going to get an AI overview. You're still going to get your LSAs or search ads, whatever. But four to six keywords gets like 40 some percent of an AI overview. But when they add six plus words into their actual Google search is 76% of the time gets an AI overview.
- [11:56]
Tersh
Wow.
- [11:57]
Phil
What does this mean for home service businesses? If people are searching for H Vac, cool. If they're searching for how much does H Vac repair near me cost? You're getting an AI overview. If they're asking how much does a ductless system cost? They're getting an AI overview. And you have to make sure that you're creating content that supports these AI overviews. And this is like the big shift in how people are searching. Take the LLMs out of it as far as like where they go. It's just like the general conversation is changing and the reason is, is because they're shifting to what's called agentic booking and agentic search. And this is like a huge shift that you might have seen the interview that the Google CEO just talks about where it's like a huge shift that's coming in how the, how Google is interacting with actual websites and businesses in general.
- [12:39]
Tersh
So with that being said, so that for those who are listening, do we still focus on SEO or like, I mean we've seen the arguments on Facebook groups like is SEO dead? And like they've been saying that for years and years and years. When Amazon came out with they were going to offer, you know, contractors to link with them, then all of a sudden you know, everything was dead. But it does feel like whenever I go on there and I do a search on Google, I'm saying talking about specifically and then it will give me these, this information but it doesn't always, like I'm not saying never, but it doesn't always give me citations for where it got the information. And so then as a contractor I'm doing all this blood, sweat and tears writing blog posts. I personally, I know you like blog posts. I despise writing blog posts. I just, it's not my forte. I'm definitely a math and science guy, not no English, like that's not my forte. So if I put forth all the effort to, to create like a handful of blog posts and then all of a sudden that information gets scraped by Google and used in the AI search and I don't get citations for it, why keep putting forth the effort on it?
- [13:50]
Phil
Yeah, great question. So LLMs, large language models, they are trained off of pattern recognition and content. Historically home service business owners, me include I was at a home service business, I was like, I'm not posting on Social media, it's a waste of time. I'm not, I don't care about likes and shares. I'm not. My client is not on Facebook. They're on Google. Finding, you know, someone that needs me. That is still true for the most part. However, about a year ago, Google started indexing short form content in their searches. And not only that, all of the content that you create is getting indexed. So I don't care if it's written word. You know, Marcus would say this. Neil says, I don't care if it's written word or it's video content or anything that can be indexed. That allows you to stand out as the authority and the subject matter expert. That is really what this is about. You could write blog posts. This is my biggest qualm with like agencies is that they start with chatgpt junk for blog content and SEO.
- [14:43]
Tersh
Yep.
- [14:43]
Phil
Don't do that. Okay. Do not do that. What you need to do is use a platform like call rail or somewhere else and have call transcripts.
- [14:52]
Tersh
Yes.
- [14:53]
Phil
And take those call transcripts and turn them into real content for your business.
- [14:56]
Tersh
Can you give example of how to do that for those who are listening?
- [15:00]
Phil
Yeah. I mean, you take. So this is what we do. We actually have an agent that does this. But I'll give you like the basic practice for someone who's listening. Go to CallRail or wherever you have your call tracking, even if it's in service Titan, whatever. Look at your leads. Calls that are over like three minutes, that usually has some meat and potatoes in there. Take that call Transcript. Go to ChatGPT, whatever other platform you want and say, can you take this transcript and turn it into an AEO optimized blog post for me? Basically, then you have your call transcript, which is real customer questions that are happening. Maybe your CSR said something smart. Maybe you want to clean it up a little bit and just talk to it and give it the real information that it should be giving as an answer. Then it takes that makes it nice. Posts it.
- [15:44]
Tersh
Now, is it okay to post it directly versus you writing it? Because I know they've, they've done a ton to making it more humanized. So if you put forth, I know personally, if you put forth a little bit of effort, it's harder to recognize that it's written by AI. Now, if you just copy paste, you didn't even format it correctly, then it's blatantly obvious that it was written by AI. But there's, you know, some pattern recognition that humans do as well.
- [16:14]
Phil
Exactly. So there Was like this whole thing where it's like in the age of, of AI search, technology, search and like every single, you know, blog post started with that or something like. Yes. What I would recommend is, aside from starting with ChatGPT, from your ideas, start with your call transcripts to get the baseline of your real customer questions and what you're actually saying. Then turn on voice mode on one of these platforms and just talk to it like, hey, what's the common question? Like, let me give it an answer and then have it structure it in the way for AEO and SEO. The reason that this is so important is because to your point, like, is anyone going to a website and reading a blog?
