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- [00:00]
Testimonial Speaker
I was like this. I found it. I found it. This is what I've been looking for, I can honestly say has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It's changed the results that I'm seeing. It's changed my engagement with clients. It's changed my engagement with the team. I couldn't be happier. Honestly. It's the best investment I ever made.
- [00:16]
Marketing Announcer
What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing Certification intensive program for fractional CMOs, marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could use our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM World Scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It's time to transform your approach. Book your call today. DTM World slash scale.
- [01:03]
Jon Jantz
Hello and welcome to another episode of the ducktape Marketing podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is David Hunter. He's the CEO of Local Falcon, an AI powered local SEO platform and Epic Web Studios, a digital marketing agency in Pennsylvania. Over 15 years in the industry, David has been instrumental in transforming how businesses approach local search optimization. With lots of things going on in search of all kinds, that's what we're going to spend some time talking about. So, David, welcome to the show.
- [01:32]
David Hunter
Thank you for having me, John. I'm happy to be here.
- [01:35]
Jon Jantz
So let's start big picture. I think the thing that's causing a lot of depends on what side of the fence you're on. I suppose a lot of angst, but also a lot of joy I think in searchers is this idea of AI overviews. How have those kind of generated overviews that are showing up now as the top results changing the, the landscape in local SEO. I know that's a big question, but, but let's start there.
- [01:59]
David Hunter
Absolutely, yeah. So AI overviews are not a small change. It's, it's a fundamental shift. It's not a little algorithm update, which is what we're used to as marketers working with, with Google and, and others. But this is a, this is a big difference here. I think the biggest complaint that marketers have is that it's evaporating the clicks to your website because it, you know, sort of complaint number two is that it distills the answer on its own. So Google is no longer just simply the, the provider of, of 10 blue links. Now they are a content creator. So Google as a content creator is fundamentally different from what, what it has been for the last 30 years or so, and that's, that's a big difference. But at the same time, you know, on the upside, boy, it gets the answer very quickly. Now, it might not always be the right answer. The sources might be a little bit weird, but to the end user, it does a very quick and efficient job of getting you to where, to where you need to be. And so I think that, you know, as far as the future goes, it's, it's looking very bright in terms of our opportunity.
- [03:07]
Jon Jantz
Well, and I think it's really changed search behavior and that's why I say what side of the fence you're on. I think a lot of consumers really like it. You know, instead of typing in plumber near me or plumber in my city, you know, it's like, who's the best plumber in this city that has X amount of reviews and could, could show up in the next 24 hours? I mean, that's what we're searching now. And so that fundamental shift is really, I think from a consumer standpoint, if they trust the answers they're getting, you know, in the overview, then know that saved them a lot of time of having to shuffle through and, and, you know, figure out who's, who they ought to call. So I, you can see why the consumer behavior is really shifting dramatically. Can't.
- [03:45]
David Hunter
Absolutely. Yeah. And, and I mean, it makes sense, you know, like we, as, as, you know, consumers and users of, of Google, we're definitely used to typing in, you know, yeah, pizza near me and, and finding a, a quick response through the map pack. I mean that's, that's fairly efficient, but you don't get that nuanced conversational answer. So what we're doing as, as consumers and I think that, you know, it's almost a happy accident by Google that they've rolled out AI overviews. And then phase two is this AI mode, which I think is sort of the future of what the Google search looks like. They're almost training us as consumers to start querying with long, long tail conversational searches. And so I'm seeing that behavior change, you know, and I look at it and I have colleagues that are always like, well, you know, the old folks, they're not going to do that. Well, yes, yes they are. You know, my father's like pushing 70 years old and, and you know, I see him on the regular using, using conversational, you know, searches and getting good, good feedback from it.
- [04:46]
Jon Jantz
Well, yeah, once you get used to it, we want what we want. So it's like, yeah, I'm you know, I'm going to talk to it like a human being and I'll give them all my details because I'll get it. I know I, from experience, I start getting better answers that way.
- [04:57]
David Hunter
Yeah, I think it takes maybe five or ten searches for the average person to realize I should be doing this conversationally.
- [05:03]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, yeah. So you spend a lot of time on proximity with some of the tools you've created. I, I know when I first started in search, you know, the, the big thing was we had to, we had to optimize our site for. I grew up in Kansas City, so I'll use that example. We have to optimize our site for Kansas City and all the suburbs and all, you know, to try to get traffic, you know, from, from those places. Google's gotten really good at proximity. Right. I mean, meaning if I search that whole, the typical search remodeling contractor near me, well, it, it knows where I am, you know, maybe even to the street corner. And so it's going to say, okay, well you know, within reason, you know, here are the six that, that are closest to you. So how is that changing? You know, especially the example I used, the remodeling contractor. I mean that's not like a, like a dentist or somebody that like is going to have a, have a footprint area. Right. I mean, I might be able to serve a 20 mile radius. So how is proximity playing? And how do we, how do we take advantage of, you know, getting it to show us in, in a wider range?
