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Google vs ChatGPT in Local Search and What Actually Ranks in 2026 with Darren Shaw
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- [00:00]
Darren Shaw
I think that because ChatGPT is currently hemorrhaging money, they are losing billions of dollars every time you blink. It's insane. They cannot sustain the amount of loss they are taking. It's all investor money being thrown at this, trying to make it happen. At the same time, Google is raking in the dollars like they've never done before. They're making hundreds of billions of dol.
- [00:34]
Podcast Announcer
Are you looking for valuable business advice to reach that seven figure revenue mark? Do you want actionable tips to properly navigate through every business challenge you encounter along the way? Let Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch be your guide in getting you to the top here at Service Business Mastery. Tune in as they sit down with world renowned authors in business leadership and personal growth who share valuable insights about management, marketing, pricing, human resources and so much more. Let their nuggets of wisdom gold guide you in owning a thriving, profitable and ever growing business. Here are your hosts, Tersh and Josh.
- [01:20]
Tersh Blissett
Today's episode is brought to you by one of our show partners, a pro.
- [01:24]
Josh Crouch
Upfrog is the OG when it comes to pricing transparency online. They find system replacement leads through paid ads and have developed an entire system to drive those hard to find system replacement opportunities, nurture the leads and book them into sold systems before your team arrives to help you grow your business.
- [01:40]
Tersh Blissett
Learn more@upfrogio. I want to give a huge shout out to Marketstorm for sponsoring today's episode.
- [01:45]
Josh Crouch
You've heard of Google Ads, Facebook ads and SEO, but did you know that there's an entire ecosystem like 80% of the Internet that ads can be served on that you've barely heard about?
- [01:54]
Tersh Blissett
That's where Market Storm operates.
- [01:56]
Josh Crouch
They leverage data science and AI to build customer profiles for your ideal customers and get your ads in front of prospects before they are ready to hire a pro, planting your brand in their minds early and often to chat with.
- [02:07]
Tersh Blissett
A team about how they can help you grow your business. Visit marketstorm AI hello everyone out there in podcast world. Hope you're having a wonderful day. You're listening to or watching the Service Business Mastery Podcast. I am one of your hosts, Terch Blissett, sitting virtually next to my co host Joshua Crouch. And we have the lovely Darren Shaw on the show today. Welcome to the show Darren with White Spark.
- [02:27]
Darren Shaw
Thanks for having me guys.
- [02:28]
Tersh Blissett
Today we're going to talk a little bit about what Whitespark does and if you're on the marketing side, you know what White Spark is because you use it, obviously. I mean I would assume that you use it if you're on the contracting side, you're probably going to resonate a little bit with the questions that I have for Darren because, like, as the contractor, even if my marketing agency is using your. Your product, should I also be using it? And if I'm getting a report from my agency, what should I even be looking at? And I know that we're going to talk a little bit about AI powered search because that's kind of like the hot topic right now. And before I get started, if you want to share a little bit about yourself and what even Whitespark is.
- [03:09]
Darren Shaw
Yeah, sure. So I'm Darren Shaw. I've been doing local SEO for over 25 years. I speak on a lot of stages. I do a lot of podcasts, interviews, this kind of stuff. I have a big YouTube channel. I post a lot on LinkedIn. I'm always researching and sharing local search information. How to rank in Google's local results is really what I've been focused on for the last couple decades. I run the annual local search Ranking Factors Survey, which is a survey of the top experts across the world who focus on the same kind of thing. So they're researching, they're understanding what drives Google's local rankings. So I survey all of them. We put together this annual resource which is really the bible of how to rank in Google's local results. The company WhiteSpark. I started in 2005 as a web development company, which then led me to doing search engine optimization. And since then we have grown Into a global SaaS company providing software and services for businesses, agencies and enterprises to help them rank in local search results. So that's a little bit about it.
- [04:18]
Josh Crouch
It's crazy you've been doing it that long, because I think I feel like I've been doing it for a while and it's been like six or seven years.
- [04:24]
Darren Shaw
Right?
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Josh Crouch
You've been doing it for 20 plus.
- [04:26]
Darren Shaw
In the late 90s, I was, I had built my sister's e commerce website and I was trying to get her ranked on AltaVista. So I've been doing it before Google was even.
- [04:37]
Josh Crouch
That's. Wow, that's aging yourself. Yeah, that's like saying you're trying to rank on Ask Jeeves or something.
- [04:42]
Darren Shaw
You know, basically it was pretty similar.
- [04:44]
Josh Crouch
Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. I. I told Darren this before the show and we're going to, along with some of the stuff, how contractors can take care of this stuff. We're talking a lot of strategy. And what's changing with search. Search has changed a lot at local. Not so Much. But regular search has changed quite a bit. And Darren, and people like Darren who put out content or literally the basis of relentless digital starting. Darren was one of those people that I follow. I told him this before the. The show is because I went, I started going down these deep dives into how we can maximize this for our own business, which was professional services at the time, which helped tremendously. Shared the feedback with some other business owners. Then they wanted help and just like literally spawned off this. This thing that I didn't even plan for. But it's because of content. And, and honestly Darren, your content I like is a unique sense of humor with your content.
- [05:38]
Darren Shaw
Right.
- [05:39]
Josh Crouch
Put things out that's just a little, little different twist. Like you, you share interesting stories too. Like yesterday I reshared the. The wall. It was a couple years old where like the, the gal has like a hundred phones in her car and she's hitting driving directions to everybody.
