Dennis Ayotte 0:00
Okay, too much info you probably never knew at this point. I didn't use that. Did you ever make the sky? Man, I started

Aaron Watters 0:05
late. I was the oldest kid by like, six years. It was weird. Okay, it was good. I still. I was thrown into leadership through day one. I didn't even know how to tie knot. That's

Dennis Ayotte 0:15
like the story of your life, dude, absolutely every single time. All right, we're getting kicked off here episode triple zero of potentially talk of the trades. Maybe take the lead. We're figuring out it's gonna it's gonna come around. Today we're gonna talk about just a few different topics. So want to talk about annual marketing plan for the trade companies, just what you should be thinking about. There also the rise of zero click search. It's been a really buzzy term. I will be the first to admit I love burst terms and just throwing them out for clients, because when they hear that, they're like, Wow. But also shows some thought leadership. Then going to try to talk about just some of the changes in HVAC with the refrigerants coming soon. And then chat. GBT is new $200 subscription, so I'm paying 20 bucks right now. 200 seems like a lot. So cool. Well, let's jump into it. So annual marketing planning for the trade companies. What do they need to know? Aaron, yeah,

Aaron Watters 1:17
this is something we really started about, what, three, four years ago, and doing annual alignments. And this is when, you know, historically, we were an SEO company turned into web development, and then as we added pay per click and traditional marketing, you know, we realized we could create a document that shows your full picture and your annual picture, yep, and I remember a client specifically will throw their their name out there. Back in the day that, in December and January, they their revenue dropped historically. Yeah, just every December and January. And, you know, he challenged us, how do we, how do we get around that? And as we took a step back, and this was probably 2019, 2020, even, we built out that marketing plan, it's like, Well, okay, well, why are you reducing your marketing spend? Yeah, in November and shutting everything off. And he had never been able to see that 30,000 foot view where we show your marketing spend, your revenue, year over year, and then what's your what's your percentage of of spend going back in is and he started to see it, and he's, you know, let's just put the pedal to the metal this year. And so we stayed consistent, yeah, we honored that marketing plan, and we hit the goals. And I think, you know, plans are meant to be changed as things evolve. You can lose staff during COVID. We had a client who their plumbers went out on strike and didn't want to run jobs because of COVID. So things happen, but if you don't plan, you're not going to hit your goals. And so I think it's really important there, and it allows us to reflect back on underpacing. Overpacing, you can't really hit the mark every single month on your ad spend. And so it's just a cool opportunity, because, as you know, most of these business owners, if you're 3 million and under, they're doing a lot, and oftentimes they're answering the phones. They're working with the call center. They don't really have time to work on the business they're working in it. Yeah,

Dennis Ayotte 3:10
yeah. When I think about planning, it's so important. Because some of the things you brought up is, like, we need to understand year over year comps, right? Because we all understand, like, specifically for HVAC, we have, like, the shoulder season, right? And there's two different philosophies in the shoulder season. Are we going to ramp up and like fish while the fish are biting? Are we going to pull back and just kind of rely on just the overall demand? So I always love looking at that and understanding what the revenue goals are based on, like, year over year comps. The other thing too is just being able to plan and understand where your dollars are going, so we know what that percent of marketing is based on your revenue every single year. And so when we were able to kind of get those dialed in, then we have, like a baseline. And then from there, we can really start planning out tactics and understanding, okay, what am I doing from, like a upper funnel brand awareness perspective, what am I doing from a lead gen perspective? The other thing too, is, what we find is we have contractors, as much as we want to be able to own everything they're doing, you know, they're always getting hit up by vendors, right? And so there's all these, you know, CPL, lead platforms. And then before you know it, you know, it's June, and they're like, yeah, yeah, I signed up with, you know, so and so lead source, and then we're like, Well, how does that affect the budget, right? And so us being able to kind of mitigate some of that stuff and say, Hey, let's stick to the plan. But if there is other lead source opportunities that come up, how do we adjust some of the existing budgets, right? And so one of the thing that we always preach to our clients is, what is our balance of like brand awareness and lead gen? Because, as we know, Google has just gotten more and more expensive, right? And the landscape is just so competitive, and so how do we start building brand? And I think that's one of my big struggles, and the role I'm in and strategy and. Talking to clients and get them to understand that, because it's such a long term play, right? And you gotta spend a lot of money before you start seeing kind of the fruits of your labor. So what are your thoughts on just, you know, building brand and that overall? Yeah,