- [16:48]
Tersh
Right?
- [16:48]
Phil
No. No. Who cares? Like, I'm not going to go read a blog in my free time unless I want to fall asleep.
- [16:54]
Tersh
Yeah.
- [16:55]
Phil
So but with these, this new agentic search and AI search that's happening, the information and how you present it on your website, it needs to be crawlable, to be indexed, to be then shown and then educate the LLMs on your business. So the most important piece is two. One, you get real stuff and real information as the authority. Because now you're actually educating the LLM and not just regurgitating slop.
- [17:20]
Tersh
Yes.
- [17:20]
Phil
And then also you're presenting it in a way that's easily indexable and findable and educational. And so that way the platform can say, hey, here's the actual information.
- [17:29]
Tersh
So I, I know that transition a little bit. I know that both of us are, are friends with Marcus Sheridan and yeah, he talks a lot about list. What are your thoughts on that?
- [17:38]
Phil
Yeah, this one comes up a lot because of like listicles and top 10 this and that. I, I think Marcus would echo this exact same thing. Do not go to ChatGPT and just say, come up with the list of 10 and write me a listicle of 10 things.
- [17:51]
Tersh
Right, we've seen that before.
- [17:53]
Phil
Yeah. So like, as a business owner, I would know, you know, the top 10 digital marketing companies for home service businesses. So then I would write like, okay, if you want to work with relentless, right. Here's some of the great things, Josh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would know, Josh and I would have a relationship and say, like, this is some of stuff.
- [18:08]
Tersh
Then I will go to 112 years old.
- [18:10]
Phil
Yeah, exactly. There you go. Right. Like, I would list them out and I would give real information that's really real stuff. What I would say about Listicles in general is that for home service businesses, the best type of listicles is local Listicles that you can get in. So for example, let's say that you're going to sponsor a PTA and you get on a list of, you know, sponsors, or you're going to sponsor a soccer team and you get on a list of sponsors. Don't just sponsor it, get a backlink from the local entity. Because this is one of the big triggers for AI search, specifically when it comes to local businesses that a lot of the listicle type of things, it, it's skewed a little bit to like affiliate listicle links and like that kind of stuff, but you want the local juice out of it, not just to have a listicle on your website or something.
- [18:52]
Tersh
Okay, all right, that makes sense. That makes sense now. So you're saying the, the local backlinks are still important.
- [18:59]
Phil
Yeah. So that same bright local report, they talked about what was the most important pieces to rank in AI search. And for the first time ever in 2026, social media content was up there as one of the things that's important. However, backlinks has slowly been dying and I would say for home service businesses that are local businesses in general, I'm sure you probably know about domain authority and getting backlinks and da, da, da, like, all that stuff is fine and well, but I don't believe that it matters as much for local service businesses as a local backlink from a local business that's linking to you. But with that being said, I wouldn't actually go out of your way to just try to build like 100 backlinks in your local area more organically and naturally. Like if you have a company that you would recommend, then just say like, hey, I should, you know, do a quick blog post about our relationship or just have like a referrals page on my website back and forth to each other, like something more organic like that.
- [19:54]
Tersh
Okay, that makes sense. So here's something that I, I, I came up with a long time ago. And so we, we created a podcast production company because of we were producing so many podcast episodes, it just made sense to kind of help out other contractors and other people in the industry. And one of the things that I came up with was becoming a, like a micro influencer and having a company have their own podcast and having other businesses as a guest on their podcast. And then you're sharing, like you could create the blog post for the other contractor and have the links and everything and have it on, like send it over to them, and then all of a sudden they're backlinking to your and then you have like 40 or 50 other contractors or other small businesses in the area that now all of a sudden have a backlink to your website.
- [20:47]
Phil
Yeah. So good. We have this partner pipeline builder program that we run for clients. And so on my $3 million home service business, about 1.5 million of it was H vac contractor referrals. We did duct cleaning. Oh, no, we had H VAC contractors, probably about 150 of them that referred us business. And then we did their duct cleaning so that they didn't have to do it. And then we gave them money and it was like a great thing. Now if I was doing that, I would have a podcast where I would feature local businesses and I would have my referral program as part of that relationship, and I would cut it down into shorts and give them the content and like, build out this whole ecosystem of relationship. And I would take it a step further where I would actually have a referral link with their team and everything, and they could send me referrals. To your point, though, this is a great way of just, like, getting that initial interaction. So our partner pipeline builder that we run, we pull a list of complimentary services. So let's say you do roofing, then you pull a list of gutter cleaning companies, and then you reach out to them. In the first email you say partnership, and then in the body, you say, hey, I came across your website looking for a good roofing contractor or gutter cleaning company to partner with. But in your instance, which I love, would be like, hey, I actually feature local gutter cleaning companies or local businesses. I would love to have you on my show and get to know each other a little bit and see how we might be able to work together. I think it's great.
