Four agency operators — Paula French of Search Influence, Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky, Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide, and Matt McGee of SEO Savvy Agent — join Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 5 of the Near Memo brand-building series, closing out the run of solo interviews with a working session on what "brand" actually means for a local business and which tactics move the needle now that answers are generated, not just ranked.

A local brand is prominence plus goodwill made legible to machines — a name people connect to a query and a set of third-party corroborations Google and AI can verify — so as the results page fills with ads and AI Overviews, the winning work shifts away from your own site and toward real-world demand, off-site mentions, and content only you can produce.

How the panel defines a local brand

Every guest was asked the cocktail-party question — "what does brand even mean locally?" — early on (03:21–05:25). The four answers stack into a usable working definition.

Takeaways

• Pure brand mentions moved AI visibility ~400% in a week. Andrew's startup client "that really doesn't have a brand anyone has ever heard of" got featured in Business Insider and Reuters; tracked prompts across ChatGPT and Perplexity rose about 400% and Google organic about 150% in a single week off a small baseline. (18:47–19:41)

• Third-party mentions now outweigh review count for "best" queries. The number of Google reviews used to be "the primary dictator" of who ranked; in AI results Joy sees off-Google mentions carry more weight, and she has "yet to see a fake listing or a lead gen listing rank in AI." (07:37–08:00)

• LLM referral traffic is still 1–2% — but self-reported discovery is much higher. Across B2B and consumer, direct LLM referrals sit at one to two percent of leads, yet when leads self-report, "I found you on AI" is far more common. People discover in an LLM, then validate on Google, so the click logs as a Google referral. (13:20–14:25)

• Local listings are the cheapest brand-mention engine for AI. Andrew's "best secret weapon" — one business on a hundred directories is a hundred brand mentions; update the non-local citation platforms too ("we are a hot water installer in Sherman Oaks"). (43:28–44:34)

• A reusable "fast expert" mini-bio scripts what LLMs say about you. Matt gives agents a two-to-three-paragraph bio — awards, career sales numbers — dropped identically onto the Google Business Profile, Zillow, and every citation site, so the machines repeat the framing you chose. (44:35–45:00)

• YouTube is a top lead source and the most AI-proof play — on a multi-year horizon. For Sterling Sky it's the number-one lead source, but it cost ~200 internal hours a month and produced no leads in year one; "AI can't do it, so you're not competing with anything automated." Roger Wakefield is the small-business model to copy. (32:49–34:28)

• YouTube is the #2 most-cited domain in local AI answers. In a study Andrew ran with rank-tracker Nozzle, YouTube came second across millions of local searches — and a phone-shot video can surface in an LLM faster than it would ever rank in Google or YouTube search.^[1] (35:42–36:37)

• Offline and QR brand-building is back. Matt put banner ads with QR codes at the local-airport baggage claim for Cari McGee — captive audience, phone in hand — and trains the audience with a standing CTA: "for more information, Google Cari McGee housing market." (06:55–07:33, 21:19–22:00)

• "Competitor jiu-jitsu" wins LLM queries cheaply — if the client will allow it. Write comparison content against a rival (or an adjacent "non-competitor competitor") and you'll surface when someone searches that name in AI; it's routine in SaaS, underused in local. Joy's counter: her clients "would flip out" over litigation and outreach fears. (30:04–32:12)

• Data-rich, niche, client-voiced content is the only content worth making. Joy interviews clients on monthly recorded calls and writes from their words — a Noah Learner-built tool turns the transcript into copy — because "if you use AI or an SEO to write your content, you're gonna get the same crap that already exists on the web." Skip anything with 5,000 copies already online. (28:50–29:22, 47:26–48:33)

• Original research + a credible partner still works the old-fashioned way. Search Influence became a platinum partner of UPCEA and co-branded four rounds of original research, then spun it into landing pages, webinars, and derivative posts to build a "higher education SEO agency" foothold — a traditional content-and-partnership play that still pays. (23:37–28:19)

• Scaled content and scaled links are now the risk, not the shortcut. Joy's closing warning: the old cheat codes — scaled/AI content, scaled link building — are exactly what she's seen small businesses "get nailed for" this year, while effortful marketing gets rewarded. Ross Simmonds' framing: "back to foundational marketing." (50:55–51:43)

Related Reading

• EP 265 — Decoding Local Branding with John Jantsch — Part 1 of the brand series; the "you have a brand whether you build one or not" thesis Mike cites here.
• EP 266 — Cyrus Shepard: What Local Brand Actually Means to Google and AI — Part 2; the technical, brand-as-entity view.
• EP 267 — You Can't Outspend a Bad Intake Experience: Brand-Building for Legal — Part 3; the legal-vertical deep dive.
• EP 268 — AI Overviews, Brand Search & Local SEO: Cyrus Shepard on Earning the Click (from the archives) — the archive companion on why brand search correlates with rankings and what AI Overviews do to that ecosystem.
• The State of Local SEO in 2026 — Joy Hawkins' data behind the panel's "organic squeeze": local-pack ads grew from 1% to 22% of tracked reports across 2025, and LSAs from 11% to 31%.
• Ross Simmonds interview (Sterling Sky) — the conversation Joy references on-air; the case that real, foundational marketing is what's rewarded now.
• Yelp licenses reviews to OpenAI for ChatGPT — the formal deal behind the panel's "Yelp is getting cited in AI" point.
• Roger Wakefield — the small-business YouTube model Joy names.
• Nozzle — the rank-tracking tool behind Andrew's local-AI citation study.
• AI Search in Higher Education 2025 Research Study (2026 version is coming out in Sept)
• Webinar with UPCEA: How to Make Existing University Marketing Work Harder
• Higher Education Marketing Resources

Concepts

• Prominence + goodwill — Matt McGee's plain-language definition of a local brand: people know your name, and the association is positive.
• Brand-as-query — Andrew Shotland's mechanical test: whether people connect your name to a search or LLM query; the thing you can actually see move.
• AI local pack — the AI Overview answer for "best [category] in [city]," sometimes a ranked list, sometimes a paragraph naming three or four businesses; often different from the classic local pack.
• The "fast expert" mini-bio — a fixed 2–3 paragraph bio (awards + performance stats) reused verbatim across GBP, Zillow, and citations to control what LLMs say about a business.
• Competitor jiu-jitsu — comparison content aimed at a competitor or adjacent business so you surface in AI answers to queries about them.
• Local listings as brand mentions — treating directory citations as volume brand-mention signals for LLMs (100 listings = 100 mentions), not just NAP hygiene.
• "At bats" / .300 average — Andrew's frame for AI tactics: cheap, high-volume experiments where a 30% hit rate is a win.