- [05:55]
Darren Shaw
Oh, I saw that. Yeah, I saw that first.
- [05:57]
Josh Crouch
I was like, who in the world has time for this?
- [06:01]
Darren Shaw
It's amazing. One of the greatest local SEO hacks of all time is that case study. Yeah. Does that still work? It does still work. Yeah. Driving directions definitely a signal that Google uses. Less important for service area businesses because you can't get driving directions to a business with a hidden address. But yeah, 100% it. Driving directions are a signal that Google looks at.
- [06:22]
Josh Crouch
Yeah. So just to kind of like catch up. Anyone's listening to this is essentially. And this is something you do a lot of you guys, listeners have offices and team members come to the office from their house. Just even though they know how to get to work every day, just have them put the business listing in there and hit directions on Google Maps and have them drive to work every day. Every day, just consistently. Because it gives signals that can help you rank better. And it's literally, it's like that's the thing that's so cool about local searches. There's all these like little unique things that you don't necessarily need a company like mine or White Spark or anyone else. You can do these things. Now we also know in the. If we're in the marketing world that a lot of people, you listen to this and you won't do it. And that's why we have jobs. That's true. But the people that do get the benefits from those things and these are the types of things you can use as leverage that your competitors will never even know about. Yep. So Darren, let's, let's. I want to start. I'M going to take over.
- [07:13]
Tersh Blissett
Yes, go ahead. You're good, you're good, you're good.
- [07:15]
Josh Crouch
Let's jump into 2026 local search ranking factors.
- [07:20]
Darren Shaw
Okay.
- [07:20]
Josh Crouch
There's a lot of information there. Let's start with Google, because Google's still the premier place for local search. I know there's a lot of people with a lot of opinions outside of that. We can get into that labor. But what were some of the biggest takeaways for you as you started formulating getting this data in from all these experts? What were some things that jumped out to you that were like either big improvements from the last time, which I think was like, 2023, they did it, or things that you were kind of surprised by.
- [07:49]
Darren Shaw
Yeah. So the changes that are noteworthy this year in the search results. So I always look at which factors increased in importance and which factors decreased in importance. And so speaking of a factor that absolutely increased in importance is the concept of review recency. So if we went back to the previous edition, back in, let's say, 2023, most local search experts would have told you that reviews are very important for rankings, but they were really focused on volume of reviews. How many reviews do you have versus your competition? These days, it's really more about how. When was the last time you got a review and how often are you getting reviews. You can have a business that has, you know, a thousand reviews and they haven't gotten one in like three months, versus a business that only has a hundred reviews and they're getting like six new reviews coming in every single week. That business with a hundred reviews will outrank the one with a thousand. And so review recency is a thing that we have now become aware of how important it is and how Google's algorithm has likely tweaked to give more emphasis on that because. And it actually makes sense. What is Google looking for? They're looking to rank businesses that are hot. What are the hot businesses right now? Because sometimes businesses fade away. They might be temporarily closed. They're not doing anything. So Google's trying to capture that. And so review recency is something that I think every contractor, every small business should be thinking about and making sure that their review strategy is not bursts. It's not like every three months, you go to your mailing list and you ask them for reviews. It should be an ongoing process. Every single day, you're trying to drive new reviews. And review frequency and volume does play a role. It's. It's probably one of the most impactful things you can do for local search rankings. So review recency. Big one for sure.
- [09:45]
Tersh Blissett
So reviews still matter.
- [09:46]
Darren Shaw
Oh my God. Yeah. I would say like, you know, on your Google Business profile there's a lot of areas to optimize. But the thing that it's almost like your website. You know you build a website, you create a website and then it's good. What do you, what do you do now? You could drive links to the website. Same thing, Google business profile, you create it. How do you now outpace your competition? It's reviews, it's all reviews. Game for sure.
- [10:10]
Tersh Blissett
You mentioned a good point there and that is backlinks to websites. I guess under the misunderstanding that they're not as important as they were a year ago.
- [10:19]
Darren Shaw
I wouldn't say that's a misunderstanding. I would say that's an accurate statement. They are less important. I think that review links are decreasing in importance and I would say that's especially true in the world of large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini. And so links still a thing for sure. Less important. In fact there's a really great chart on the local search ranking factors where you can see that links as a general group of factors have been decreasing year after year. From the published study it's the one that's like a straight downward stairs as.
- [11:00]
Tersh Blissett
The like the reverse hockey stick.
- [11:03]
Darren Shaw
Yeah, it's a reverse hockey stick. So yeah links have definitely dropped in importance but reviews have gained in importance a hundred percent. Reviews are much more.
- [11:13]
Josh Crouch
I want to ask you about reviews because in the contracting world because Google Maps has been so dominant for home service businesses, everyone's like I gotta get reviews on Google and like I have shared similar things to what you shared. As far as reviews in other places it looked at kind of cross eyed like no, it's not a big deal. But with large language models becoming a thing and when I do searching on chat we'll just use ChatGPT as an example because that's the biggest one I get. See a lot of notice or a lot of comments about Better Business Bureau Reddit threads. And then of course not that there's Quite like when ChatGPT came about Microsoft was the big financier, but it's not quite that way anymore. Which was connected to Bing, which Bing uses Facebook, it uses Yelp, it uses other third parties because they don't really have their own system. And I know you share some tips and things like that to help people facilitate positive reviews on one platform to get them on others. If we could go into that just a little bit and kind of use some of your tips and things. I think it'd be really helpful to hear it from you, someone that studies this every day, for sure.