- [21:57]
Tersh
That's a pretty cool idea. And if you need help with the podcast side, just let me know. But, uh, I. I love the idea of that, but as business owners, a lot of times we are like, oh, yeah, another iron in the fire. Like something else for me to do. Great. Yeah, Good job, Tersh. Add some more to my list of things today. Love the idea also of having a full, you know, production company handling all of it. And then you just get in front of the microphone. In a perfect world, that's exactly what would happen. But that's not how it always works out. And, you know, we know that, but yeah, for sure.
- [22:31]
Phil
And there's other tools like Clicky or Refer Pro that you can like, bolt into that what you're saying. Like, you could just show up and get on the mic and then you could have a tool like that where you have a referral link, almost like an affiliate link, but basically a referral system that generates leads for your business that you just have to show up, but you have the system in the background that can generate referrals.
- [22:47]
Tersh
So yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I like some automation.
- [22:51]
Phil
Yeah, there you go.
- [22:52]
Tersh
That's. Yeah. Hello, home service professionals. Do you want to maximize your marketing budget? Then you need to be using call tracking from CallRail. Let's say you've noticed a spike in new leads this month. To find out what's driving them, you just log into your CallRail dashboard. Is my new Facebook ad outperforming my other ads or is paid search knocking it out of the park? Or maybe it's time to retire those newspaper ads ads. Since CallRail assigns a unique phone number to each of my marketing efforts, I know where my best leads come from and which efforts to scrap. CallRail shows you your most cost effective marketing channels so you can get back to business. Go to CallRail.com sbmpod and try it for free.
- [23:39]
Sponsor Representative
Today's episode is powered by Ciro Systems.
- [23:42]
Tersh
Sarah is all about removing the clutter and unnecessary necessary touch points to run your home service business profitably.
- [23:47]
Sponsor Representative
They use AI dispatching to get the right tech to the right call automatically and job time efficiency to ensure your entire team runs like a profit generating machine.
- [23:56]
Tersh
Get a tech upgrade for your business at Get Sarah Tech forward slash service business mastery. I actually wrote a couple list here of things in case we just died on the bind. But I also, there's a couple of them here that I really would like to get to. But you got something. I feel like you got something.
- [24:16]
Phil
I have like some really important ones. So yeah, a lot of times business owners say, okay, I want to rank in AI search. What the heck should I do? I'll give you like the main, the main things. One, you got to have a pricing page on your website. The reason that pricing page is a pillar is a pillar page. I mean Marcus has been saying this for years, but now it's even more important than ever to have specific pricing pages. Because the Google CEO, he just talked about the shift to agent search. Basically what agent search is for those of you that are out there is instead of people going to Google and typing in something and then getting the links and then going places, now it's just going to be interacting with your Google agent and then your Google agent going out and finding the information and Coming back to and presenting it. Right now they have this thing called agentic booking in Google Labs where you can actually do this with like Open Table and Resi to find you restaurants.
- [25:02]
Tersh
I'd actually use that.
- [25:03]
Phil
Yeah. Okay. So this is shifting for home service businesses. So we have to shift how we're presenting information online. It's not about our. Oh, our competitors are going to see our pricing. It's more. So we need to educate these platforms that they know about our business. So pricing page is number one. Marcus wrote all about this and they asked you answer exactly how to write a good pricing page. Number two is online booking. And a lot of people tell me, oh my route density. Oh, I can't. If I do online booking, then I got. I'm going to go all over God's green earth to try to do. No, just set up virtual estimates and that's it. So you do virtual estimates in your online booking and then you don't have to have actual schedules if you don't have a bunch of technicians or routes or like push it out a couple days. But you need to have this because these agents are scraping it already with your Google Business Profile if it's linked up. Like it's very.
- [25:48]
Tersh
With that being said, like our CRM has online booking and for like the websites.
- [25:53]
Phil
Yes.
- [25:53]
Tersh
Are those always scrapable? And if, how, how can you tell if it's scrapable or not?