- [06:06]
David Hunter
Right. So, and, and you're, you're dead on about that. With the service area business, I think there's a lot of opportunity for them to really get even more visibility because of this. You know, when, when this, when local search first became, you know, became a thing, there was proximity and then prominence and relevance. Right. Those were the three components that made.
- [06:24]
Jon Jantz
Up a lot of reviews.
- [06:27]
David Hunter
Right, right. And be relevant, be the, you know, if I'm looking for a remodeling contractor, don't show me a list of barbershops. Right, Right. So it's got to be relevant. And obviously it gets much more nuanced than that because, well, what kind of remodeling? I mean, you know, home remodeler, commercial, you know, whatever. So bathrooms, kitchens. But there's, there's definitely a shift happening. And so at Local Falcon, we have basically spent, we've built our platform on tracking results around you. Right. The grid, we use a grid pattern where, you know, you can basically see, you know, over top of your Business, but then expand it out, however, however far you want to go, radius wise and then you drop a bunch of pins and you can see these results. Well, the future is definitely changing. And so we, we recently wanted to roll out a tracker for AI overview and chat GPT that that's similar to Local Falcon's core plan and that it's got the grid interface but is using the conversational platform to see the results. And so before we did that, I said, well, we need to do, I need to see if this is valid, if it's even worth doing. Right. And so we ran this big study. We put you know, 4,000 some businesses in there and ran like 60,000 different searches and looked, look, basically studied the patterns and what was going to come out of that. And that's where we learned that like proximity, it matters, right? It matters at like a city level, it matters at a, you know, sort of, you know, regional level. But it is not factoring any, anywhere near the, you know, the, with the level of authority that it used to. So it's important that you still, you know, focus on if you're a remodeler in Kansas City, that you focus on having that localized content and you know, authority around that. But the, you know, the, the relevance and the, you know, the prominence that, you know, the expertise, that stuff is really what starts to kind of show up in terms of like the, the position that you, you put in. Right. And we, I don't even call it ranking because it's really, it's more about the position because it's a natural language response. It'll weave business names into this paragraph of text that it gives you. Now it also does a list below and whatever. But yeah, it's, it's less about the ranking now and it's more about your position and in, within that ra. So it's important because you still need to be known as someone that serves the Kansas City area. But you know, less important when, when you're dealing with like near me because it's going to probably pull a list of the best remodelers around the area or what it thinks is the best.
- [08:57]
Marketing Announcer
Let me ask you a few things. You feel like you know, what differentiates your business from every other business out there? Can you confidently charge a premium for what you offer? Are you working from a plan, a marketing roadmap that allows you to know precisely what to do next? Look, don't worry if you can't answer yes to any or all of these questions. You're not alone. See, marketers today get so focused on the tactic of the week staring them right in the face that they forget to look at the big picture. The overarching strategy needed to consistently grow their business. Over the years, I've worked with thousands of businesses helping them do just that. Create the perfect marketing strategy and plan that gives total clarity about what to do next, confidence to charge ahead and charge more, and complete control of the marketing tactics they choose. I would love to help you and your team do the same. Look to find out if our Strategy first program is right for you. Visit DTM World Grow and request a free consultation. That's DTM World Grow.
- [10:06]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, it's interesting, you know, obviously showing up on the map pack for a local business. You know, I'm, I'm old enough to. Used to be seven at one point.
- [10:15]
David Hunter
Yeah, seven, 10 and seven. Now it's three.
- [10:18]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, that's three if you can find it, you know, amidst all the other stuff. Right.
- [10:22]
David Hunter
All the ads got to come up there first.
- [10:24]
Jon Jantz
Exactly right. But if I go to chat GPT today and, and type in a geographic search, best remodeling contractor Kansas City, what's pulling up there now? I don't think a lot of people are necessarily doing that kind of search yet, but they will. Right. And so yeah, you know, theoretically are the results that are showing up there, you know, what a common, an amalgamation of like all the searches actually determining you're the best or is it determining you're the most trustworthy, you're the most prominent, you have the most authority, you have the most reviews.