- [12:25]
Darren Shaw
Yes. So review diversification is a thing that you should be thinking about for sure. So Google is still the king of reviews. I would want most of your attention to be focused on getting Google reviews. And that's because it is the platform that drives the most amount of leads. ChatGPT is a drop in the bucket compared to Google still to this day. And actually, I think chatgpt, I don't think they're going to make it. I think Google is going to outpace them. I think that because ChatGPT is currently hemorrhaging money, they are losing billions of dollars every time you blink. It's insane. They cannot sustain the amount of revenue or the amount of loss they are taking. It's all investor money being thrown at this, trying to make it happen. At the same time, Google is raking in the dollars like they've never done before. They're making hundreds and billions of dollars. They have the funding to keep their engine going. They're already outpacing ChatGPT in terms of performance. In terms of an AI chat. Gemini is better than ChatGPT. As of this moment, people are already getting Gemini included in Google workspace.
- [13:46]
Josh Crouch
Yeah.
- [13:47]
Darren Shaw
You know what else Google has? Google has two other massive things. They have two decades worth of spam fighting experience where they know how to control manipulation. ChatGPT. The results are going to get worse and worse and worse because it's very easy for the black cast to manipulate the ChatGPT results.
- [14:08]
Josh Crouch
I was actually sharing a story. It was a different market from Canada. I can't remember what province Thaddeus is from.
- [14:14]
Darren Shaw
I think he's from Alberta.
- [14:17]
Josh Crouch
Yeah. But anyways, he was, he travels to events with us all the time. So we talked to him and he was like, I went to an event. He used chat to find some local restaurants.
- [14:26]
Darren Shaw
Yeah.
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Josh Crouch
Two out of the three recommendations were closed. Like they weren't open. Not just closed for the day, they were closed, closed.
- [14:33]
Darren Shaw
That's my other point. That's my other point about Google's power. Google has Google business profiles. It is the richest data set of local businesses in the world. And it is a powerhouse that no other search engine search interface can compete with because people care about their Google business profile. Businesses have been optimized in their profiles. They have all the reviews, they have all the data. You know, I have a, a third point. They have Chrome. Chrome is the most widely used browser in the world. They have all of that user behavior data that people are using. So, ChatGPT, I mean, good luck to you. You are currently hemorrhaging money. You do not have the data, you do not have the resources. Google is going to crush you.
- [15:23]
Tersh Blissett
Like, not to mention Nano Banana coming out.
- [15:26]
Darren Shaw
I mean, it is everything Google is doing. It's like they have the ability to outpace anybody because they have so much money, so much resources, so much experience, and so much data. So, anyways, for six or eight months, I've.
- [15:40]
Tersh Blissett
I was like, I am not using Gemini. I. I don't want Google to have any more information than what it already has. I don't want it, and I refuse to do it. And then all of a sudden, like, I. I was frustrated because I was trying to create an image inside of Chat GPT, and then I went to Grok and then I was like, you know what? Let me try Claude. And then I said, oh, yeah, I forgot about let me try Gemini, Jim. And I, I literally put the most basic prompt in there, because I did. I didn't want it to win. And it just smashed all of them. And I was like, oh, why do you have to be good?
- [16:14]
Darren Shaw
I have fully switched. I do not use ChatGPT anymore. I really only use Gemini for everything that I want to do.
- [16:21]
Tersh Blissett
That's why I'm sort of question.
- [16:23]
Josh Crouch
So we're talking about ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, AI mode, all the different things that Google has going on. And I just did a webinar for 2026 planning yesterday, and I was doing some research because I think the way our brains work is like, well, if something's growing, something's dying. Right, Right. And that's. I feel like that's what people think with, you know, well, chatgpt. Their prompts, the number of prompts they're doing on a regular basis, keep growing. Yeah, but then you look at Google's search volume, and that keeps going up, too.
- [16:52]
Darren Shaw
Yeah, yeah.
- [16:53]
Josh Crouch
Why? What are your thoughts on that and why do you think that is? I have my own theories, but I'd like to hear yours.
- [16:59]
Darren Shaw
Well, I think that the introduction of conversational search has increased search volume. And what that means is, like, people are getting used to the idea that search is a conversation. It's not just I type in a keyword, I get results, and I am completed. They're now using the Google search bar in, like, a conversational way. They're refining the queries. They're running into AI mode. They're running additional queries. And so it becomes a whole process. And so I actually think Google search volume is going up too, because people are running per topic, that they're researching way more queries than they were before. And so we're actually seeing that growth for sure. I also think that search is very interesting right now. People are just like, you know, as humans, we are craving information all the time. It's what we do. It's like we want to know things, we want to learn things, we want to get better, we want to improve. And so search interfaces are. They facilitate that for us and especially with this conversational stuff. And so I just think that like, yeah, chat GPT is growing, but to your point, that doesn't mean that something else is dying, that it's not displacing anything. I think both, both platforms are growing.
- [18:11]
Josh Crouch
Yeah. And it's interesting because I think about how I use local businesses. I do not use ChatGPT for. Because I, I was doing some testing for that webinar I talked about yesterday and I was trying to find like a local AC company and some of the results were like, like an hour away. Yeah. Now they had a location page on their website and they were very authoritative. They're a big company, which is probably why they were pulled in. But it was like, it's not near me. It's an opera way.
- [18:36]
Darren Shaw
I know. And I just. Another point for Google, right? Google's got the data. Yeah.