Practitioner Notes

• The discover-in-AI / validate-on-Google pattern is a measurement problem Near Media already tracks. The panel's repeated observation — leads self-report "found you on AI" far above the 1–2% referral logs — argues for Near Media's user-research video work (the Atlanta PI example Greg cites at 11:14) as the way to see the real path, since analytics will keep miscrediting Google.

• "Local listings as brand mentions" reframes citation audits. If directory presence is now an LLM brand-mention lever rather than a NAP-consistency checkbox, a citation gap analysis becomes a brand-visibility deliverable — worth pairing with the Yelp–OpenAI reality that a thin Yelp profile is now a hole in the answer, not just a missing directory entry.

• The "fast expert" bio is a concrete GEO artifact clients can ship this week. It operationalizes the brand-as-entity theme from EP 266: one controlled description, syndicated across profiles, is exactly the corroboration layer an LLM assembles an answer from.

Pick your starting point:

00:00 Welcome & the panel
03:21 What "brand" means locally
04:50 You have a brand whether you build one or not
06:38 Baggage-claim banners & out-of-home
07:37 How AI treats "best" queries
09:41 The organic squeeze
11:14 Discover in AI, validate on Google
15:04 Why ads are eating clicks
18:47 Brand mentions & the ~400% week
21:19 Matt's playbook: PR, QR codes, community
23:37 Higher-ed via UPCEA research
30:04 Competitor jiu-jitsu
32:49 YouTube as the AI-proof long game
43:24 Local listings as brand mentions
50:55 Scaled content & links are the new risk
51:45 Reviews, Yelp in AI & sign-off

Full Transcript -->

The Near Memo — EP 269 · Building a Local Brand in the Age of AI Search (Part 5)

*Editor's note: This is a cleaned reading copy. Stutters, false starts, and clear transcription errors were removed; backchannel ("yeah," "right," "mm-hmm") was folded into the main speaker's turn; and wording was otherwise left faithful to what was said.

Greg (00:10)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Near Media Podcast with me, Greg Sterling, and as always the lovely and talented Mike Blumenthal. Today is Episode 269 — coming up on 300 if we get there. We've got a great panel of guests today, all local SEOs representing an agency point of view on the question of brand. This is the fourth installment in our series on brand. We had three really excellent solo interviews previously — you should go back and watch them — and today this is a panel to talk about what they're doing for local businesses to build brands, their own agency brands, and tactically and philosophically how you approach that. So welcome Paula, Joy, Andrew, and Matt McGee. And feel free to introduce yourself if you feel I've not done you justice.

Andrew Shotland (01:03)
Hi, I'm Andrew.

Greg (01:04)
I think most people are aware of Joy, Andrew, and Matt, who've been around on the circuit for a long time. Paula, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Paula French (01:13)
Yeah, thanks, Greg. I'm Paula French, a director at Search Influence. Many of the crowd listening probably know Search Influence best from our co-founder, Will Scott, but there are a lot of additional wonderful experts at the company. I've been working with Will at Search Influence for 16 years. I primarily focus on marketing and sales for our own company, sharing the insights from our team who's actually doing the work for our clients. And we have a lot to say about how we've built Search Influence's brand up in different ways than what it was originally known for.

Greg (01:46)
Okay. And anybody else? Andrew, do you want to talk about what you're doing these days? Everybody knows you work on multi-location stuff, but has that changed? Are there any new wrinkles?

Andrew Shotland (01:57)
I like to say our target customer is anybody with a website and a budget. That's how we narrow it down.

Greg (02:02)
All right, that's your tagline. How about just anybody with a budget?

Matt McGee (02:10)
You can build a website.

Andrew Shotland (02:12)
No — we do SEO for multi-location brands, small businesses, B2B SaaS, startups, media companies, you name it, but mostly local stuff.

Greg (02:21)
Okay. And Matt, what are you doing these days?

Matt McGee (02:25)
What am I doing? That's a broad question. My focus SEO-wise is in the real estate industry. My wife is one of the top agents in our market, and that's a full-time job. But I also have my own company called SEO Savvy Agent, where I train, coach, and do some client work for other real estate agents as well. So that's my focus.

Greg (02:48)
Okay. And Joy, your agency is very, very visible, as are the people in it. You guys have done a ton of podcasts and video and webinars. Anything you want to add to my very short introduction?

Joy (03:07)
Yeah. I'd say I'm obsessed with figuring out Google's algorithms — that's what I spend all my time doing. My team is fully remote in the US and Canada. We're coming up to almost fifty employees now.

Greg (03:19)
It's impressive.

Matt McGee (03:19)
That's awesome. Congrats.

Greg (03:21)
Okay, so we're talking about brand. I'm at a cocktail party with you and I ask what you do, and the subject of brand comes up, and I say: brand is kind of an elusive thing. What does that really mean when people talk about a brand — and a local brand in particular? Who wants to go first?

Matt McGee (03:42)
I'll go first. I've been trying to teach real estate agents this concept for the last couple of years, and when I say you need to be a brand, it's nebulous and vague — they have no idea what it means. "I'm not going to be Starbucks, I'm not going to be Apple." So I use the word prominence with them: people need to know your name. That's very difficult for a lot of real estate agents because real estate marketing looks the same. I just try to tell them that when people think of a real estate agent, they need to think of your name — they need to know who you are and what you do. And preferably it also brings goodwill. Obviously some brands don't have goodwill — there are bad brands and all that. But that's how I steer the conversation: prominence and goodwill.

Andrew Shotland (04:31)
Yeah, just to echo what Matt said, I think of it very mechanically: do people connect your brand name to a search query or an LLM query? Whether in Matt's case it's real estate, or any vertical — that's how I think of the brand, because we see it having an impact.

