Google Business Profile: The AI-Ready 2026 Checklist for Home Service Pros

Dennis Ayotte 1:06 Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Talk of the trades. I'm joined by the one and only first of his name, Aaron Bartholomew waters, is that your middle name? Did I get Aaron Watters 1:17 it right? It's just Nathan. Very names, yeah. I think that's the Greek translation, Bartholomew. Dennis Ayotte 1:23 Okay, cool. I don't know why I just got Bartholomew vibes in that moment. So I love it. Awesome. Cool. Today, for sure, we're gonna talk about some LSA secrets that we've been learning. So we recently joined a mastermind group. Have some folks helping us there. So LSA has always been that black box. So getting some more info is going to be good. Talk about some GBP update. So also part of a GBP kind of mastermind group as well. So learning some new things there. I have Claude code on here, yeah. As all the tiktoks I've been sending you super late night on all that. So maybe want to talk about that. I feel like we haven't talked about AI in a while, so we really haven't okay. Then, if we have some time, we'll talk about some client win backs and then potentially partnership that we have struck with another person in the kind of industry that we'll talk about. So if we get to that, that'll be good, not you'll have to tune in next time so and again. Rapid Fire episode. We're trying to get through this in like 20 minutes. We got kiddos to pick up, so don't want to jeopardize your father of the year. I know. Yeah, it's only January, so I can't lose it this early. I know, right. Okay, let's talk about some of the LSA kind of secrets were just things that we've learned in terms of best practices and to kind of set the stage, as most, you know, contractors. Know, LSA is a bit of a black box. It's kind of a set it and, you know, pray type of thing. I wouldn't say set it and forget it, because, you know, the disposition and kind of monitoring leads and all that stuff is important. But I know you've been working on this here, and so what are some of the, you know, big things that we can share with folks to help them understand and give more visibility? Aaron Watters 3:10 Yeah, yeah, a couple big things. Like, last year, we got connected with the actual Google team that works on the LSA product, so we've been getting better reports from them and just reading between the lines of what's real, what's actually valuable, and what's not, and then also just learning a little bit more with some of the connections we have, really validating 95% of what we've been doing. But then there's like a 5% little things here that you can do to tank a profile. And you know, one of the things that we that we've talked about, we've known for years, got validation on it, though, through some of the Google product managers pausing LSA ads is gonna, is gonna really tank a profile. And you know, we'd experienced it back when we had Snowmageddon here, one of our clients shut theirs down and then just weren't able to recreate or get that profile back up and running. Best practices on something like that. If it's dead for 30 days or more, just create a new one. Because profile we've always thought about, like Google business profiles, the history of that profile carries weight with LSAs, not at all. Does not carry any weight. It's all about recency, responsiveness. When our guys meet with Google, Google's always going to say, add a new service area, make sure you're opted in all the categories and businesses, and then open up the hours. And really, that's all reach tactics. You know, they just want to try to spend as much money as possible and open it up. They don't realize our service businesses probably don't do duct cleaning all the time. It's kind of one of those things that some contractors do. So it's become really a game of reading between the lines. When Google gives us advice, is it something that actually is going to help the client or not? The other stuff is just a lot of basic routine, things like, you know, photos, regularly, updating photos and. Doing that once a week, once every other week. The big KPI that most people have known for a while is, of course, phone responsiveness. Everybody says they answer the phone, but actually putting a number to that, you know, we're reporting a little bit more regularly to clients and letting them know what I didn't know. I had assumed that SMS messaging and message responses was factored into it, and it is not phone responsiveness. It's all just over the phone here. So anyway, we sent out. There's a big storm coming through the Midwest here, actually, across the east side too, but telling our clients, hey on your LSA is Don't, don't pause them if you want to throttle back if you can't handle the call volume, lower your daily budget or your weekly budget to just your cost per lead, but keep the profile up and running. Google doesn't like knowing that we're just willing to quit when things get tough, so keep the profile up and running. Also, if you're a service area business, this