- [18:41]
Josh Crouch
Well, and when I sometimes, when the map appears in there, like, sometimes they pull like TripAdvisor reviews for contractors and I'm like, yeah, who gets TripAdvisor reviews? It's just some of the stuff that pulls in there. It's just like, how long is it going to take for people like, yeah, I'm going back to Google and I'm not looking back because Google has the things I know exactly when something's open, when it's closed, what their holiday hours are, what their specials are for restaurants, like, yep. It's so easy for me to get everything I need without having to do much extra digging. And now with that coming up with an AI answer, you can get all that in context without even having to click in profiles. Really.
- [19:16]
Darren Shaw
I think that the actual interface, like where people go to chat GPT and they do prompts, I feel like that is going to become an old school. I think it is not going to be the way that people search people. You know, for the last two decades they've been learning how to type into Google's search bar when they search for something that's what they're familiar with. And now, oh, there's this whole new thing is ChargeBT. And people were excited about it was novel. They were using it, they were trying it. It was like, oh, it's really cool how you can ask if I all kinds of things that is coming to the search bar. When that comes to Google search bar it really changes. Like why would you use ChatGPT when you just go to Google and just use theirs and it's so much better. So if you look at Dr. Pete on the Moz blog just published a very good piece on what's called webguide. Webguide is the clearest look about what the future of search is going to look like. In my opinion it is a hybrid. It is a combination of traditional search plus AI. You can write a prompt into the search bar. It automatically does its additional research for you no matter what you put in there. It's almost like this like, like chatgpt on steroids because it's powered by Google on the back end. And so I really think that webguide is the future and it's another reason why I think Google's going to win. And so this whole interface web guide is going to be really powerful and it's going to have all the accurate data and it's going to be really good.
- [20:48]
Tersh Blissett
Well, let me ask you about this because me as a contractor and I want to rank locally obviously and I want my blog post to be just so amazing that it gets pulled into your chat GPTs or your Google AI. But to my knowledge I'm not getting accreditation for the information if it goes into a the Google AI. Is that correct?
- [21:11]
Darren Shaw
It is pretty correct. So like let's say you've got all this great content on your website and that gets people are asking questions and your content is answering those questions. You know, it's not. That's not going to drive a lead for you because they they don't have to go to your website to get the information. It's all just getting pulled into the system. And so that is true, but it is an unfortunate truth that you just have to live with like there's nothing you can do about it.
- [21:36]
Tersh Blissett
Do we spend the time and effort and energy creating these amazing checklist if that's the case?
- [21:44]
Darren Shaw
Yeah, no, it's a good, great question and I definitely think you should because you still want to be relevant to these search engines because maybe that person is researching a topic and actually your chat history can help because you keep getting pulled into those answers. And then their question becomes very specific, is like, I want to hire an H VAC company to come and install my new AC unit. Who should I hire? And all your chat history kept referencing the content being pulled from your blog. Now that's going to help you to actually be surfaced. So it definitely is an authority building thing. It is a relevancy building thing. You want to be relevant for the terms. And so content on your website becomes as important, if not more important than it ever was.
- [22:31]
Tersh Blissett
What about YouTube content for.
- [22:34]
Darren Shaw
I love it. Yes. Yes. YouTube is a newest strategy for 2026 that if your business is not doing it, you should probably start. Because video content is very rich content and 100% the large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini because they own YouTube. So Google owns YouTube.
- [22:58]
Josh Crouch
So really hardest acquisition in the history of the world right there. By the way, Google with YouTube probably like the smartest acquisition ever.
- [23:05]
Darren Shaw
I know. And didn't they buy it from like a billion dollars? And everyone was like, oh my.
- [23:09]
Josh Crouch
Oh, it's worth so much more now.
- [23:11]
Darren Shaw
Yeah, I know.
- [23:12]
Josh Crouch
That was awesome. It was a really smart decision.
- [23:16]
Tersh Blissett
Josh, real quick, tell. Tell Darren about the video that's on my YouTube channel that I made on a whim.
- [23:25]
Josh Crouch
Yeah. So I was.
- [23:27]
Darren Shaw
That's crazy.
- [23:27]
Josh Crouch
We were doing. I was searching something.
- [23:30]
Darren Shaw
Yeah.
- [23:30]
Josh Crouch
Church like, hey, go search this real quick. And he knew the video was number one. It was like this video he made like five years ago. It was, you know, and it's a. It's a question homeowners asked. It was about your outdoor AC condenser condensing unit. Yep. Can you spray water on it to clean it? And I was like, well, it rains outside, so. But he made a video and is the number one driver. He's gotten like, I don't know, thousands of subscribers to his channel.
- [23:58]
Tersh Blissett
I've gotten 50,000 subscribers for that one video.
- [24:01]
Josh Crouch
One video. And it was.
- [24:03]
Darren Shaw
Haven't made a video since then. I haven't made one since. Wow. Like everything that you did not start pumping out a video once a week after you had that success.
- [24:12]
Tersh Blissett
I didn't know about it. I just, I happened upon it and I was like, that's not right. That doesn't seem accurate. And then it. It is.
- [24:21]
Darren Shaw
You just became the. The de facto source. And that can happen. And that's another, like, you know, that's a great example of why all these contractors out there, small businesses, need to start getting into video. Because Whitespark is a great example. We have a very good YouTube channel. I know. Josh, you mentioned you follow my content but our our YouTube channel, we try to publish videos, a good a couple long videos every single month. And it, it is maybe our number one lead source at Whitespark. People are like, we ask our when, when leads come in. We're like hey, how did you hear about us? Well, I follow Darren's videos on YouTube, I saw his video on YouTube and there's a huge thing that happens with video. You as the business owner get to create something authentically you and authentically your business. While everyone else is using ChatGPT to generate the same garbage content, you can't be duplicated when it's your authentic real human self. And video does that better than anything. And so video is a very important strategy in 2026.
