Transcription
If you own a local business, the way customers find you in 2026 is completely different than even just 18 months ago. Google business profiles changed their rules. Between 25 and 40% of people aren't even scrolling past the AI summary. People are searching for businesses just in the LLMs themselves. So, whatever you know about SEO is probably outdated or it's about to be.
So, in this video, I'm going to give you guys a complete playbook to dominate your local market based on what's actually working in 2026. So, step number one is we need to lock down our Google business profile. This is still the foundation of Google or even just AI SEO in general, but there's a few things that have changed.
So, back in March, they changed their rules to no longer allow keyword stuffing. So, a lot of people in their business name might say their business name and then what they do and they're trying to stuff as many keywords as they possibly can, which in the past has helped with SEO, but now they're starting to suspend certain accounts. So, number one, we want to fix that. So, as opposed to saying, you know, Joe's plumbing, oh, best local plumber and whatever, we just need to change it strictly to our business name.
So, the second thing is we need to fill it out completely. A lot of people, they just fill out a couple sections. Okay, name, website, contact, and that's it. We need to fill out absolutely everything. It's going to reward a 100% filled out Google business profile. A lot more than one that's just maybe 70%. So, your hours everywhere that you serve, your business category, and be a little bit more specific, too. In the past, you could have just said, you know, contractor, but if you're a plumber, you want to make sure you're putting plumbing or whatever it may be.
Now, the third thing, which is much more important today than it has been in the past, is having an active Google business profile. So, if you haven't posted updates, if you haven't posted, you know, updated pictures on your Google business profile, that's something that you want to be doing. So, I would at least once a week, every two weeks at the minimum, be updating your Google business profile, adding more content, adding pictures, adding updates. Google and just the AI platforms in general are going to reward you SEO wise for having an active profile.
Step number two is we want to build a review generation system. Now, having reviews is still a very important aspect to SEO, to AI SEO, to just having a reputable business in general. People are always going to look at that. But a few things again have changed. Number one, how many reviews you have total is very important. But number two is how active they are. So maybe you had a ton of five star reviews 5 years ago. That's no longer as important as your last review and how active you are getting reviews. So we want to create a system to continuously keep adding these reviews. And another thing is we want to make sure we're replying to these reviews. So within 24 hours of getting every single review, we want to be responding to these customers. Again, this is just showing that our Google business profile and our reviews are a lot more active than again say if we're just kind of stagnant. and we haven't gotten reviews in a while, we're not going to be, you know, showing as high in terms of SEO.
So, the first step in this process is I would find a way to automate this. So, depending on your workflow, depending on the services that you provide, maybe after you send a, you know, invoice, 24 hours after that, we're automating it either SMS text or an email text to that customer asking for a review. Or maybe if you're in person, you know, hey, okay, after the first week, after the second week, we are automating that review or we have, you know, certain things internally that are reminding us to say, hey, we would love a review. It would really help us out.
And next is you want to find a way to incentivize these customers to give a review. Obviously, everyone has so many things going on. They're more worried about their life than about giving you a review, obviously. So, we want to find ways to ethically incentivize these customers to give us a review. Now, Google will not allow you to just pay for reviews and say, "Hey, I'll give you 20 bucks if you give us a Google review." But there is ways that you can ethically do it without obviously getting banned on Google. You can enter people into a giveaway. Say, "Hey, whoever gives this review in the month of April or May, for example, you will be entered to win a $100 gift card, a $50 gift card, or maybe you even give them a free session or you give them a $50 discount if they give you a Google review." So, it's in their best interest to give you a Google review and it helps you.
And another big part to this is we want to make sure and almost like you want to coach the client and say, "Hey, this is, you know, how you can give us a great review." is include what we did for you, where were you at before, the results that you got, how did you feel about those results. The more information that they can put in these reviews is going to help us in terms of SEO. If you just have a fivestar review and if you have one that has a bunch of information saying, "Oh, you know, before I had this service, I wasn't feeling that great. I had this problem, this problem, but then when they came in, it was so great. It was, you know, speedy. It was professional. And then they solved this problem and I feel great." That's going to have so much more information, so many more keywords that AI and, you know, SEO can pull from. It's just going to help you rank a lot higher.
And then lastly, which is kind of a headache, but if you can diversify these reviews across different platforms, so not just on Google, but maybe Yelp, maybe on Facebook, maybe on Apple Maps as well, that is going to help you. So definitely pay attention to that. Where is everyone going? Maybe you get a bunch to this platform. Okay, now I'm going to try to lead a bunch of new reviews to this platform. That way you have a bunch of reviews on different platforms as opposed to just one.