is an opportunity to win, because there will be people that get stressed out and they pause their Google Ads the LSAS. This is an opportunity, as people leave that auction for you to win them. So just make sure that your team can answer the phone in under 30 seconds and get contact information so your database is clean and you guys are able to contact them in the future. Nice. It's an opportunity. Dennis Ayotte 6:20 Heck, yeah. Speaking of opportunities, let's try to get a nice, juicy, like clip here. So I was just thinking, like, Okay, here's a clip, right? So here are the absolutely do not do things for Google. LSA, number one, do not ever change your name, because once you change your name, it nukes your profile, and you basically start from zero. Number two, Never change your address, because once you change your address, absolutely nukes your profile. And number three, you just said it and I forgot it. What is it? Don't pause it. Yeah, never pause your ads. There's a clip. There you go. All right, your turn. You do the what you should absolutely do on GLS, I think you just touch on another one. Yeah. Phone, responsiveness, Aaron Watters 7:08 whatever. Yeah. Answer the phone 30 seconds. Dennis Ayotte 7:11 Wait, wait, you got to start it with you absolutely have to do on LSA, Aaron Watters 7:15 here are the things you absolutely have to do on Google. LSAs, answer the phone in under 30 seconds, the quickest you can best. Make sure you're active in the platform. Write back the customer name, whether it was booked, give Google all the data you can. And then three I would say, Gosh dang it. I'm not great at the clips off the spot, but keep your profile updated and active. Add Photos, keep activity on there, and then do automated bidding. Dennis Ayotte 7:46 Nice for Heck, yeah. The other thing that is kind of was intriguing to me that I had no idea about you talked about the metrics phone responsiveness, right? And in my experience, in the kind of LSA back end. There's not, like, a lot of metrics that show there, but we learned that through the API, you can pull these kind of, quote, unquote, hidden metrics. So would you describe them as, like, hidden metrics? Or, I guess that's one question, but the other question, like, when you're measuring phone responsiveness. Like, what's the best way to I guess, like, keep an eye on it. Yeah. I mean, Aaron Watters 8:25 absolutely API. Like, we've got slido or any kind of reporting connection. You can build a Google Data Studio report that shows your phone responsiveness. Okay, that's the most important one. And really, that's the priority, secondarily. And most of our clients don't run into this, but if your budget is constrained. So we got a report this morning which budgets or which accounts have a constrained budget. Typically, that's on purpose, like a foundation repair company that's spending through the ears. They might not want to just spend an infinite amount of money, but you could be harming your account or losing out on leads if you don't open that up. Dennis Ayotte 9:03 So is that a metric constrained budgets? Or how do you Okay, so phone responsiveness, constraint budgets can be pulled through the API. And for somebody who maybe doesn't want to invest in a like a platform for reporting, you say Google Data Studio? Aaron Watters 9:19 Google Data Studio is good, yeah, okay, and it's not going to the last isn't going to impact your ad quality score as far as the constraint budget, but it will give you opportunities that you know maybe you weren't having before, Dennis Ayotte 9:31 yeah, impression stairs standpoint and all that, because even with our reporting tool slido, you know, you can pull in impressions clicks, click through, rate that stuff, but even their phone responsiveness, I've never seen that in there, or the metric you mentioned in terms of budget constraints. So I think API is the way to go on that. And then, you know, what? Are some ways. So let's say we pull that metric, we benchmark it, and it's like 10% you got any tips on, like how to improve? Phone responsiveness. Like, what? What are you thinking Aaron Watters 10:02 on that? Yeah, I mean, you you should improve your phone responsiveness on all tactics. So you should probably be reviewing everything, even outside of LSA. So make sure that you're testing your phones regularly, that you're using a tool like we have, lead pulse to grade phone calls coming in. Make sure that you're getting them, because there are even clients that, you know, I spoke to one this morning before this freeze coming in, and, you know, wanted to open up LSA budget for them because they're about to get hit. But at the same time, I looked at the last five phone calls, and they didn't book any of them because they couldn't do same day appointments. And so also just monitoring and making sure are you staffed to do it, because this is also a client that's telling us they want more leads, so gotta honor the ones that you're getting. Gotta make sure that you're you're able to serve them in the right days, because you