- [25:29]
Tersh Blissett
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. 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.
- [26:13]
Josh Crouch
Okay folks, listen up. Pricing transparency is taking over the home improvement industry. More and more of your competitors are now offering instant online ad estimates and price ranges on their websites. So why is this happening? For one, homeowners are demanding this transparency. Every shopper today wants at least a sense of what they're going to pay for your services. Two companies that add a pricing estimator see a 300 to 500% jump in leads. And three AI tools like ChatGPT are now more likely to recommend contractors who show pricing online instead of hiding behind a call for quote button. Still skeptical. So were a lot of folks until they tried Price Guide, the tool my friend Marcus Sheridan built specifically for home improvement companies. The results? More trust, way more leads and more AI visibility. You can have your estimator live in under an hour. Less than $30 a month. This is the future. Check it out at www.Price Guide AI. Now back to your episode. Today's episode is powered by Ciro Systems.
- [27:21]
Tersh Blissett
Sir is all about removing the clutter and unnecessary touch points to run your home service business.
- [27:25]
Josh Crouch
Profitably 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.
- [27:35]
Tersh Blissett
Get a tech upgrade for your business at Get Sarah Tech Service Dash Business Dash mastery.
- [27:43]
Josh Crouch
Just to kind of elaborate on what Ter did is he was getting this question repeatedly from, from his customers. So he just made a video about it. Like he did very little to no editing.
- [27:55]
Darren Shaw
Nope.
- [27:55]
Josh Crouch
The audio wasn't even like the best quality. Like he's got these great mics now. Like it was, it was five, six years ago.
- [28:01]
Darren Shaw
Yeah.
- [28:02]
Josh Crouch
And do you think about the questions that your sales team, your technicians, your, your CSRs get every single day that can be turned into YouTube content? When I started Relentless Digital one of the first things I did is I created like three different videos. One was like how to get Google reviews fast and automated or something like that. And I created like seven top local SEO ranking effects. Those three. I, I created the video. This is before ChatGPT. I wish I would have ChatGPT or Claude to write the art the article for me afterwards. But I had to write the article myself after rewatching the video a bunch of times. And I put the YouTube video in the blog and literally those three pages drove so much traffic to my website.
- [28:43]
Darren Shaw
It's huge.
- [28:44]
Josh Crouch
And of course like tersh, all these really great things that we do and we realize work really well, we stopped doing.
- [28:50]
Darren Shaw
It's crazy how, how we operate. Yeah.
- [28:52]
Josh Crouch
But like think about it. We're talking like Google, Google's still growing. We're talking Darren believes who studies this stuff and talks with very high level experts all the time, thinks Google's going to be the, the one that's going to continue to come on top with local search pairing Google and YouTube together. So like if y' all have a marketing company, if you're listening to this or you do marketing yourself, you have blogs on your website, you already have topics. Just go make a video about it. Literally put a video in your own words, have your team put it on YouTube and put the link on your website and it's that simple. And you can now you have the power of both things. You can even localize the video a little bit to be more your area. So hopefully it shows up a little bit more locally.
- [29:31]
Darren Shaw
But I have a tip for you on video production production. So if you are a contractor listening to this, you're like oh video, I gotta hire a video editor. All that kind of stuff like Ter did. You should not overthink it. Don't Overthink it and don't script it. You are dead in the water. So what you need to do is pretend the camera is a customer and the customer just asked you a question and just answer it. It's. It's. That's going to be so natural. You don't have to worry about being on camera. You're just like, you get your wife to be like, hey, Joe, should I spray? Is it okay to, to spray off my air conditioner? And then you're just going to answer that question. That is a, that's a better video than the scripted version, the overproduced version. And it's so easy for you to do. And it's like one take and it's done. And you, you know what? If you say, who cares? Who cares? Just publish the damn video.
- [30:27]
Tersh Blissett
What about people who tend to. What is, what is the best word? They just ramble. Just like, all right, wrap it up, wrap it up.
- [30:38]
Darren Shaw
That's where you do take two. It is, it is useful to have someone filming you that's sort of assessing how it's going. And if, if like you found that you did Rambo, then it's fine, just do another take. And then I often when I. Here's how I make all of my short form videos, I have an idea in my head. I say it to the camera without hitting record at least twice, sometimes three times. So it's like, I'm like, hey, everybody, I got a great tip for how to get more reviews on Google. And then I'll just say it to the camera before I hit record. So I've done it at least two or three times and then I hit record. And if that takes did go great, I'll hit record again. But usually, like, especially we're talking about short, short form video. Five takes is done. And I am now at this point where I can make a short form video in 10 minutes.
- [31:30]
Josh Crouch
I think, I think sometimes because we, we see these, like, these people like the Dan Martell somebody's like super Alex Hermosi somebody's influencers are super big and they got like a whole production team behind them doing all this stuff. And you're like all these different angles and the clips and they got like four cameras on them and people are like, oh, like, there's no, like, we. We've set up this bar that's so high that we're like, never. I can't do that. I'm never going to be able to do that. It's just, it's not me. And like, I Go. I think back to like when I was in the trades, I'd literally. And I, you know, I didn't really realize the impact of some of this stuff. But we, I did the same thing. I literally was in my basement creating on my cell phone videos with no scripts, no idea. I'm like, I just had a thought. I thought this would be useful for customers. I didn't have the success tertiary, but we sent a lot of ours out when someone booked an appointment of like, hey, check these things before we get on site so we don't come out charge 99. And you just had to flip a switch on your furnace to turn it on because your brand turned it off or whatever.