- [25:58]
Phil
Okay, two things on this right now. I would say that they're not scrapable because I have not been able to emulate it going through like a service titan booking widget or a job or booking widget and being able to find times. What I would say is that the integration with their Google Business Profile is there for those platforms and you can have the little blue button on your Google Business Profile. This is book Online. So I believe that this integration is coming. Just like with Open Table or Resi. They have that integration with Google Business Profile that it's like a natural fit. It just hasn't caught up yet. Specifically in the age of Google LSAs where LSA has that ability with scheduling and they want to make the money off of LSAs like it's going to, they're going to figure that part out where there's so much on the bone that they haven't unlocked yet with that.
- [26:37]
Tersh
There's so many people though that I talk to that have already cut off their LSA because you can't, you can't, you can't dispute things anymore. And the leads, they're spending $500 to get $20 or whatever.
- [26:50]
Phil
And yeah, I believe that this, there's going to be a shift with the agent search and the AI search of like LSAs are going to be shifting away from that. Like LSAs are going to be moved into AI search.
- [27:04]
Tersh
I can do that.
- [27:04]
Phil
Yeah. Because then it's going to be a pay per lead and then there's, there's team for it and it's like perfect on both ends for everyone.
- [27:10]
Tersh
Yeah. Google's going to get their money one way or the other.
- [27:13]
Phil
Exactly. And this is a great way to do it because they have like all the stuff and the online booking and it's a pay per lead model and they don't have to do the pay per click all the stuff. Like it's I, this is just. How could they not.
- [27:23]
Tersh
It makes sense. But we also know that the Alphabet company. Yeah, yeah. They don't talk to each other and, or not very well anyways. And so sometimes you and I would look at things and we're like, this would make sense to, to combine these two together and the other two, they're two completely different companies inside of Google and they don't even talk to each other. And I'm like, this is a no brainer, you should be doing this. And they don't ever do it. They just cancel all of them. And so.
- [27:52]
Phil
Yeah, exactly. I think that the pricing page, online scheduling is like got to have that. The other thing that I would say is awards and recognition. A lot of times people just, well one, they don't really talk about them until their sales process. So you want to make sure that you highlight them on your website. And what most people do is they just put them on their homepage as just like static images. And they don't like they need to talk about them. So like write a blog post or do a video about it or something that's like, hey, we won this.
- [28:18]
Tersh
Well, sometimes it's, you have like imposter syndrome as a contractor and you're like, I don't want to talk about me winning this award. It makes me feel icky, that type of thing. But you're exactly right. Like you, if you want to stand out, you're gonna have to talk about it.
- [28:33]
Phil
Yeah. And most importantly is that you want to educate the large language models about your business. And so it's not about you being, you're gonna make a Facebook post and no one's going to see it. Let's just be honest. Yeah, it's about, it's about training the Large language models on your business. So you need to tell it everything like it's your best friend.
- [28:51]
Tersh
Would you. So if someone was like, I really don't want to publicize that I just won this award, like the best of award or whatever, would you create a blog post and then not link it to anything? Or like, yeah, like your homepage or whatever.
- [29:11]
Phil
Have a page that lives out there that's not linked to anything. Do a unlisted YouTube video? I mean, yeah, just something that, that is out there in the ecosystem, educating those platforms.
- [29:21]
Tersh
So it can still search unlisted YouTube videos.
- [29:24]
Phil
Yeah, I can still search unlisted.
- [29:25]
Tersh
Okay. Just as long as it's not private.
- [29:27]
Phil
Private. Yeah, private. You can't see it, but yeah.
- [29:30]
Tersh
Okay, that's good. Well, we've knocked out four of the questions that I have on my list, so they're perfectly aligned there.
- [29:36]
Phil
Yeah, I got another cool one for you. So in about and I talked to Marcus a lot about this and like we are building this for our clients, which is, here's another thing. If you still are not bought into content and making this stuff, okay, in about a year or two, there are going to be AI avatars of people. Like.
- [29:54]
Tersh
Oh yeah, there already are some.
- [29:56]
Phil
Yeah, I have one. I have one. Okay. So like I use a tool called Delphi D E L P H I AI and basically it's a duplicate fill. It's trained on all my content, all the podcasts, all of our SOPs. And my team can ask it any questions that they want.
- [30:10]
Tersh
Oh, I like it.
- [30:11]
Phil
It's great. Now when I talk to business owners, they say, I want that because I get asked a million questions. The problem is that they, they don't have the backlog of content answering questions from their customers. So when this actually comes out and it's live on like websites, imagine there's an AI avatar on websites. Imagine an agent from Google is talking to your agent and your avatar and like asking you questions and going back and forth. Right. This is really true. So if you don't have the back end of all of your real content, you're not going to have stored in
- [30:40]
Tersh
your brain, your personal brain and external brain.