Mike B (04:50)
I'd add one thing. John said in the first episode that you have a brand whether you've chosen to develop one or not — it's basically how your customers perceive you, and you can either drive that conversation or be a victim to it. In some sense, if you're not doing anything, it's whether you've fulfilled your promises historically to the customers you've dealt with that defines your brand. If you haven't, it's a negative brand; if you have, it's a positive brand. People think they don't have a brand, or that they can't build one, but they've got one whether they want it or not — in local particularly.

Greg (05:25)
In some cases, though, you truly don't know. If you're in home services and you need an electrician, people may have a total lack of familiarity with electricians. It's really a blank slate when they go to Google and look up "best electrician in 94118."

Mike B (05:46)
In that case it might be defined by their negative reviews.

Greg (05:49)
Right. That's what people default to when they don't have anything else to go on — they go to reviews. But Paula and Joy, what are your thoughts on the concept of brand and what it means locally?

Paula French (06:00)
Getting ready for this, I was thinking about something you touched on earlier, Greg, before we started recording: when you do a search for the electrician, you're recognizing one of those brands there. That to me makes all the difference. Maybe it's because I come from a market where outdoor advertising is so incredibly prominent — in New Orleans, there's somebody marketing on the billboards, on the Smoothie King Center, whatever. It's so prominent that there's pretty much somebody in every category. So when you go to do a search, it's hard not to be influenced by the people doing those other things.

Greg (06:38)
It's interesting — that's not going to be true in every area of the country or every category. Certainly true in legal; there's a ton of legal out-of-home marketing. In real estate too — street furniture and billboards. I see them all over the Bay Area for different realtors.

Matt McGee (06:55)
We just — I think it was May or June — started putting up two banner ads at our local airport at the baggage claim for Cari, just to get her name there. There are QR codes on them. One of the QR codes does a Google search for her name so they can see her Google Business Profile and all that. We don't have a ton of billboards in our area, but that was one of the things I wanted to do more recently — offline advertising to grow her brand recognition. People are standing at the baggage claim with nothing to do for fifteen, twenty minutes. They're on their phone. Why not?

Greg (07:33)
I definitely want to come back to that — it's really interesting. Joy?

Joy (07:37)
Yeah, to expand on what Paula was saying, we're seeing a bit of a shift when it comes to queries like "best" on Google and how they're treated. Those are some of the terms we see AI results for the most these days — "best blank in city." And the businesses recommended by AI are really different from what we normally see in the local pack. One of the biggest trends I'm seeing: the number of Google reviews you have used to be the primary dictator of who ranked — whoever had the most reviews, the most frequent reviews, was the winner. That is not true with AI results. We're starting to see that third-party mentions, things outside of Google, actually carry more weight sometimes than your Google reviews themselves do. The good side is that I have yet to see a fake listing or a lead-gen listing rank in AI, which tells you they're getting something right if they're not recommending businesses that frankly have no brand.

Mike B (08:36)
Or at least not getting as much wrong.

Joy (08:38)
Well, there you go. Don't want to give them too much credit.

Greg (08:40)
And when you say AI specifically, what are you talking about — AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude?

Joy (08:48)
AI Overviews — the thing right in the search results. That's what I focus on the most, because it's still the same search results page the majority of people are using. We call them AI local packs, but sometimes they don't show up like a local pack; sometimes they just list three or four businesses in a paragraph format. We're seeing them on a lot of queries, especially "best" queries.

Greg (09:10)
It's pretty interesting because — whether you share this view or not — I think ultimately there will be some merger of the local pack and AI in a local context. It just seems like the direction they're going.

Joy (09:27)
They're separate right now — they show one or the other. And then there are some search results where they show both, which is weird: you get a list in the AI and another list in the local pack. But I'm interested to see if they merge them, because right now it's an either/or for the most part.

Greg (09:41)
Speaking of the search results page, one of the things that's really challenging now is just getting organic visibility, period — because you've got LSAs very often showing up, PPC ads below that, the local pack almost always below the fold even on desktop, maybe a couple of organic listings, then more PPC ads lower on the page. You've got these modules, very often the forms module. Traditional organic visibility is really being squeezed, I think quite intentionally by Google to squeeze more ad revenue out of people. How do you think brand factors into this? Behind my question is an assumption that brand will help you get clicks and get leads. What are your thoughts about the way the page is going, and does that imply a need to develop a stronger brand?

Andrew Shotland (10:38)
Regardless of how the page is going, the stronger brand is always the recommendation. It's the easiest one: get better known, get people to like you more. The change in visibility for organic results is making that even more important — not only that people search for you more, but that when they're scrolling through that mess of AI and ads and local packs and organic results, they see your brand and click on it. Click-through rate is still a thing, and brand search demand is still a thing. We're seeing that absolutely make a difference.

Greg (11:14)
What's interesting is the way people will often — one of the videos I showed when I presented at a legal conference in Nashville: we do user research where we capture people searching in different contexts on video, and they narrate. In this particular video it was a PI search in Atlanta — a woman searching for a personal injury lawyer. She hit the page and there were two LSAs. This was a desktop result. She opened "more businesses," scrolled down the list of LSAs, and saw two firms she recognized: "I know those guys, and here's another one I know even more." She went to the one she knew even more, clicked through to their website, spent a lot of time looking around, then went to the BBB site to look at what the BBB said about the firm. They weren't accredited, but they had an A-plus rating. She got some validation that her familiarity with the firm was justified by that A-plus rating, and said, "That's the one I would choose." I think that's a microcosm of what a lot of people are doing. They're either looking at reviews to figure out who to go with, or they have somebody in mind, or they see a familiar brand and then validate with reviews or other third-party validation. We talked a little before recording about badges and awards — that's all part of that process.

Andrew Shotland (12:57)
Everything we hear anecdotally — when we ask people who found us to self-report how they found us — we just keep hearing it. I don't have any hard evidence beyond the anecdotes, but people look around in LLMs, have a conversation, decide on something, then go to Google and try to validate it by searching for stuff like BBB and GBP reviews.

Joy (13:20)
Yeah, we see something similar, Andrew. We track all the leads we get as an agency, and we get tons of leads from LLMs now — the growth has been pretty crazy for the last year. But we don't see that with clients. For B2B, especially in tech, which is where we live, most of our clients' LLM traffic is about two percent of their overall leads. So it's still super small for them.

Andrew Shotland (13:45)
It's that way across B2B and consumer — the LLM referral stuff is one or two percent. But we're seeing it even with consumer brands: if the lead is self-reporting, the incidence of "I found you on AI" is much higher.