- [32:24]
Tersh Blissett
You know the crazy thing, I think that a lot of the success with the video that I created was the fact that the service techs got on there and were like, duh, it rains, right?
- [32:35]
Darren Shaw
I'm in bait. Yeah, yeah.
- [32:36]
Tersh Blissett
And then they legitimately, they were arguing back and forth and I was like, look, this is for a homeowner that doesn't want to get shocked for electricity. And they're like, yeah, that makes sense. I get it, I get it now. And so like the other thing is I was wearing a three piece suit in the video too. And so the technicians were like, no, I would never listen to him, he's wearing a suit. I was like, oh, so my butt crack wasn't showing. So that's the qualification for listening to me. Like, what? And so that got some engagement as well.
- [33:09]
Darren Shaw
I do think that's worth mentioning. So since we're on the topic of video, sometimes videos, they can really be like, instead of holding a microphone, you're holding a banana. Just the stupidest thing, right? Like you're just like. And then, and then you get all these people like, why is he holding a banana in the, in the comments? But all that engagement helps your video to get larger reach. So you wearing this suit is a very great example of that.
- [33:37]
Tersh Blissett
Yeah, well, there's this lady that I was watching on TikTok a couple months back and she mentioned almost something exactly like that. She was like, I was doing a full video and my zipper was down. And she said the whole time I knew my zipper was down. I actually had an extra pair of pants on underneath. But the, their comments were crazy about, hey, your fly's down.
- [33:59]
Darren Shaw
Like, you should check your fly comment 8.
- [34:01]
Josh Crouch
Yeah, and that video probably got a ton of extra views for people that were interested in whatever the video was actually.
- [34:07]
Darren Shaw
It is, yeah, yeah, it was. I have another video Type that I'm going to mention. And then maybe we should change topics from video. But I just went viral on Instagram, 1.4 million views of a video that I made on Instagram. And I was like, it's so insane. Like, because my Instagram, I only have like 2,000 followers there. But I was like, what? How did this happen? So this video is a reaction video. I was making a video about small businesses, and there's a small bit, like a golf course that has this really great series they're doing where they throw a beer at the guy right at his face, and then he has to guess what the. What the beer is like. Is it Budweiser? Is it Coors? Right. So this is really awesome video. That is hilarious. And they. Their video is like 22 million views. Right. So I wanted to talk about how this was powerful for small videos. So the. The. My video starts by me reacting to their video. So I've just like, piggybacked on their success. And so my video is just talking about why that video was so good and why it was so successful. But it's just like, so if you as a contractor, there's another video that's out there that's talking about, let's say, Tershi's video. If I'm an H vac, I could do a reaction video on Tersh's video and I could put that on my channel. So that's a very interesting thing.
- [35:29]
Josh Crouch
If you make a reaction video that is hilarious and makes fun of church, I will personally pay.
- [35:35]
Darren Shaw
There you go. Yeah. So that's an interesting strategy.
- [35:39]
Josh Crouch
Anyone listening to this? That is your 20, 26 goals and mission is to make fun of church in a reaction video of his video. So. But you got to go find it. We told you a little. So I'm not going to tell you the title. You got to go find it on this YouTube channel.
- [35:54]
Darren Shaw
Yeah.
- [35:55]
Josh Crouch
@ least give me a little bit of extra search value there. Evan had a question. He's actually from Canada as.
- [36:02]
Darren Shaw
Well.
- [36:02]
Josh Crouch
Okay. We happen to know a lot of Canadians, probably because he's from Edmonton.
- [36:06]
Darren Shaw
Friendly.
- [36:08]
Josh Crouch
This. He gave this question a little bit ago when we were talking about loss of traffic and church. I think the word you're you. You said accreditation. You were living for, like, attribution because you're not getting credit to your.
- [36:18]
Darren Shaw
Website. You're.
- [36:19]
Josh Crouch
Right. So Evan asked, does this mean that lead magnets to build an email list and then send traffic to your website could be more valuable than ranking a blog? What do you think about.
- [36:26]
Darren Shaw
That? Darren, you should do that for sure. You should definitely have a lead magnet. You should definitely build your email list. Because when you have an email list you use it everywhere else, right? Every time I publish a YouTube video, I send it to my email list and now we've got our email list of 45,000. And so that drives a big amount of initial boost of the video to keep to give it traction within the platform itself. So but if you're just talking about the traffic to the website, I would temper your expectations. Our email list is 45,000. When we publish an email we get about 10, 12,000 of those people open it. Most of them, I would say open it and close it immediately. Open it and delete it, whatever. Right. So you know, what is your actual open rate? Like? It's like I would say at least half of them. Those garbage opens and then on average we get like 2, 300 clicks. So that's a very small amount of clicks coming from an email. Now if you are a local H Vac company, you're not going to grow your list to 45,000. You're going to grow your list to like 2,000. And you'd be celebrating because you got 2,000 people subscribed to your mailing list. How many clicks are you going to get to your website from your.
- [37:41]
Tersh Blissett
Emails?