- [30:43]
Phil
Exactly. And so you're not going to be set up when do. When it shifts over to that. So what I am coaching my clients on right now is you need to be creating real content to one, train large language models. But two, to have the backlog of content so that you can build an AI avatar for your business. You can have it in your sales process. You can have it on your website. You can have it so that you can link it up, like, even right now, you can link it up with like Notebook and LM and other tools that link into Gemini. So there's, it's all in the rumblings, but I believe that that's going to be one of the biggest moats for business owners is having all of that information, you know.
- [31:15]
Tersh
So I, first off, I want to get your recommendations on how to make this happen. But I'll tell you how I've done it. And for those who are listening, if you're not a nerd, like I am, like, don't, don't dive in this rabbit hole, because it is a rabbit hole. But I built an open call server that is completely separate from everything else. I got 144 terabyte external NAS hard drive system, multiple hard drives, and every conversation that I have automatically loads from my Plaud device, My little voice recorder, a note taker. It automatically goes into Slack and it goes into a specific Slack channel that I communicate with Carl. He's my external brain. He's my Open Claw server. And he automatically transcribed or it's already transcribed, but he, he sorts it out and then banks it wherever it needs to go. He determines which company I was talking about or if it was personal information. So to build my personal brand and then sorts it out and, and puts it in the file folder that it belongs in. And so then he can scrape that data later on and including building apps. So he, there's an app building agent inside of my Open Claw.
- [32:30]
Phil
So good. I want to hit this though, because home service business owners that are listening, imagine you go and work with another marketing company, a cfo, fractional CFO or something else and you have that like database about your business that then you can say, here you go. Now you can access every single thing about my business and not have to ask me a million questions and take six months to learn about my business. That is what we're talking about here. What we're built is. So with CallRail or any other tool, you have the call transcripts. You can take those call transcripts and drop them into a Google Sheet or something else and you have a Google Sheet with all of your real customer questions and real information that's happening. You can plug that into a notebook lm so now you have a searchable database with real questions that you can go back and forth on. You can also record your calls using Rilla or something else. There's other tools out there that then you can get that transcribed and dropped into a Google Doc or a Google Sheet. Plug that into your Notebook lm. These are all free tools, by the way, that I'm telling everyone now you have a Notebook LM database where you have a new hire come on board, have them go in there and asking questions. Anything that comes up on top of that, as business owners, if you creating content or SOPs, you can plug those into your notebook as well. There's obviously ways to do this. Like what you're saying.
- [33:36]
Tersh
Well, I think that Notebook LM is one of the most slept on programs out there because it's so simple. It's so, it's overwhelmingly simple. Like the very first time I used it, I was like, I don't understand this. Like, there's, there's very little, like back when I first started using those very little guidance, it didn't even have the infographics at that time.
- [33:56]
Phil
Yeah.
- [33:56]
Tersh
And I remember like, even the podcast version of it, it was like, what do I do? Like, there's no instructions. I just hit the button and then it does it. And I, I can't change anything. And all this stuff, like they've made advances, but I feel like it was another of the Alphabet companies that somebody was like, hey, we have everything. Let's just build this out and then not use it. And then all of a sudden somebody found it and they're like, hey, this is supposed to be for schools, but this is going to be perfect for an external brain. Oh, all of a sudden it gets all this publicity and some traction and now they're putting some more effort behind it. But for those who are listening, you should take your website, just your home page URL, and put it into your Notebook LLM account Notebook LLM. Tell it to create a podcast and you can have a conversational podcast. Now you have different ways you can set it up. I like to set it up as just a conversational and it will blow you away with just that one URL, the information that it will create. And it's accurate too. Like if you find something that's not accurate, you can fix it, but for the most part it's, it's really accurate. And if you have like a lot of old blog posts, like if you're 10, 15 years old and you have blog posts from back then, you'll, it'll scrape some of those. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh yeah, I forgot that we used to do that all the time and we don't do that anymore. And like It'll. It's. It's really cool.
- [35:21]
Phil
The setup that I mentioned to you, like, every single one of our clients, we build them a notebook lm and then we funnel the calls and everything into a notebook. Because if we're making like, email newsletters or content or promos, like, our team can go and reference their brain that we're, like, building over time. And obviously we give them access to it because we want them to use it to train their people. But it's like, we're trying to. It helps us do our job better, but then it also is great for them.
- [35:43]
Tersh
Now, do you have a way to automatically funnel calls from, like, a call rail? Like, is there, like a zapier integration
- [35:49]
Phil
or do they have a. Yeah, they have API integration.