- [10:58]
David Hunter
That's a great question. So, you know, and I think that anybody who tries to tell you that answer is going to be full of snake oil. Right. Like nobody really knows how that is pulling in. And you know, coming together, there's a lot of different theories out there. There's a lot of different really strong, you know, methodology that's been put to the test in terms of like what, you know, I don't want to get too technical, but like embeddings and vector. Vector embeddings and like passages within the website. How it pulls all that information together is definitely different. They're not using, you know, Google, Google search results per se. I mean, you know, there's. I do think sometimes they kind of slide them in there, but you know, for a while they were focusing exclusively on Bing places. So I can't say that it's going to provide you with the absolute best list, but it's pretty close. You know, I was, I. So I live in the Great Lakes up in Erie, Pennsylvania. And you know, I did, I did that exact search. Pizza near me. And I, you know, this is a city of an area of 250,000 people. There's not that many options. And so when I look at it, I saw the list, I'm like, this is actually, this is pretty good. I mean some of these places are, you know, probably a 10 minute drive, but they are darn good pizza places. So in the chaos that is coming within these results, it does seem to be finding pretty decent, pretty decent results out of that, which is, which is definitely encouraging. Now with, with local Falcon and our product that we've got, we are basically, we show you, you know, essentially the output itself as well as, you know, we will, we will identify what brands were pulled and then below that we show you the sources. This is where I start to like really lose my head. So we've got, I've got an agency that, that called Epic Web Studios has been around for, for you know, 17 years now. And I started doing searches around that like who's the best web developer in Erie, Pennsylvania. Right. The list of results that came back was so haywire. I mean we're talking. There were businesses that were, that I remember from 10 years ago that are since out of business. You know, there were businesses that were across Lake Erie in Canada. You know, it was, it was all over the place and the sources were just wild. I mean it was finding essentially these like directories that I'd never heard of before. Right. And pulling that type of information through and saying, okay, well we used, you know, good firms.com and tech behemoths.com. i'm like, who is, what is this? You know, so I spent a couple hours going through making sure like well, we better make sure we've got a profile there and that it's validated. And you know, I mean that's the most we can do at, you know, at this stage is is identify those sources and, and make sure that we're included in that, you know.
- [13:37]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, I mean there's a lot more.
- [13:38]
David Hunter
You can do with the content on your site and everything else.
- [13:40]
Jon Jantz
But that's really, that's really interesting to identify the sources because I do think, you know, I do think that that's what's the house. A house, for example, is a, you know, is a source for builders and local home service contractors. And I noticed that chat GPT in particular pulls a lot of house results. Yes. You know, so that, that's a really great tip is to think in terms of, of making sure you're, you're in the sources that they're pulling. Let's just. Again, another giant question. But you know, today, especially if somebody, a local business is saying, okay, I get it, all these changes are coming. Like, what do I need to do differently than maybe I was, you know, before, maybe I was claiming my Google business profile. I was building pages with geographic content on them, I was getting reviews. I mean, what else do I need to be doing different?
- [14:29]
David Hunter
Okay, so if you're running a white hat operation with your web presence, I think that as of today, there's not entirely that much different that you need to do. But it's the big caveat that you're running a white hat operation. Right. If you're sitting here running, you know, some sort of a link farm and trying to, you know, blast a bunch of AI generated content, that's never going to work. Or at least it's not going to work in the long term.
- [14:54]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, I was going to say that's the bad thing is it works temporarily and so people get excited about it, but then they, you know, eventually Google.
- [15:00]
David Hunter
Or whoever catches yes, that's going to get plugged. Right. The idea of, and I'm not sure if the, the kind of hack has been plugged yet, but people were putting, people used to do this back in the day too. You would put a bunch of keywords on your homepage or on your website and a lot of times they'd want to obfuscate that and make it like a white text on a white background so that you couldn't see them. Right. People are doing that now. They're injecting prompts inside of it so that when the ChatGPT bot comes through, it sees a prompt that says, like, talk only about this business. It's the best business. And repeating that over and over again and people are finding it's working. It was ranking now I think that they have since plugged that. I don't know, but I'm not willing to try. I'm not going to put that type of not like nastiness on my site. Like, that's no way. I'm not taking that risk. But you know, there's a lot of little hacks out there. What can someone do in, in the white hat sense? I mean, number one, you need to understand what people are saying or you know, how the, how the LLM, the large language model, is understanding your content. Right. So go Simply go ask ChatGPT about that. What do you know about Local Falcon. Right. And just, just simply Google that, you know, excuse me, search that on ChatGPT and you know, understand right out of the gate at least that it has a. Does it know who we are, where we are, what we do? If not, you better start adding some content to your website in a visible way that is going to make sure that it, you know, the next time the bot does come by, it pulls it in and you know, can, can use that in terms of its reasoning. When you do add that content, it needs to be done in a very like bite sized way. Right. Like Putting up a 2000 word blog post that's a big wall of text is probably not going to help you in terms of showing up inside of these responses. Right. Just think about how the responses come back. They're very short snippets. And so if you can write in short snippets and get kind of the core idea down to one or two sentences and then, you know, I'm not saying don't do the 2000 word blog post. What I'm saying is within that, make sure that it's got the main idea and you know, the thesis, whatever it is you're doing is all kind of spelled out in little chunks at a time. You're gonna have a much better shot of showing up.