Greg (14:02)
So there's a phenomenon happening where people go to AI, get two or three recommendations, then go to Google and check out — and what they see that as is a Google referral. They're not seeing a click from an LLM; they're seeing the click from Google. That's a common behavior pattern.

Andrew Shotland (14:20)
And most LLMs don't have clickable results, or at least they're not consistently clickable.

Paula French (14:27)
We've been paying attention more and more to the branded search impressions we're seeing in Google Search Console — visits to the home page — so we can tell that story to our clients and help them understand that while they're not getting as much organic traffic, some of what they are getting is brand. And then we try to break down the organic traffic they are getting: how much do we really believe is brand as a result of LLMs? It's not like there's a formula for that, but just speaking to it helps them understand that change in behavior, which is so different from what we've been talking to people about for twenty years.

Mike B (15:04)
So to address that change in behavior: even though people may reference AI Overviews or AI Mode, they are clicking on ads much, much more than we've ever seen. Google has really trained people — both with more content in ads and better-looking ads. One of the reasons you're not seeing much organic traffic, from my point of view, isn't AI or AI Overviews or ChatGPT — it's ads. I'm curious if you've seen the same phenomenon and how you address it. And whether these ads function equally well to improve your rank: if somebody comes through an ad to your website, has a long click, completes an action, and never goes back to search — is that as effective a way of telling Google you're a great company and deserve to be shown? I'm curious about all that. I know, Joy, you've talked about this.

Joy (16:02)
Yeah, we've been pushing ads like crazy the last two years. I used to leave it up to the business whether they wanted to run ads; we've now been actively pushing it to clients. The ROI we've seen from ads in the last year is way better than five years ago. All the features Google's adding — giant photos, review stars, all new in the last year or two — they're so hard to tell apart from organic listings. Sometimes I look at these all day long and still get confused about what's an ad and what's not, which is clearly intentional.

Mike B (16:35)
They look better.

Joy (16:37)
They do, they look so good.

Greg (16:37)
Which is the point. That's the entire point.

Joy (16:42)
Google's winning. But I wouldn't take the viewpoint that it's screwing over businesses. As long as they have a really tightly knit ads account, they should easily get ROI, and it satisfies the instant stuff. So to your question at the beginning, Greg — how do you deal with businesses that need leads right now, when things like Reddit and YouTube aren't going to do that for them? I love pairing it with ads. We do both, so we can work on the long-term stuff, but they're not emailing us every day going, "Where are my leads?" — because the ads are delivering those right away.

Mike B (17:17)
Or in the case of the lawyer saying, "I'm not going to be able to put my child through college this week." Just as a side note: in one of our user tests, we did see a local pack — a three-pack — with an ad at the top and an ad at the bottom. So it had two ads in it. Just warning you guys, it isn't going to get any better.

Joy (17:38)
You've got to show me that picture, Mike — I haven't seen one of those yet.

Andrew Shotland (17:41)
I was just thinking through the endless conversations I've had in the last several months about cost-per-click prices this year versus last year. I feel like the range is a twenty-five to sixty percent increase in prices across every client.

Greg (17:58)
It's because everybody now recognizes they have to advertise, and there's more competition — and who knows if Google is manipulating prices behind the scenes. It's opaque.

Andrew Shotland (18:09)
Yeah, who knows.

Greg (18:10)
Well, we do know they manipulate prices, based on the antitrust exhibit. One of the things I want to get into — we can keep talking about ads, but — is a discussion of tactics you're using that you see as really effective in increasing your clients' visibility and building awareness and brands. Matt, you alluded to the banners at the baggage claim, and Joy, you were talking about Reddit and YouTube. Tell us the kinds of things that are working for your clients and for you as agencies.

Andrew Shotland (18:47)
I'll kick it off. In terms of brand — as the entire industry has probably shared on LinkedIn infinite times — brand mentions on third-party sites seem to have an outsized effect on your visibility in LLMs. Not just the best third-party sites; any third-party site. But on the best ones it seems to have a really interesting effect. As an example, we're working with a startup client that really doesn't have a brand anyone has ever heard of, and last week they got featured in Business Insider and Reuters. We could see the prompts we're tracking for them in LLMs — ChatGPT, Perplexity, et cetera — went up about 400% over the last week off a small baseline, but still up. And their Google organic traffic has gone up about a hundred and fifty percent in a week. That's just brand mentions.

Greg (19:41)
So that's straight awareness, and then people are responding to that with brand queries, which in turn convince Google that this is noteworthy.

Andrew Shotland (19:52)
Something like that, yeah.

Joy (19:56)
Yeah, I agree. Those lists are like gold right now. Using lawyers as an example, because I work with a lot of lawyers: being on Super Lawyers lists — they list out the best lawyers in every single city — then Best Law Firms has another list, and then Avvo has another list. The more of those lists you're on, the better. And the local lists are really important too. In Florida there's a "Best of Florida" list, and also a "Best in Orlando" list. You want to hit as many as you can, and then promote those things like crazy on your social media channels, your newsletters, everywhere you do marketing. You need to mention those awards.

Greg (20:35)
What about paid? There are a number of these things around lawyers that are paid inclusion. Are those equally valid, or is it only the organic, editorial stuff that works?

Joy (20:48)
Google cannot tell the difference, so pay it all the way. It's usually worth it if you're a lawyer, for sure. Even in other industries, we've got clients in home services with badges that come with annual costs. Even a BBB badge — you have to pay an annual fee. It is what it is, but for the most part it's worthwhile.

Greg (21:08)
Matt, give us a sense of what you've been doing for Cari, your wife, who's a realtor, to elevate her profile — and tell us what's been effective.

Matt McGee (21:19)
As I mentioned, two or three months ago we started the airport ads with her name and QR codes. We do a lot of digital PR for her — trying to get her in national publications, get her expert interviews on realtor.com or homes.com, all the real estate and handyman sites. That has definitely helped with LLM mentions, as Joy was saying. We do press releases to local TV and local newspapers to get mentions there. On social media, whenever we put out information — since there's no point putting links in a social media post — for the past two years or so I'll say, "for more information, Google Cari McGee housing market," if it's a post about the monthly housing update. That's been really consistent: getting people in the habit of, if you want more information, Google — and it always includes her name. We also have a big community page on social media called Everything Tri-Cities that has about 10,000 followers. We support the community that way — again, getting her name out there, increasing prominence and goodwill. We have two Reddit subs, one branded and one not, that are starting to pick up in terms of brand recognition and conversation. Like I said earlier, when people think "real estate agent," I want them to think of her name — and when they're scrolling through the listings on Google or the ChatGPT answer and see her name, I want them to say, "Yeah, that's that agent." That's the goal of everything we're trying to do.