might be able to push some clients off they're more routine to get to the urgent calls. Gotcha. Dennis Ayotte 10:55 Okay, cool. So yeah, those are some of the things we've been learning on LSA. Is more to come as we work with these folks, but seems like it's been super beneficial, because I think for all of our clients, you know, everybody wants to spend as much money on LSA, but like we said, there's just some that for whatever reason, I guess now we understand some of those reasons. They just don't take off, or they were doing really well at one point, and then change their name, whether it was a rebrand, and, you know, so they were impacted, but nonetheless, you know, more to come on. LSA stuff as we learn things there. Yeah, cool. GBP updates. So one thing that came to my mind on this one, and we might have talked about it before a little bit, but now it's starting to, I think, roll out into additional markets. We actually got a question from one of our clients in the foundation space about it, but Google going out and calling HVAC companies and plumbers on your behalf to get quotes, which I think is really interesting, because in my experience, you know, CSRS have always been trained not to give pricing over the phone, right? But also, what's kind of funny is, like, are we going to have bots talking to bots, right with, you know, the different, you know, systems that are out there, like broccoli AI and all those kind of virtual CSRS. So that's interesting. So I think, just at a high level, be on the lookout for that in your market and see potentially what it's going to going to do overall. But what are some of the other things that you've been learning? Aaron Watters 12:29 Yeah, I mean, with that in mind of the AI, talking to AI, like GBP is going to be your business directory, and it's going to carry more value than the website when it comes to Google's AI itself. From my perspective, like the description in your GBP only allows 750 characters. I do expect that to jump up within the next year. So what you're putting in your in your description, and what you're filling out, as far as the amenities and every single thing on your GBP, the way, like it's we're saying the same thing to our clients that we were a year ago. I think the lens is different. When you're filling this out. Think of it as, what does AI need to know about you and your company to be able to chat without your CSRS being involved? And so I'm even coaching our team on now, in the GBP descriptions, it used to be just business name. How long have we been in business? What do we do? Let's do a general description. I also want to know, are technicians NATE certified? Are we a Mitsubishi elite dealer, diamond contractor? Are we a plus with the BBB? The more badge bait and ego baiting that you can put into your business description, the more Google then sees you as ahead of the game, and so we want to kind of manipulate that. Another thing that we that we look at is like your services. In the past, we've been told and we've been telling our clients, put every service you can under your categories and just put them all in there. In reality, we need to match the website as well. So don't just throw a bunch of services like have AC maintenance under multiple categories, be very clear and transparent and clean up that data, because that's what Google's using as your Rolodex. And do pricing Absolutely. Dennis Ayotte 14:13 Yeah, I was super intrigued when you had put together, like, a spreadsheet of all this checklist on different things, and there was questions that I didn't even know, you know, were in there, like the stuff about being, you know, LGBTQ friendly, you know, and answering that whether you are not, just so they understand, because I'm sure that's important to some people, one way or the other. So things like that. It's just like all these questions that people might have overlooked before are so important to do now. And why do you think that is, is it because of like, AI is like, thirst for knowledge and its ability to be able to, like, parse through that and give you better answers? Because now it's just, you know, not Google. It's like all the other llms. What do you think like, the the importance is, yeah. Aaron Watters 15:00 Overall. I mean, I think the tendency for a lot of businesses is we just want to say yes, yes, yes, yes. We're all of these things. We identify as Asian owned, because that might be an area to get ahead, even if you're not. I think it's just the clarity and making sure that even if you're not select No, there's a lot of parking questions. And so I think it's more so there are real people asking these questions, and it is important to a subset of people, I'm sure, and it's just better to be clear and transparent about it. Don't let Google guess, yeah, if you don't have, I'm even saying, like, if you don't have a parking a paid parking garage, don't see that as a negative. See, there's just reality. Nobody's searching for that, right? Well, some people might be, if they're going downtown, but not to an