- [37:42]
Darren Shaw
6. Like not very many. So I think it's a, it's not a great tactic if you're trying to do it to drive website traffic. That's what I would say. I would say ranking. I like that you put it in quotes. Ranking a blog is, is more valuable. I would be careful about the types of content you are building on your blogs. You don't want to make your site too diluted, too off.
- [38:07]
Josh Crouch
Topic. Are you scan, you don't want to expand. So like, like let's say you're a.
- [38:12]
Darren Shaw
Plumber.
- [38:13]
Josh Crouch
Yeah. You don't want to talk about Atria C or like.
- [38:15]
Darren Shaw
Electrical. You want to, well that's a hundred percent. Don't do that. But even within your own, if you're staying within your niche, you're a plumber, you want to be talking about plumbing topics. But it's almost like do you really want to go into every tiny little subtopic of plumbing? I feel like it's good to stay focused on the services that are driving revenue and invest more into those. Like you know what, what is if you talk to like a roofer, right? A roofer wants to do a whole roof, a roof replacement, like they want to replace the whole Damn thing for $20,000. They don't want to come to your house and fix three shingles for 300 bucks. Nobody wants to do that. And so do not focus your roofing website on roof repair because that is going to attract the wrong leads. Focus on roof replacement, I think. And just really, I would put most of your content effort into things that are very focused on what you really want to rank for. And be careful with the blog and not going too deep into the weeds of like, random.
- [39:19]
Josh Crouch
Topics. But some of that. So like I'll use the. Because repair replacement is huge, especially H vac. It does carry over into plumbing. Some other things. A lot of repair searches turn into system replacements.
- [39:30]
Darren Shaw
Because. Sure, that's a different strategy. It can work for you. Yeah. If you want to rank for that, great. If you don't want to rank for it, then think, well, what about.
- [39:38]
Tersh Blissett
This? So Marcus Sheridan's a friend of ours and he talked. Are you familiar with Marcus Sheridan? He wrote a book originally. They ask, you answer, and then endless Customers. Endless Customers. And he talks a lot about putting your prices on your.
- [39:52]
Darren Shaw
Website. Oh, God, please. Yeah, I hate not having prices on a website. So you agree 100 and actually, those prices can drive leads specifically from large language models like ChatGPT, because people will ask pricing questions. If you don't have that data, you're on the running. Right. So absolutely put your pricing on your website. And the thing is, like, people are like, I can't tell you how much a roof costs. Yeah. Because it depends on your house, it depends on your square footage. Like every job is different. Different. You just have to put ranges in. Like, basically a job is going to run between, you know, the low end, 5,000 to the high end. It could go up to 100,000 depending on the job. But typically our jobs are in the 20,000 range. Like, that's the kind of thing that you want to have on your.
- [40:38]
Josh Crouch
Website. Thank you to companycam for supporting today's.
- [40:41]
Tersh Blissett
Episode. These guys are changing the game for contractors with their smartphoto.
- [40:45]
Josh Crouch
App. Keep your projects documented and streamline your team's communication with even your most complicated.
- [40:50]
Tersh Blissett
Jobs. Try that for free for 14 days and get 25% off of your first two months at companycam.com forward sl.
- [40:57]
Josh Crouch
Svm. Those are really easy to rank too, especially locally. Like I. So we had Marcus at our. Our event. I mentioned Trade Automation pros too, prior to this as one of our companies. So we had an event called Tap into the Future and Marcus was the. The main keynote there. Talking about online Pricing and we had some, I had some of my clients there, so I, I worked with them. It's not kind of outside the scope of what we typically do for our content stuff, but I'm like, let's. I'm always open to test and try some things. So I asked them a bunch of questions because the hardest part about doing this is I have to get the answers from them. I can't. Like as an SEO company, I can't put content I know needs to be on the site. I have to pricing information I got to get from them because I'm not, I'm not backing them into a corner or sledge Website says this and then we quoted this and they answered the questions. And then I took those answers and I used some, some prompts and some different things to create the article within. As soon as I saw that the article got indexed, ChatGPT picked it up and it was like the number two source on there after a. And they're. They're a smaller plumbing, two, $3 million plumbing company. They're not big. They don't have a ton of authority or anything like that. And it was just now the answers that populate there because home advisor Angie Thumbtack, they all dominate those pricing queries, which of course they are way lower than most contracts are because they don't factor in the actual cost of doing business. They look at the, the unit as like a, a box from Amazon. Like it's just this is the price for the box and you add a couple hundred dollars of labor. I'm like close. And then. So that's why homeowners don't trust contractors because they're getting this information from one place that says, well, it's only. It should be like 3 or 4,000 for this. And like the equipment itself from our supplier cost 3 or 4,000. That's before we even make any money or pay our team or put our lights on or get by insurance and everything else but owning that conversation because it's now that we can have conversations with something versus having to go look at 10 blogs to find the information and kind of come up with our own synopsis. The information we're going to get put out there, people are going to ask those questions more and more. At least that's my personal thought as a. Because I hate when I go to like software sites and I'm looking at a software, I'm like, call for pricing. Like, I don't want to get on a.
- [43:06]
Darren Shaw
Call. You know what that means? If they say call for Pricing it means. So I'm not calling. Yeah.
- [43:14]
Josh Crouch
Exactly. And I'm like, I don't want to sit through an entire demo where someone's trying to just give me an idea. I will tell you if it's in my range, where I was thinking, if it's not, and it's like not that big of a deal, I'm not even consider it. But if it's in my range, I'll consider it. I'll get on a.