Greg (23:12)
Are you doing all that yourself? Are you the guy doing all the posting and content and releases? It's a lot of work.

Matt McGee (23:19)
Ninety percent of it, yeah. I involve her where there are legal things in real estate she has to handle — since I'm not a licensed agent, there are some things I'm not allowed to say, so she has to be involved in some of that. But yeah, it's mostly me.

Greg (23:37)
Paula, you told an interesting story about how you entered the education market as an agency, and you had no brand recognition. Talk about some of the things you've done that have been particularly effective.

Paula French (23:48)
Sure. About four to five years ago we started working with UPCEA, an association specific to continuing and professional education as well as online education — a certain unit within universities. We saw that as a great opportunity for our services, and saw the need, because there was really big growth in these units at universities. People needed that kind of education, and the units were over-reliant on undergrad traditional students and really needed to diversify their audience. We knew that because of our work with a local brand, Tulane's School of Professional Advancement. Search Influence is based in New Orleans; we've had a really good reputation locally, and we were known as "New Orleans SEO — that's Search Influence." Through that, we were able to work with the largest university here, and through them we really got to understand this adult learner. From that, we decided: there are a lot of universities who need our help, and a lot of learners who can ultimately be connected with those universities through our services.

So we partnered with UPCEA — and just think about it: we're a platinum partner of a very well-respected, very active organization. There's the simplest thing: we're listed on their site among our competitors. You have that co-citation right there that supports you with Google organic and AI search. But the more interesting thing — and this is really the reason we sought out the partnership — is that we wanted to do original research that would help serve the universities trying to make these decisions. We're in the process of doing our fourth research study right now. Through that, we provide very specific statistics on usage, behavior, cost-per-inquiry benchmarks — things universities didn't have before that now help them make decisions. Boiling that down to Search Influence: of course there's a landing page on the site where we capture leads to download the research. We have webinars about the research. We have so many derivative blog posts, and an amazing higher-ed marketing stats post that pulls from all our different research studies. It's given us a lot of things to talk about in a lot of places. Through our work to publish that research in all these places — as well as being live in person at the conferences and publishing higher-ed blog posts that aren't necessarily specific to the research — we've seen a major foothold within higher-education digital marketing searches: the higher-education SEO agency, and of course working on higher-education AI search agency.

Greg (26:45)
So you associated yourself — hence the word "platinum."

Mike B (26:45)
Is the platinum status paid? Or partially paid — and the research is not paid, or the research is co-branded?

Paula French (26:54)
It's co-branded research — UPCEA and Search Influence — and it's one of the benefits of being a platinum partner.

Mike B (27:03)
And who does the research?

Paula French (27:06)
Great question. UPCEA does the research. They have a research and consulting team that universities hire directly, and they also work with partners like us. They conduct the research, and we've done studies of the members — that's how we understood the cost per inquiry and cost per enrolled student of these individual units. Our two most recent studies have been of the target audience: potential adult learners, and whether they're using Google or AI search.

Greg (27:36)
How do they find it? Right.

Paula French (27:40)
That's been a really great one.

Greg (27:42)
So what you've described, in my mind, is a fairly effective, fairly traditional content strategy with an association partner: you partnered with a visible brand in the space, created content, and pushed it out in all kinds of channels. Is that a fair characterization?

Paula French (28:02)
Yeah, for sure. We continue to reuse, reuse, reuse, to make sure people are actually hearing about it in all of our channels.

Greg (28:11)
It's an old-school approach in a way — but it still can be effective.

Paula French (28:15)
Yeah. It's traditional, but it works.

Greg (28:19)
To what extent are the rest of you — what are you saying about content to your clients? Matt, you described a pretty broad-based content strategy. But what are you telling clients about content and what kinds they need to produce, or even whether it's worth producing? One point SEOs have made is: no more top-of-funnel content, because that's all going to be answered by Gemini and ChatGPT and Claude, so it's worthless. What's your philosophy on content now?

Joy (28:51)
Anything that includes data is what you want, because that's going to satisfy Google and LLMs. There are lots of ways to do that, but you're not going to have 50 million pieces of content you're pumping out — you're going to have a few very targeted, specific things you want to keep updated. It's not a volume thing. I'd stay away from producing content that already has 5,000 copies on the internet. That's usually the biggest waste of time — the scaled stuff that can be created easily is working very, very little.

Andrew Shotland (29:22)
For local queries, you want to look at the responses in Google AI Overviews and find gaps in the top-of-funnel stuff. If there are consistent gaps, you can easily fill them. Unfortunately, for most really good high-value local services, that gap has been filled over the last 20 years by spammers like ourselves.

Greg (29:50)
So what do you do if you're in a very competitive segment — a lot of home services, legal, professional services? What do you recommend?

Andrew Shotland (30:04)
There's no one-size-fits-all. Everything everyone else said is right-on-the-money stuff, but right-on-the-money stuff doesn't work all the time, so you have to keep poking the bear and finding little edges. We found a totally silly, fun strategy I call competitor jiu-jitsu. One of the ways you can show up in LLMs is to produce content that's not really on the web very much, and with a lot of local brands there's not a lot of competitive-analysis content — how does Joe's Plumbing compare to Bob's Plumbing? No one's really doing that.

Greg (30:43)
It's all over B2B, all over SaaS, but not local.

Andrew Shotland (30:46)
It's all over SaaS because it works and it's easy — you can just have Claude write 20 articles on "XYZ versus Y" and you'll show up for like 10% of them instantly. You can do the same for local businesses. Pick your biggest competitor, the one you're always up against, and write some content about them. You don't have to be disparaging — just compare yourselves to them. And you'll almost always instantly show up when someone's searching that person in AI.

Mike B (31:13)
You're smiling, Joy.

Joy (31:13)
You've had clients agree to do this? None of my clients would go for that. They would flip out. They don't want to talk about their competitors — they don't want their competitors calling them.