HVAC company, yeah. Dennis Ayotte 15:47 And to that point, like, I think the algorithms or the language models are going to be so smart, or the agents that are scraping they know, like, okay, most HVAC companies don't have, you know, parking garage, right? And so it's like one additional signal that can let them know, am I going in the right place, right? Because if 95% of HVAC companies don't have one, then they're probably by default, could eventually ignore the ones that maybe have that right, potentially. But okay, cool. What else on Aaron Watters 16:20 the the GPA, yeah. Darren. Darren Shaw, I love from white spark. I love anytime he puts out content. So I'll Dennis Ayotte 16:28 share his stuff too. Shout out. Darren Shaw, come on the podcast. Aaron Watters 16:31 He's, he's awesome, yeah, I love what they're doing. He mentioned Instagram posts coming up in in Google as well. Yeah. So yeah. And I think, I think it's really important, just as you look at your social citations and what you're adding on to Google to make sure it's the right one. And so I was auditing an account, and we had, like, the LinkedIn from the holding company, not the actual local business, and so just making sure that that's accurate, but just know that what you're posting on Instagram, if it's timely, if it's regular, if it's offer based, it's getting indexed. And it's super important. Dennis Ayotte 17:08 Do you have any insights on what type of Instagram posts get indexed? Is it by like, the amount of engagement they have? Is it recency? Is it just pulling, like, the last five you know, have you? Do you have any insights on that, Aaron Watters 17:20 from what I could tell, it's, it's recency in its posts. It's not, it's not the stuff that goes away. It's not the stories posts. Dennis Ayotte 17:28 Okay, cool, yeah, because I actually saw that when I was, like, just searching a random like tattoo shop. And it was so convenient, because from a, you know, searching for that, it's such a visual kind of thing. And I think it was able, I was able to go down like another pipeline of, like, an about this business, to understand, like, if I would trust them, right? And I think what we've heard, I think we heard it kind of from Rob McCann when we had him on the podcast about, you know, what do customers care about the most? And he was telling us, typically, it's not price, it's always, you know, can I trust this company to, like, do a good job and not mess up my house type of thing? And so being able to have that, like, additional avenue to get to a place where you can have more content that can explain that, you know, not necessarily, like long form, but when we are looking at the SERP, it's all so, like, heavy word based, right? And I think people out there are like, they talk about multimodal learners, like, what how do you learn best? Or, how do you consume? But then, you know, when you start thinking about our consumer behavior, like, everything is gone to, like, vertical videos, Tiktok, reels, shorts, and we've been conditioned that way, and so it makes a lot of sense that, you know, that's a component now, and we are getting driven towards that, or at least have the opportunity to look at that stuff. Aaron Watters 18:51 Yeah, that. And then, you know, the metadata of urgency and scarcity is also important, and that's where, you know, as more, not agencies, but more businesses, bring marketing in house, or at least components of marketing in house, like the community, community building side, I think is really important from an SEO standpoint, like, if you have somebody that's your culture person in house, are they? Are they putting events out on Facebook, or are they putting events where you can have the metadata say this is where we are, this is where we're going to be, because Google is also looking for timeliness and things that are that are happening from an event base. Dennis Ayotte 19:28 So unpack that. Made it metadata thing a little bit more. So, like, when you're talking about that, is that, like, you know, having good clean captions and, you know, or is there something more technical, like to that? Yeah. Aaron Watters 19:40 So if it's on your website, like there's a lot of things with SEO plugins that we can write actual schema that wraps events to tell Google exactly what they are. Facebook events does the same thing. So if you put a Facebook event on your page, there's metadata that shows Google and all that, all the bots that are crawling exactly what that is. But. But also they're smart enough to know if you have something formed as a time, location and Event Name, even if it's in, like, written text, yeah, they can crawl and those three things together can be seen as, of course, an event. You know, there's, there's some simple ways to do it, but just being active and and local, I think, is something that we're looking for a lot more from our clients. Dennis Ayotte 20:23 Okay, nice, yeah, I think you brought it up a ton of times. It's just the also the opportunity to be involved in these like local community