- [35:52]
Tersh
Oh, okay, sweet. I didn't even know that. So you literally could funnel every single one of your calls straight into NotebookLM. And then, so there's no manual having to figure out, you know, now I have somebody in the office copying and pasting transcripts.
- [36:06]
Phil
There's a lot more to it. But, yeah, I mean, not. Not like to do it. Like, someone could do it. Right now I'm saying, like, you could build so much more stuff that, like, that's why I mentioned, like, we have agents and all this stuff, like, doing a lot of cool stuff.
- [36:15]
Tersh
Cool. There is. Okay, so I have one question that I want to ask, and we can go as long or as short as we want to on this. If a contractor has days and they want to set up, set this up to improve their AI presence, what would you have them fix first?
- [36:33]
Phil
Yeah, so we actually have an AI checklist, readiness checklist that we built out. So, like, I could probably give that to you or put it.
- [36:39]
Tersh
Yeah.
- [36:40]
Phil
But basically it goes through all the stuff to do. The first thing is pricing page online scheduling. Make sure your rewards are up there. Make sure you have all your services built out on your website. For the services that you offer, do
- [36:52]
Tersh
they need to be on different pages or the same page or.
- [36:54]
Phil
Yeah, different pages.
- [36:55]
Tersh
Different pages.
- [36:56]
Phil
Okay. Like H Vac. You know, you do H Vac repair installs, duck list, whatever. Like, have them all listed out. This is like technical SEO stuff, like the old school SEO stuff. But the reason is, is because you need all that information to be indexed on these platforms and you need to, like, set it up right initially. So that's the first part is like, go through and like, this is why, like, if Josh was here, be like, yeah, you still got to do the SEO stuff. Like, it's not not going away. It's just, it's just packaged a different way now. You still have to educate a different platform. It's not algorithm, it's a language model. Once you kind of get that part in place, the, the other part would be you need to start funneling real content in. If you're working with an agency that's just using AI slop or you're just starting with ChatGPT AI slop that is not helping your business. It could probably be hurting your business because it doesn't trust you because it's not real stuff and it's. You're just taking things and giving it back to it. And it's like, I already know this. Like, leave me alone. Yeah, so you need to get real stuff in there. So whatever inputs that you want to do for real stuff, like what we do is like we take their call transcripts, we turn that into content, we take their call transcripts and turn into video hooks. Then we get on a call with our videographer, we make real content, we post the content. Because it's so important to be training these, these models on your business. The other thing I would say is to, is to start thinking about how would. If we switch to this. Agent booking and agentic search is everything on my website that I would want to tell an agent if an agent was out there looking for an H vac contractor or whatever service it do. I have everything on my website that I would want to tell this thing about my business. Like I. Since this, I've been in that. Like, if you think about it that way, it's different.
- [38:34]
Tersh
So, okay, so in that realm, because I've, I've had people come up to me and say what about intellectual property? And I would say personally, if it's like super secretive, I wouldn't put it on my website anyways. We're all parts of best practice groups. Like we're. We all know what the next thing is that we're all doing. It's just who's implementing it. Implementing it and who's not.
- [38:58]
Phil
Exactly.
- [38:59]
Tersh
With that being said, there's very few things that are new under the sun, so I wouldn't really be that concerned about it. Like, obviously you want to put your P Ls on your website, but as far as that goes, what, what would you say?
- [39:11]
Phil
This is how I, how I used to talk about Google. This is how I talk about LLMs. Google's the number one referral partner in the entire world. If Google trusts you and they like you, they're going to refer you on their Google search engine results page. The LLMs is the exact same thing. So imagine you have this free tool that's out there and all you have to do is build a relationship with it and get it to trust you and give it real stuff and to learn more about you. That's exactly how we think about it. So you need to be the person that's educating these platforms.
- [39:38]
Tersh
Yeah.
- [39:39]
Phil
As much as you can. Whatever you feel comfortable. Sharing, share.
- [39:41]
Tersh
Okay, cool. That's good. That's good. That's. I feel confident in that. I can. I agree with that. This last question I'm asking you, I'm going to read it verbatim because when I wrote it out, I was writing as I was talking, like the way I would talk. So sometimes I don't write the best. How should business owners measure AI search visibility when they are not getting the same click data they used to get from Google Rankings?
- [40:06]
Phil
Yeah, great question. So if you're working with a marketing company and they're not talking about this yet, these are the things that you should be listening for or looking for. So these tools are new, right? Like Marcus has a tool with AI signals. Neil Patel has a tool that just came out with like, you know, visibility. Bright Local has a tool in labs that we use to see visibility. Essentially there are two main things. One is prompts. So the prompts that are happening are the starting point of like what people are actually searching and then what they're seeing.