Greg (31:21)
Because they feel like it gives them exposure?

Joy (31:24)
No — because they don't want their competitors suing them or calling them.

Andrew Shotland (31:31)
Well, actually — where we've really seen it work is with what I'd call non-competitor competitors. You're in the same city, say, but this other business does something adjacent to you, not a direct competitor but in the same market. You just write about them. It's not like "they stink" — it's more, "Hey, are you using this thing? Well, you might consider this thing." That's worked pretty well. These don't create rivers of leads, but with certain industries, if you can get one lead a month out of something like that, it's worth it, because it's so easy to create that content.

Greg (32:13)
Let's talk a little about things like video and Reddit — stuff that maybe doesn't immediately occur to people, though it does pretty quickly these days. What role, in the brand-visibility mix, are you advising your customers on — or doing yourselves — specifically with video? Joy, I know you do tons with video, and Darren Shaw is doing a huge amount with video and credits it with a lot of his success. What are your thoughts on video, Reddit — things once removed from straight-up local SEO?

Joy (32:49)
YouTube is our number-one lead source. It's something I suggest to all my clients, but I don't expect more than about one percent of them to actually do it, because it's so hard and takes forever, and the payoff is years down the road. I don't even think we got a lead our first year doing YouTube, and we were pumping out three videos a week — I think our internal YouTube hours were about two hundred a month, and it's more than that now. So it's a huge expense, and pitching that to a business is not easy. But long term, it's absolutely one of the most AI-proof strategies you can have online — AI can't do it, so you're not competing with anything automated. I'd strongly suggest it, but it's a long-term play for businesses that have the budget and already have brands that can take off on YouTube. Reddit is —

Mike B (33:43)
How do you drive YouTube conversions specifically?

Joy (33:47)
It's a lot of informational content — you're giving out your expertise. We're teaching SEO on our YouTube channel, giving away some of our stuff.

Greg (33:55)
So it's not top-of-funnel exactly, but you're educating people.

Joy (34:04)
Yeah. My best example of someone who's nailed YouTube in the small-business space is Roger Wakefield, a plumber in Texas. That guy — follow him, do everything he does. He's got the YouTube thing down pat: he does the crazy faces, he's super animated, easy to follow, his thumbnails are amazing. That's basically what you have to do. But again, it's not going to be tomorrow — you are not going to get an ROI from YouTube quickly.

Mike B (34:29)
But how do they get from YouTube to you? Phone call, link to your website? What's the path from YouTube to actually talking to somebody?

Joy (34:40)
For us, the leads are way better because somebody's been following us — they've probably watched hours of our content. It's all about keeping someone engaged with you for a long time. Podcasts do this too. But you've got to make sure the people listening are actually your customers — that's always the tricky angle. It's about giving away information for free and helping people for free, and then you draw in your customers, who realize you're an expert in the thing.

Greg (35:10)
This is one of the hallmarks of brand — trust and confidence that if I hire this person, they're going to be able to do the work. You're giving proof of that well in advance of the hiring decision. This is something people otherwise try to decide on the fly by looking at reviews in a real-time search scenario: "I need somebody, their reviews are better than the other person, I'll take a risk." But this strategy lays a big foundation of trust.

Andrew Shotland (35:42)
And Joy's experience is probably what the real YouTube experience is — it takes years and a lot of investment to really make it pay off. But we just did a study with a data tool called Nozzle, and we looked at 15 million local searches, and YouTube was the second most-cited domain in all of the AI results. So what we're seeing in the one percent of clients we can get to just pick up their phone and make a video is: you can actually make a video pretty quickly on YouTube, and it's not like you have 100% odds of showing up in an LLM, but it shows up a lot quicker than showing up in YouTube or Google regular searches. So I'd encourage everyone to get their iPhone or Android out and just start making a few videos on some topics.

Matt McGee (36:37)
Along those lines: for Cari, the whole production element of video has been the reason she's never really gone both feet into it — the time, and she's just too busy. We were at a real estate conference earlier this month, and one of the agents on stage is apparently crushing it with YouTube. She does long-form home-tour videos — 15, 20 minutes. The moderator said her most recent one was an 18-minute home-tour video with thousands and thousands of views, and asked, "When you do an 18-minute video, how long does that take?" The agent literally said, "About 18 minutes and 30 seconds." There's no production, no pro level — it's just one shot, and then she sends the video to her VA, who creates a thumbnail, and they upload it. That was gospel to Cari. So Cari went out last night and recorded a twelve-minute home-tour video that I guess took her thirteen minutes to record.

Mike B (37:43)
The other day I had a friend doing videos for a book he just published, and his publicist recommended he buy a gimbal. He couldn't figure out how it worked because it did face tracking and all sorts of stuff, so I sat down, figured it out, and showed him — he walks with the gimbal, talks, and can hit a button and it flips 180 degrees, or switches cameras to show the other view. The technology for this kind of walkthrough is available and, with some learning, accessible. But I'm still asking this question — I asked Joy and didn't get an answer: how do you get them to pick up the phone and call you from the video? How do you get them to click a link to your website to fill in the form?

Greg (38:26)
What's the call to action?

Mike B (38:30)
How does the call to action work? You've got a video and you're trying to get them into your regular flow.

Joy (38:38)
You don't want to hard-sell on YouTube — we don't hard-sell at all. We'll close our videos sometimes saying, "Subscribe to our channel," and we'll definitely have a link in the video description. You need it in the first hundred characters or so, otherwise it doesn't show as a link — to our website.

Mike B (38:51)
Link to your channel or link to your website?

Joy (38:55)
To our website. So definitely those things — but we don't hard-sell, because the idea is you're gaining people's trust. "We know what we're talking about; here's what we did, this is what we saw," sharing all our tips. If you're a plumber, you're showing them how to fix things themselves at home, how you do all the things — and then you get people who go, "I don't freaking want to do this, I'm just going to hire somebody." So you serve both crowds.

Mike B (39:20)
But then they go and Google you? Is that the path you find them traveling to get to you from YouTube?

Joy (39:27)
First, yeah. And also the videos get cited a ton — they get pulled in on Google, pulled in on LLMs and things like that.

Greg (39:36)
Gemini and so on. Yep.