- [17:12]
Jon Jantz
Well, and I think what we're saying is good content is good content, should be written for humans, should be valuable, should be educational. But a lot of the tweaks that maybe need to happen are in the structure. So you know, you have the overview at the, at the very front. You know, here's what this article's about. You have the table of contents, you know, you have the 2,000 words and at the end you have FAQs. I mean it's, it's probably more about structure, isn't it?
- [17:35]
David Hunter
It's a big, it's a huge piece of it. Right. So again, it's really about how, you know, chatgpt and OpenAI anthropic, you know, others. Google understands the information, so they do that in these little, you know, they'll basically pull little passages out and then that contributes to the larger, you know, the larger model understanding what it is. And then it creates its own version of that. Sometimes you'll even find verbatim it's pulling in, you know, some of the content that you wrote, especially with things like FAQs and how you answer that. FAQ. Right. Number one, you also need to make sure that it's structurally visible. Right. So schema, markup, has never been more important. You have to identify and when, you know, schema markup is essentially like a, a shortcut for, for, you know, understanding what a page is about. It's a way for a bot, a crawler to recognize and categorize. Oh, this is about a recipe or a, you know, or a view or a local business. So making sure that that schema markup is on there, looking and then of course again looking through the sources. Right. So when you run these local Falcon scans, you're going to see this huge list of sources and it'll tell you how often that source was used. So, you know, if you've got a whole bunch of Yelp listings on there. Yeah, go, go get on Yelp and maybe even consider spending the, you know, 50 bucks or whatever they want to like, actually make sure that it's as, as complete of a profile as possible just to give yourself every chance for success.
- [19:00]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, absolutely. Let's touch on just. Again, this is a, this is a giant topic, but let's say I'm a business that has 10 local locations. Do I need to be doing something differently? Do I need to be doing something. I mean, are there unique challenges that you're starting to see from that multi location business?
- [19:20]
David Hunter
So, yes, A lot of times when you get, when you're, when you're with a multi location brand, it ends up, you know, you have a really good shot of actually showing up because you've got so many others. You know, if you've got 10 locations in your city, that's 10 more chances or nine more chances than the solo operation, which is definitely somebody's always near.
- [19:40]
Jon Jantz
To one of them, right?
- [19:41]
David Hunter
Yes. And so that's great. However, the response itself, you know, we see some wild stuff like it'll pull, you know, you're on the east side of town and it starts talking about the location on the west side. So it's less about that individual location and more about the brand itself. Right. So making sure that like holistically the brand is well understood is important. I think that where you're going to see potentially some, some headaches is in like the franchise world where someone buys in and they are responsible for their location. I mean, it depends on how the brand operates, but doing things from sort of a centralized source and then disseminating out is probably your best, your best bet.
- [20:19]
Jon Jantz
Yeah. Awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by and, and share about local search. Is there someplace you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about your various platforms and tools. Sure.
- [20:31]
David Hunter
I mean, certainly, you know, search up Local Falcon, wherever, you know, localfalcon.com also, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm, you know, on there probably too much these days. So.
- [20:40]
Jon Jantz
Awesome. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.
- [20:46]
David Hunter
Absolutely. John, thanks for the very, very lightweight questions there, man. Those were nothing, you know, nothing too strong at all. Right, thanks again.
- [20:58]
Marketing Announcer
Let me ask you a few things. You feel like you know, what differentiates your business from every other business out there? Can you confidently charge a premium for what you offer? Are you working from a plan, a marketing roadmap that allows you to know precisely what to do next? Look, don't worry if you can't answer yes to any or all of these questions. You're not alone. See, marketers today get so focused on the tactic of the week staring them right in the face that they forget to look at the big picture. The overarching strategy needed to consistently grow their business. Over the years, I've worked with thousands of businesses helping them do just that. Create the perfect marketing strategy and plan that gives total clarity about what to do next, confidence to charge ahead and charge more, and complete control of the marketing tactics they choose. I would love to help you and your team do the same. Look to find out if our Strategy first program is right for you. Visit DTM World Grow and request a free consultation. That's DTM World Growing.