groups and all that. And that's, I know, something we're still trying to figure out. And, you know, how does that stuff get managed? But interesting to see how the world of social is infiltrating the SERPs even more and more, you know. And I think we saw it. If you consider Yelp a social platform, you know, they're kind of owning like the blue links nowadays, but the fact that Google is opening up their Dennis Ayotte 20:55 their like profile, their Google business profiles, to take you off site, that's not a Google property, right? In this case, we're talking about Instagram, you know, so super fascinating to see that they're, you know, willing to, I guess, relinquish some of that Aaron Watters 21:11 control, yeah. And I think in the same way, you know, something we talked about with GBP is like chamber memberships. That's OG stuff we used to talk about in SEO, like get listed with the Chamber looking at it from a different lens. What it is now is its local credibility. And so if we're able to then say, if you're in the city of New Braunfels, and you're a member of the New Braunfels Chamber of Commerce, mentioning that high up on the page of your New Braunfels landing page will help get your GBP better visibility. So it's not just we're telling people to join stuff so they could spend, you know, $500 a year for their local community. It's that those things need to be vetted, and it's an investment in your local community, but we have to make sure it's seen on the website properly too. Dennis Ayotte 21:56 Yeah, and I consider you like an OG SEO, like you've been in SEO since, you know, day one, and that's how Leadhub was essentially built, right? So I feel, I find it like, super interesting that it's like, what, you know, was once, like, tried and true principles. Maybe we got like, away from a little bit because we were, you know, focused on other things. And then now it seems like we're coming back to full circle. And it's like, oh, well, like, backlinks are the right type of backlinks are super important again, you know, being involved in these, like, community organizations that we can, you know, cite is important again. So, you know, I don't know where I was going with Aaron Watters 22:37 that, yeah, but it's, it's important, yeah, and it's and it's like, it's the same thing, just a different, again, a different lens. Back in the day, we would use those because that was the easiest way to build a backlink that didn't look black hat, right? Because that's how Google dictated that you're a real business. Was by links Gotcha. Then that got abused. All the black hat tactics that happened, then people got penalized. Well, what's still around now, yeah, you know, the community based, like blogs are not valued as much anymore, but it's in the same way that bounce rate used to be a big deal for Google, where if you had a high bounce rate, you wouldn't be doing well now, actually, a long time on site actually is probably a bad UX for a home service company, because it's saying they don't know what they're doing here. They're sitting on your service page, and they haven't called or submitted a form. This is a bad UX if they're on on your website, as long as they are. So it's crazy. Those are things to check out. Dennis Ayotte 23:35 Cool. I just saw we have a two minute warning, so let's, let's end with something positive. So we have our client win backs on here. So super excited to share, like we got Connecticut San Antonio back. We had a, you know, decade long partnership with them. They, you know, decided to try some other partners couple, and then kind of made it back to us. That was awesome. And then I know one that you're particularly, you know, excited about is gotelli so plumbing company, kind of out of the north San Francisco area, right? They went and tried to, I think, at another agency as well, and then they're back. Yep, they're back. What do you always what's your saying that you always say, because I love Aaron Watters 24:13 I always say, we want to love our clients on the way out, just like we love them on the way in. And, you know, we don't have a massive sales engine. We're not sponsoring a bunch of events. We're really not bringing in a ton of new leads. We really grow through referrals. And so it hurts whenever a client leaves, of course, but you got to suck it up and say, Hey, we get it. Let's give you all the assets. Here you go. Hopefully we'll see in a year, and we've been seeing it more frequently, and so excited to have them back, some of our crowd favorites. And, yeah, just getting it going. And, I mean, it's sad to see the progress, of course, that you put in and where they were and where they are now, and some of the things tactically that were done. But we've got confidence in the relationship. And. That's why I know with a couple of those, we stayed in front of them, didn't, weren't overly pushy, but just kind of nudged them every now and then, asking how they're doing. And we're very excited to have those, those people back. We've got a few more in the pipeline. Heck yeah, yeah.