Andrew Shotland (39:38)
Plus, I imagine if someone's been watching Sterling Sky videos for a year, and then they do a bunch of "I need an SEO agency" and just search, and you guys show up, they'll be like, "Of course."

Joy (39:49)
Usually people who contact us say they've watched our videos, plural. It's not like "I watched a single video."

Greg (39:55)
That's your sales cycle — all the prior touches are happening on YouTube, and then the client is calling you at the bottom of the funnel when they're ready to close. One place I've seen a lot of realtor videos, Matt, is on TikTok. I'm seeing more and more, probably because I watch one and then they show me more. There are a lot of realtors on TikTok doing similar things, and I always wonder: is this working? Are prospective home buyers watching these? It's undeniably powerful — you see the house, you hear the person talk about it, it's very engaging. Paula, you haven't said anything about the role of video. Are you guys using video? Has your partnership with the industry association really involved video?

Paula French (40:51)
We haven't done quite as much video as I'd like. I started an Instagram channel called SEO for EDU with the idea that I'd try some of these shorter reel-style things. I think I'm going to switch to carousels, just because they'd be a lot easier to create. And I find from my own behavior — this is a trend that's talked about — people want to swipe on those carousels more than they want to watch videos, and people continually see higher engagement on carousels. So that's a strategic shift I'll be making when I pick SEO for EDU back up. But on the client side, we do see the combination of taking a blog post or a program page and repurposing that content for a LinkedIn article, a LinkedIn post, and a YouTube video — more of an informational YouTube video with slides and text that, with a well-optimized description, gives a few reference points that help corroborate the pattern we want AI to recognize, and ultimately help with visibility.

Greg (41:56)
So you're doing a slideshow or montage-style video rather than a talking-head approach, and you're saying that's also effective?

Paula French (42:04)
Yeah. In the case we've done this most for, the ones I've seen the most results for are universities that already have a well-established brand. But within a university, the brands are very complicated — you have the school, maybe the continuing-ed school, then maybe an additional program within the continuing-ed school. There's a lot of entity disambiguation that has to happen when we're talking about, say, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. There are a lot of sub-entities there.

Greg (42:37)
Right. Let's turn to some final advice for folks. A client comes to you and says, "I've been doing a lot of reading about online visibility, and my understanding is that brand is really significant. I want to build my brand, I want people to know me, I want all the benefits of brand online." What do you do — cold start?

Paula French (43:01)
A lot of people don't even know what they want to be known for, or they want to be known for too many things. Getting really clear about what you want to be known for, and who you want to know you for that — who your target audience is — is a big hurdle a lot of brands, or want-to-be brands, have to get over.

Mike B (43:17)
Google curmudgeon — that's my brand.

Paula French (43:21)
There you go, Mike.

Andrew Shotland (43:28)
I'd take what Paula just said a little further: you do that, and then you stack. What's easy to start convincing Google and AI that that's what we are? You take all the low-hanging-fruit stuff and update it as quickly as possible — your Google Business Profile, your website, your local listings. Your local listings, by the way, are the best secret weapon for AI ever, because if you have one business and you're on a hundred business directories, that's a hundred brand mentions.

Greg (44:02)
How far we've come from just a few years ago.

Andrew Shotland (44:06)
They're hot now.

Mike B (44:08)
So you mean Yext has a good business plan — is that what you're saying, Andrew?

Andrew Shotland (44:12)
Maybe, maybe. I don't know about that — but maybe. And then there are all these non-local-listing citation platforms out there, places to list your business. Just go update them all and say, "Hey, we are a hot water installer in Sherman Oaks, California." Those little stupid things are sometimes enough to move the needle in LLMs.

Greg (44:35)
Matt McGee?

Matt McGee (44:35)
Joy, you want me to go? I agree with everything Paula and Andrew said. Big picture, like Paula was saying — I'd talk to a real estate agent and ask, "What's your viewpoint? What do you believe? What do you want to be known for? What makes you different?" Especially in real estate, all the marketing looks the same; agents are out there doing the same thing time after time. So what makes you different? Tactically, to Andrew's point about citations, I talk to agents about having a two-to-three-paragraph mini-bio that becomes your Google Business Profile, becomes your Zillow profile — it's your "fast expert." You put it on all your citation sites. It describes what you want the LLMs and Google to say about you: it lists your awards, your performance statistics, how many sales you did last year, how many in your career. And, as Joy said earlier, content-wise, original data and press releases are a cheat code for getting your name in search results and LLMs. So strategically and tactically, that's what I'd say to a real estate agent.

Greg (45:48)
I want to follow up on one thing — the point about distinctiveness, which I think is an element of brand. If you define a brand, it features a distinctiveness component — what makes that brand different? For someone who's a realtor or a lawyer or a plumber or an electrician, where there are tons of other people doing the same thing, how do you tease that out? How do you identify it?

Matt McGee (46:15)
In real estate, a lot of social media marketing is very performative right now — entertaining, comedy. You see a lot of the funny videos, Greg, on TikTok. We don't do any of that. We take a more educational approach, trying to reach buyers and sellers who aren't looking to be entertained but are actively in the market and need information and assurance and trust. The entertaining stuff is more, "Remember me five years from now when you actually need to buy." We're trying to talk to people who are buying and selling right now. And on social media we try to be community-supportive instead of self-promotional — supporting other small businesses and getting involved in the community that way.

Greg (47:01)
So altruism is a marketing strategy on a certain level.

Matt McGee (47:04)
Yeah, on social media our angle is very much about supporting other small businesses.

Greg (47:12)
Well, Joy, that's essentially what you were saying about education — that's an altruistic strategy. So what about you? A new client comes in: "I've heard this brand stuff is important, but nobody knows me." What do you do?

Joy (47:26)
Our primary way of getting content is actually an idea Mike gave me a few years ago. We have monthly calls with our clients that we record, where we interview them. We're trying to get content that, as others have alluded to, is not highly talked about and very specific. The more niche and specific you get, the better — you don't want to be broad. If you start talking about "the most common plumbing issues," your page is not going to rank, probably won't even get indexed. So we get into really specific topics, and we get our clients' words, their expertise, and then write the content based on that — because if you use AI or an SEO to write your content, you're going to get the same crap that already exists on the web. You're not going to get anything new.

Greg (48:09)
So you're using a hundred percent human effort to create content?