Aaron Watters 5:13
I mean, it's the best thing you can invest in. And, you know, I coach a group of accelerators here in Entrepreneurs Organization, and I've been an EO for like, seven years. And when you look at building your business and growing your business, you know, in early 2000s maybe 2010 Rockefeller habits were really that was a big the way to run your business. What's your B hag, What's your why? Now EOS is really running through a lot of the entrepreneur circles, and I bring those up because what's really important with the brand is we get a lot of clients that come in. Like, we got the best team. We get there on time. We're pretty good at pricing. We're trustworthy, we're trustworthy, we're loyal, like, trust us, right? And it's great. But what else? Because that's what your competitors say. And I can't tell you how many times that our clients have then said, Well, yeah, but they're lying. Okay, well, who knows? Google reviews can only tell us so much of the story, exactly. So building your brand and brand awareness diversifies. And I think we'll get into it a little bit later. Of trying to be everywhere as AI increases the zero click searches, and people start to pull data from different data sources. You want to make sure that your brand is memorable. And this is one of kind of going in the back to the annual planning, as we've seen over the last few years, a lot of people that don't have trades experience are getting into the trades, yeah. And they're coming in from PE or from some money moving concept and other industries, yeah. And what they love to do is look at your marketing plan and kill targeting, kill marketing on specifically Facebook ads or meta and social ads. And if you're looking at a one to one relationship, and some of the awesome things that service Titan is doing, giving you ROAs and giving you reports based on marketing channels, it's giving you some strong reporting stomachs yelling at me. But that reporting doesn't matter if the data is wrong, and this is something we talk about a lot, or if it doesn't tell this full story. And so when we're talking about branding, when you're doing meta, we always say, do not expect to get a bunch of leads. And if you do a lead format, expect for most of them to be spam, and you're gonna have to be aggressive and outbounding, because there's a lot of accidental clicks there. Yeah, what it's great for is brand awareness. You're getting cheaper CPMs cost per 1000 impressions then you might on a billboard, then you might on traditional and also you're able to use that first party data. And I think tying back to what what you were talking about like, well, what are you putting in front of them, right? And what is the brand message? And you know, I talked to Brendan here a couple times. He manages an account that I see our Facebook ads and our Instagram ads a lot. I don't log into Facebook. I see a lot of Instagram ads and and we're telling the story in about 75% of the ads, but I typically only see one ad, and it's a stock photo of an HVAC unit, 25% of the time. Yeah. And I keep telling him, hey, we got to kill that in his responses. Do you want to also kill the most successful ad in that mix? And the answer is no, but we've got to tell a brand story with it. And if your brand story is the same as your competitors, how are you standing out? Yeah,

Dennis Ayotte 8:33
and I think a couple points there. So one pro tip on the meta side, if you are doing, you know, lead gen ads and you are seeing more spam. What we like to do is increase that barrier to entry, right? We want them to put more skin in the game. So expand your forms to ask more information. Like, what is the age of your unit? You know whether it's a water heater or HVAC unit, what is the age of your home? Things that are going to help potentially inform you and understand if this is like a warm or hot lead. How soon are you looking to get service stuff like that will help cut down on some of those things. And then, to your point on the creative, it's important to make sure that you have multiple forms of creative, right? Because meta, their algorithm, is going to put whatever the best performing ad is in front of the audience is right? And so we had a, you know, annual alignment with the client yesterday, and we showed him his 10 we showed him his top performing ads. And he's like, how he's like, this is dirt with two holes in the ground, right? And, you know, I love creative, and I'm always like trying to put out very polished and, you know, things that look like ads, right? And you know, some of this, UGC tends to perform better, but doesn't mean you shouldn't test other formats, whether it's video or different type of creative, to make sure that you're giving your audience an opportunity to decide on what works best. So I think that's what's important on that side, going back to the branding piece too. Like, not only is it important, like. Externally, like what your brand represents, but like, what does it represent internally, like for your company culture, and you talked about the why, and some of the operating systems that, like EOS specifically, that folks are doing, and all that stuff is great, because if it starts internally, and if they're bought into the brand and what they do, then that's going to go into the home. And then, you know, the customers are really going to know that your brand is authentic. And these guys are what I saw externally is true internally, right? And I think sometimes there's like a disconnect there on some of that. But you know, as a trades company, you gotta get away from saying you're trustworthy and honest and all that, those should all be given, right? And so you really got to do an exercise to say what makes us different and, you know, unique, and to be able to build, like, a brand story around that. So not only externally, people resonate with it, but internally, you can build culture on that. And one