- [40:41]
Tersh
Can we get those prompts? Like, can we access them?
- [40:43]
Phil
Yeah. So I'll talk you through how we do it.
- [40:46]
Tersh
Okay. All right.
- [40:47]
Phil
The shift from keywords to conversations is kind of all the way tying it back from the beginning before it was keywords. And you would put together a list of keywords and then you would see where you would rank over time. And it was easy to say, oh, your rankings are going up, your ranks are going down. You know, that was like good SEO. Now when you talk about conversations, it shifts. So to answer your question, there's a couple ways. One is Google Search Console. You can actually look at any searches that happen on Google Search Console that were over six keywords and usually those are more in depth type of conversational
- [41:16]
Tersh
prompts that people would be used to like, look, we. What are they called? Long. Long tail.
- [41:21]
Phil
Long tail keywords.
- [41:22]
Tersh
Yeah, that's it. That's it. Yeah, yeah.
- [41:23]
Phil
So that's one way. The second way, and this is the easiest way, and it goes back to the call transcripts, is that the call transcripts the people are asking the questions on the phone. And what we try to tell the CSRs to do is to ask this question. Someone calls in and says, hey, I, I need emergency repair to come out with my H vac unit. Instead of just saying we charge dispatch for you, da da da, ask them, well, what's exactly is going on? And then it's like that exact thing, that dream outcome or that exact situation is the content that you want to prompt for and you want to create for. Right. So you need to pull that out. Hey, I want you to come, I need someone to clean my gutters. Why are you calling us now? What's going on? Exactly what Brigham talks about with power selling pros like pull that out so you can get that dream outcome and then that's going to be that, that, that big thing. So that's what you want. Then you start with the prompts. So that would be the best, those two ways.
- [42:11]
Tersh
Yeah.
- [42:12]
Phil
Then there's two parts to it. There's share of voice and mention rate. So share a voice is the amount of times that you are show up. So basically if there's a hundred times, then your share of the voice, let's say you show up 50 times. So your share of voice would be 50 times on that prompt and then the mention rate is if you're mentioned or not and how many times you're mentioned.
- [42:33]
Tersh
So basically where can we get that? Is that inside Google?
- [42:36]
Phil
Yes. So these platforms that I was mentioning, like AI signals, Neil Patel, Bright Local. That's exactly how they're measuring AI visibility. They're starting with prompts and then they're running those prompts and they're, they're taking it and looking at share of voice and mention rate and then they're giving you an aggregate score for you and your competitors. And so like one of the things that we're doing is measuring. Okay. That call to content system that I mentioned to you before is how is that building more visibility from an AI search perspective based off of the prompts and then share a voice and mention rate. What I will say is that for most businesses they have no idea about any of these things and for most agencies it's still like figuring it out.
- [43:18]
Tersh
Yeah.
- [43:18]
Phil
So to tell you that it's like this is the silver bullet is like, I would say most people don't have that. What we have is like AI signals or different things that we know. But also it was like this big Reddit boom, like everyone needs to post on Reddit and then it was like no Reddit sucks. It's not that anymore. And so it's like, is it gone
- [43:36]
Tersh
or is it, is it still here
- [43:38]
Phil
for home service businesses? Who knows? I mean, there's like, up and down, there's tools that you can actually see every single day, like which platforms it's pulling from. Like, okay, today it's like Reddit's 10 and then Reddit's 50%, so.
- [43:49]
Tersh
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually built up a program that searches AI. It uses AI to do keyword searches across Facebook groups and Reddit posts and for keywords. And so like it because of that exact thing. Like, hey, you're not only searching for, you know, H vac contractor in Charlotte, North Carolina, but also like brand reputation too. Because we had like most contractors, I say most contractors, a lot of contractors I talk to don't have any clue about Reddit. And they could be getting roasted on Reddit in these sub. Subreddits and have no clue at all. And so I was like, you should use this tool to just make sure your brand's not getting roasted on the Internet. And so I think it's good.
- [44:38]
Phil
And the, the crazy thing is like, this, what I'm talking about. There's not really like a platform or a real answer. It's like Tersh making this cool thing that's in, like pulling these things and then like me making this thing over here and then pulling this agent. It's like the wild west of like figuring this out. And like, this is what you're saying. Like, everyone can have ideas and it's like, who's going to figure this out and what's going to actually happen? And we're in that space, which is why this is the biggest shift from Yellow Pages to Google. Because it was just like that with the Google Wild west. And then it's Google to AI search and the companies that are like on the forefront of it, they're going to get it. The people that are like running the old playbooks, they're going to get toast.