- [43:27]
Darren Shaw
Demo. A good strategy that you kind of highlighted here is you find out what the pricing is. You make a dedicated page on your site for what does a roof replacement cost? What does a new air conditioner cost? You make these pages because those are queries that people are typing. And then make the YouTube video too. So take what you said in that and also make the YouTube video. So now it's on YouTube, you got the text on there. And oh, here's a good idea. Embed that video you made on YouTube on that page. So like that's just a really good strategy. It's going to take any contractor 10 minutes to record that video on their phone. And, and actually what you do is actually record the video first. And then what you said in the video is actually the text of.
- [44:09]
Josh Crouch
The page because you just said that was the way I prefer doing it. And now with large language models, because I can pull the transcription and take that into. And, and if, if any of you guys decide you want to write content, I would highly recommend Claw. I, I love Claude for writing content. It's just, I feel like does a much better.
- [44:26]
Tersh Blissett
Job. Is it okay to write blogs with large language.
- [44:31]
Darren Shaw
Models? Yes, as long as you don't just use the default prompt. So if you don't just. Here's what you should not do. You should not go to Claude or ChatGPT and say write me a blog post for how much does it cost to replace a roof in Atlanta, Georgia? And then it generates the post and then you copy and paste it onto your website. That is the wrong approach. The right approach is similar to what Josh had mentioned. Speak it in your own words first and then get it transcribed because that is what we call information gain. So if you ask ChatGPT, it can only build it off of what's already been put out on the Internet. And so then it just kind of puts all that together, makes it look nice and, and so you're not really adding anything new to the conversation. Whereas if you do the speak it into your microphone and then get ChatGPT to convert that into content. It's fresh, it's new, it's, it's got your own voice in it that's actually really critical and actually it comes across as much more authentic. Another thing I would do is that if, if you're as a business owner have already written real content in your own kind of style and tone, that's important. And I would tell the ChatGPT, okay, here's a transcription of my response to what does it cost to replace a roof? Here are six articles I've written in the past that will show you the way my tone and style now create the content for my what does it cost to replace a roof page. Now you've used ChatGPT to create content in a way that's not crap app. It's actually really.
- [46:11]
Tersh Blissett
Good. So have you ever tossed all of these things into like Notebook LM and then created something out of.
- [46:19]
Darren Shaw
That? I haven't. I've only used Notebook LLM LM for doing the podcasty thing where like you give it an article and then it turns it into a two.
- [46:29]
Tersh Blissett
Piece. That is pretty cool.
- [46:30]
Darren Shaw
There. You can just kind of listen to it. I've done it. I've only used it for that and I've enjoyed it for that. If I'm like, actually someone sent me a really like technical paper and I'm like, I don't want to read this. And so I, I threw it into Notebook LM and it generated the podcast and I listened to it on a drive. It was like a 20 minute episode. And I totally did a great job of kind of like helping me understand all the, all the complex stuff in that technical.
- [46:55]
Josh Crouch
Paper. Right now we're in the middle of, we're like three or four weeks of six. We do a, it's kind of like a done with you coaching for our trade automation pros where we are teaching contractors how to use large language models like tool like that but also with automation. With zapier, we're in make.com and things like that. And we were talking about NotebookLM last week about how we can leverage that and somebody was because they wanted to take very technical things from like manufacturers of how to you how to start up equipment and processes and his team to like listen to that stuff and assign that stuff out as essentially like homework throughout the week first so his teams can learn those things and up level his technicians. And we were trying to figure out a way to make that work with NotebookLM because it does such a great job. And the episode's like weirdly Cheap. Like it's really good. And which is funny because like there's so many AI voice providers out there now for home service businesses, all kinds of businesses. And the voices aren't as good as the notebook LM voices are. It's just like my talk to Chatgpt on my poll. I'm not going to step over. I talked to her on my phone. Like this gal giggles and she's like, it's like the most friendly conversation I've ever had in my life in.
- [48:07]
Darren Shaw
The. It's amazing how it's developed. I.
- [48:09]
Tersh Blissett
Know. Darren, we appreciate you hanging out with us. We're running over our time.
- [48:13]
Darren Shaw
Here. Been fun. Yeah. Like we didn't really talk about what's new in local search. We but we kind of did because we talked about the AI stuff, we talked about videos. That is what's new in local.
- [48:22]
Josh Crouch
Search. We are going to do exactly what Evan said. We're going to push people to your website so they can go read the local search ranking.
- [48:29]
Darren Shaw
Factors. Yeah, you should go check that out. That.
- [48:31]
Josh Crouch
Is. I did drop the link in the so anyone's watching this, you can see the link. It's in the. In the comments. Otherwise we will put that on our show notes. And then just so everyone else knows, like Darren and his team at Whitespark, he talked about like a global SaaS company, they have a lot of stuff to track local ranking factors. You guys should check out a lot of really cool tools, unique spins on some of the. Some of the other heat map stuff that like I share and they can also track like local organic and stuff like that too where a lot of these other tools don't do.
- [49:00]
Darren Shaw
That. So definitely we have a full agency side too where we do SEO for for clients. So we can also help you with.
- [49:06]
Tersh Blissett
That. We appreciate you, Darren. If anybody has any questions at all, don't hesitate. Reach out to the their team, check out their blog post. There's a wealth of knowledge. With that being said, I hope you have a wonderful and safe week. Until we talk again next time, we'll see.
- [49:20]
Podcast Announcer
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