Now, step number three is we want to rebuild our website to optimize it for AI search. So, we're not necessarily writing all of our content, writing our pages, writing the back end as if, you know, we're just trying to stuff a bunch of keywords. We're writing it as if someone is asking AI themselves. So, again, maybe you're a roofer and it's like, okay, what areas do you guys service? This area, this area, this area. So, you're just asking the question exactly how people would answering it. Does your brand offer 100% financing? Yes, we offer 100% financing. Are they insured? Yes. Blah blah. So, you're literally just asking the questions in plain language, answering them in plain language. And this is one of the best things that you can do for your SEO.
The next thing is we want to add a schema to the back end of our website. This essentially just tells AI what our business is, what it does, where we do it, all of that kind of information. So, it's almost like the front end we have, you know, that information for viewers, but then the AI has the back end where it can again get all of that information. So, we want to make sure we're adding that as well.
Now, the next one, which is very new, is you want to add an LLMS text file to the root of your website. This is essentially what the AI crawlers will go into to try to get more information about your business. Again, what you guys do, all of that information. So, you want to make sure that it is in there as well. And then lastly, we want to make sure that we're updating this content, you know, regularly where if people are asking more questions, okay, we want to make sure we're adding those to our website. We want to make sure that we're continuously updating this. It's not something that you just do once and then you kind of just forget about things are always going to change. The LLMs are going to change. Maybe your business changes. So, you want to make sure you're updating that content every 90 days or so.
Now, this is something that can be complicated for some business owners. If this is something that you guys need done or interested in, feel free to reach out to us. We can help you guys implement this into your business directly.
So, step number four, which is very important, is we want to be omniresent. We want to be in all of the areas that the AI is going to pull information from. So if we're on LinkedIn, if we're on YouTube, if we're on Facebook, if we're on Instagram, if we're on maybe answering questions in Reddit, if we're on Yelp, if we're on Apple Maps, like AI is going to crawl all of these different areas. Number one, we want all our information on all those platforms. But if you're specifically putting out content answering a lot of these questions, for example, with my basketball training business, a lot of people have, you know, brought up my name, brought up our company on Reddit to answer some questions people have about basketball. We have a lot of YouTube videos with the title, which is very specific questions that a lot of basketball players ask. So, we're coming up. So, an AI is going to pull and trying to find these answers. We are constantly showing up in all of these different areas, which is just going to help boost us in terms of the SEO or the chances that we are going to show up when people search about that.
So, really, we're trying to reverse engineer, okay, where are the AI crawlers? Where is the LLM trying to look? And we want to make sure that we're there specifically for our nation, specifically for what we serve. Now, say you're a plumber, say you're a roofer, say you're a trainer. You don't want to try to be everywhere answering every single question. You want to focus on where you are best and really be the top people in those areas. So essentially, you want to be the authority in maybe a handful of different things. So again, say you're a roof for example. You don't maybe want to be commercial, residential, small homes, big homes, this area, that area. Maybe you just want to focus at least for now in one specific niche, maybe residential in this area. And you want to constantly, you know, have these backlinks, have this information in this area so when people search that you come up, then you can move to the next thing and to the next thing.
And this can even go as far as, you know, trying to get into different publications within your local market. Maybe your local newspaper, maybe your local, you know, commerce, maybe different Facebook groups, neighborhood blogs, things like that. So that way you have a bunch of different backlinks coming back to you from as many different places as possible.
So when you can do all of these things, number one, they're all going to compound. Now, the big thing with this is this is all going to compound. It's going to take maybe weeks, months, maybe even years. But the thing is, if you can do it, you are going to eventually outpace your competitors cuz most of them are not going to do all of this. Maybe they're really heavy on just Google reviews and they're beating you there. Well, you can beat them by having more reviews in more places or having better reviews and getting reviews faster. Or maybe they're not posting on YouTube or they're not posting on Facebook or they're not, you know, getting these back links. That's where you can start to beat them. And then over time, because you've done it for so long, it's going to take your competitors so long to catch up because they're not doing everything. They're not posting short form, long form content. They're not running community events and then having the newspapers write articles about them. That's going to take years for them to catch back up to you if you're doing that.
So, it's going to be a constant process. It's not something like maybe in the past, okay, I read a bunch of keywords, boom, I'm ranked. That's it. and never have to touch it. That's not how it's going to work anymore. This is something that is going to be constantly shifting and you have to stay on top of.
But again, if this is something you want help with, number one, we're going to drop a complete checklist down below so you guys can get everything from this video. Make sure you have a checklist, make sure you're doing it. Make sure you know you're optimizing every area or we can come into your business and help you do this for you so you can save time and focus on what's most important is running your business and growing your business as opposed to working on all this backend stuff. If you enjoyed this video, drop a comment, drop a like, subscribe. We'll see you in the next video soon. Peace.