- [45:13]
Tersh
Yeah. Okay, Very, very last question, I promise. AI building websites. Good or bad?
- [45:20]
Phil
I think parts of websites is good. I think a full AI build of a website, I haven't seen it to the point where it's good enough yet, but there could be good inputs. For example, if you're super niche, like if you just do H vac websites, and it's like, here's our normal service area pages, here's our normal service pages. And it's like plug and play.
- [45:40]
Tersh
It's got references to good Stuff exactly.
- [45:43]
Phil
Like for my company, we work with home service business, gutter cleaning, electrical, custom closets. Right. Like, it doesn't really make sense for us. We might have parts of it and pillars that we can use, but it's not as like cut and dry. That's not to say that it's bad if you do it the other way. It just depends on who you're working with. What I would hesitate is I'm not going to hire someone to do it professionally. I'm going to go to Claude because Claude can replace my whole marketing team. It's not there yet, guys.
- [46:09]
Tersh
I was wondering where you're gonna go with that.
- [46:11]
Phil
Yeah, you see all the posts and everything and like, shoot, I. I have 23 team members. Of course I would want Claude to replace my 23 team members if it could. Right. I love you guys, but like, come on.
- [46:23]
Tersh
Yeah, no, it's. I. I'm with you there. And not only that, it can be. We know this by firsthand experience. It can be working amazingly for two months and then all of a sudden some random update and all of a sudden you just get crap results and then you have to refigure out how to do the prompts a different way or fix your memory or something goofy's going. Like, I. I had one once like last week or week before last where it started pulling in data from a year ago. And I was like, where's my memory? Let me find. And it would literally saved two things from a year ago where I asked it to help me write an invoice out. And I was like, why are you bringing up that person's name all of a sudden? And so. Yeah, exactly, that's. And we've also seen websites 100% built by AI and just have some AI slot out there and that's just going to hurt you in the, in the long run. Like vibe coding. Like, I love vibe coding. There's no they. Unless you know what you're doing. You're not. There's no SEO value because it's not even written in the same code. So our language. So yeah, be careful with that too.
- [47:32]
Phil
But yeah, everyone wants a vibe code. But the problem is like you can vibe code like a cool calculator or tool. Like go for it.
- [47:38]
Tersh
Yeah.
- [47:38]
Phil
But sure, maybe like an estimate software or something for your business that's unique. But like to do a website, especially with the whole agent thing is like,
- [47:46]
Tersh
yeah, I don't know, you can hang it up. It's like unless you have a lot of time to spend on it, you're. Yeah, it's cool.
- [47:56]
Phil
I will say this. You see this on LinkedIn and a lot of times it's because, like it's an E commerce website and they're slapping on a landing page and it's like AI built my link. It's like cool. This is different for home service business. This is not an E commerce landing page or something like that, or stack landing page or something.
- [48:09]
Tersh
So, Bill, if people want to get in touch with you, learn more, what's your podcast and then where can they follow you?
- [48:16]
Phil
Yeah. So flash consulting ph l a s h consulting.com we work with 1 million to $10 million home service businesses. So you can go there, discuss your business. If you want that AI readiness checklist of, you know, go on LinkedIn, you can connect with me, ask me for it, whatever. YouTube is the best place. We have a. We have a great YouTube channel, Flash Consulting Ph L A S H Consulting. You can get our podcast, you get all of our video content, educational stuff. That's the best place.
- [48:39]
Tersh
Cool, man. Phil, I appreciate you hanging out with me.
- [48:41]
Phil
Yeah, brother. Good to connect.
- [48:43]
Tersh
Absolutely. If anybody has any questions at all, don't hesitate to reach out to Phil. If you have any questions for me, don't hesitate to reach out to me. I'm happy to help. I will tell you if you send me a Facebook message, though I probably won't check it, just being honest with you because I do not like meta. So there's that. I do have a lot of friends on Facebook, but it's the bane of my existence. But with that being said, I hope you'll have a wonderful and safe week until we talk again next time. And oh, by the way, happy, happy 112th birthday to Josh today. So I'll see you later, old man.
- [49:18]
Narrator
Thank you for listening to this episode of Service Business Mastery. Now that you are equipped with essential business advice from this impactful conversation, you are one step closer to becoming the successful owner of your dreams. If this episode has been helpful to your business journey, don't forget to subscribe to the show, leave a rating, and share it with other owners as well. Visit servicebusinessmastery.com to learn more.