Mike B (48:15)
But starting with the video interview, right? You have the video content too.

Joy (48:20)
We definitely do. I had Noah Learner build a tool to take the transcript and organize it into content that's readable and good for search engines. So there's an AI component there, but it's all the words of the person we interviewed.

Matt McGee (48:34)
Yeah, I do that too, with Cari and clients. You've got to interview the agent to get their expertise and experience into the article.

Greg (48:41)
Okay, we're at the end of a very informative and interesting discussion. Any final statements or words of advice or thoughts you didn't get a chance to express?

Andrew Shotland (48:55)
The clients we've had the most success with — the local clients — are the ones who really embrace this stuff as a big test. There are certainly things we've been doing for years where it's like, "Yeah, this works, let's do that." But especially with this AI stuff, it's all still a bit wild, wild west. The ones who say, "Yeah, let's do that — let me make 10 iPhone videos today and see what happens" — those guys are moving faster. I like to say it's all about how many at-bats you get. A .300 batting average is considered great in baseball, and great in SEO.

Joy (49:33)
Nice analogy.

Matt McGee (49:34)
I'd just say: embrace the hard. Building a brand is very difficult, but Google has always rewarded the hard stuff. The harder the link was to get, the more it gets rewarded. The harder the content, the more effort you put in, the more that gets rewarded. Building a brand is hard, but the rewards are worth it.

Greg (49:57)
I'm hearing a Jimmy Cliff song in my head now — "The Harder They Come, the Harder They Fall."

Andrew Shotland (50:04)
More like "Many Rivers to Cross." That's really the one.

Matt McGee (50:06)
Very good reference.

Greg (50:10)
There's a synergy between SEO and reggae here on display. So Paula, what are your final thoughts?

Paula French (50:20)
You've all reinforced a perspective I've been sharing over the last year: you have more control over your AI visibility than you realize. There are a lot of things you can test and try. You just need to start getting stuff out there, talk about your programs or services in a clear, focused way, get it out there, and see what magic happens.

Greg (50:43)
All right, Mike?

Mike B (50:45)
Well, I think Joy is the conclusion here. I don't think she's provided her insight on this, has she?

Greg (50:51)
If you have something else to say, by all means, Joy.

Joy (50:55)
I thought I went first — but I agree with what Paula said. I actually had an interview with Ross Simmonds on our YouTube channel, and he said, "I love this whole era because it's back to foundational marketing." A lot of the gimmicks that worked with SEO are getting hit hard in the last year. One thing I haven't said, but I will: exercise caution with how much you experiment with AI content or scaled content — or anything scaled when it comes to link building. Those were always the cheat codes for SEO in the past, and those are the things we're actually seeing a lot of small businesses get nailed for in the last year. Good marketing, which as Paula said takes time and effort, is being rewarded, and the slimy stuff is getting penalized.

Greg (51:45)
Interestingly, we didn't really spend much time talking about reviews. They were mentioned in passing, probably by me, but you guys didn't talk about them at all. Is there a reason for that, or is it so well understood that reviews are essential it's not worth mentioning?

Joy (52:06)
The only thing that's changed is that you need more than just Google. Everyone used to just get Google reviews, Google reviews. There's a shift in that, for sure — and this hurts to say, but the one that's getting cited the most —

Greg (52:16)
Yelp.

Joy (52:18)
You knew exactly where I was going. Yelp is actually getting featured in AI, on the homepage as the main source on lots of listings. It's gross, but Yelp is —

Greg (52:26)
Well, they have a deal now — they're the non-Google provider of reviews. They have a formal deal now with ChatGPT.

Mike B (52:33)
And when iOS 27 comes out, this is going to be even more obvious, because they have a deal with Apple as well, right?

Greg (52:41)
It's amazing how people just hate them, but you now kind of have to deal with them.

Andrew Shotland (52:50)
I'll give you some solace: in the Nozzle study I referenced, we looked at 1.5 million local-services queries, and Yelp was only referenced about one percent of the time in the LLMs. So look at your vertical — it may not be as beholden to Yelp as you think, although that was a month ago. Things might change.

Matt McGee (53:07)
Yeah, Yelp is not that important in real estate, unless you're in the really big cities — the San Franciscos, Chicagos, and all that.

Greg (53:15)
Right. Home services, restaurants, and entertainment are the two big Yelp categories — home services is a pretty big one for them.

Mike B (53:25)
And they've helped Barbara Oliver a tremendous amount, because she's the best jeweler in Buffalo — she has seventy Yelp reviews, which is twice as many as anyone else.

Andrew Shotland (53:33)
I have not heard about Barbara in so long. Please tell her I said hello.

Mike B (53:37)
She's doing well, trust me.

Greg (53:42)
Mike has single-handedly built her brand over these many years —

Andrew Shotland (53:45)
Totally. I had forgotten all about Barbara.

Greg (53:48)
— by simply using her as a case study so often, you've built her brand.

Mike B (53:51)
That's right. She's mentioned everywhere — she's on Business Insider, she's everywhere.

Andrew Shotland (53:54)
And what's the dive bar in Olean? I forgot.

Mike B (53:58)
Third Base, Third Base.

Andrew Shotland (54:01)
Third Base, right.

Greg (54:01)
All right, right at the hour mark, I want to thank you all for your time and expertise. Really interesting, practical conversation today, and an appropriate way to end the series. Mike, we need to do something to pull out the really juicy bits from all these sessions, because there's been so much valuable information. Maybe we'll just go make a bunch of YouTube videos and employ all these techniques you've been describing. It's always the cobbler's children — we talk about marketing, but you guys do it well for yourselves, and I'm not sure we do it so well for ourselves. This podcast is a good example of something that we do —

Joy (54:36)
Greg, you've got to make sure you put Mike in a thumbnail with his mouth open and his hands beside his face. I just need to see that. Please do that.

Matt McGee (54:43)
From earlier, yeah.

Greg (54:44)
Mike is the editor. Mike is the editor.

Mike B (54:48)
And I've clearly instructed all of my tools to take an educational, non-typical YouTube approach to thumbnails.

Joy (54:55)
Just try it, Mike. Just try it.

Mike B (54:57)
All right. Thank you very much.

Greg (54:58)
All right. Thank you, everybody, and thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with more exciting adventures.

Paula French (55:05)
Awesome.