Aaron Watters 10:55
of my fears, you know, as you talk about user generated content a little bit, and I'm going to be terrible at staying on a script, even though I'm a rule follower. But, but like, what one of the fears, and I'm also a little excited about it, is what content generation looks like, even as soon as today, yeah, because, as people are using AI of all kinds to generate content and create content ideas, what the algorithms and what most AIs are going to do is it's going to pull what's being successful and tell you to do the same dang thing. And I saw there's a case, or there are a couple of them, where influencers are suing other influencers for copying their style, their format, their graphic design. Well, if you're all using Canva, and Canva has the same apps, has the same AI tools. How are you being different? And so some of those differences that can be unique is working on your business in your annual planning, saying, Okay, does our team know what our core values are? Do do we? Do we live that? Well, how do we then tie our core values to a brand promise to the client, and then how do we create content around that? Yeah, you know, instead of trying to just sit down and say, okay, marketing intern that I just hired, use AI now put 10 tiktoks together, yeah, go exactly,

Dennis Ayotte 12:11
yeah. And that comes back to the planning side and understanding, okay, how are we going to plan out some of that content, setting measurable goals also super important, you know, we're always trying to understand from our clients, you know, what are your goals? So we have kind of a North Star, and then we can build realistic budgets around that and realistic plans, you know, because we hear it all the time, it's like, I need 500 leads, and then, you know, the budget does not match kind of what that goal is, right? And that's a difficult conversation to have, so being able to have specific goals, the other thing is really leveraging the data you have. I always love when we get clients and they have, you know, a CRM with 10 years of data and, you know, an ads account that's got a ton of data, so we can look at it and understand, because if we can understand, you know, what does it truly cost to book a job? Then at that point, it's somewhat of a math problem. We can back it out from there and say, Okay, if we know, you know, it costs $320 for us to actually get a truck in the driveway and book the job. Then we can back out, you know, from there. Because CPAs can be subjective, depending on how we define those rules, cost per clicks, you know, are all, you know, Google space, or whatever cost per click platform you might be using. So really leveraging your data, understanding that super important for for planning as well. And then, you know, obviously some of the tools and strategies, just, you know, making sure you got an agency that you can trust, and they're going to be open and transparent about what your budgets are and what's going towards actual working media dollars, what's going towards, like their management fees, understanding that's going to be super important, and then figuring out what is the right mix of media depending on what your goals are. Right? Because, you know, one to $3 million shop is going to be much different from a $30 million $30 million shop, right? $30 million shop is going to have a lot more to be able to do brand building and some of that stuff. And when you're one to 3 million, you know, you got to kind of pick and choose, right? But sometimes, when you're at one to 3 million, you got to be willing to spend a little bit more on marketing, maybe 15 to 20% just so you can work on brand building, and as you see more revenue, that percentage comes down overall. As

Aaron Watters 14:26
you're speaking, I've got like five different rabbit trails we could go after, and I'm trying to consolidate. And I think one of the things that would be interesting to at least spend some time on is, you know, practice what we preach. And, you know, our core values, as much as we made fun of trust, they spell out trust. It's team first results driven, unrivaled responsiveness, service, mindset and tenacious pursuit. Yeah, and then the results driven, one of the things we talk about a lot, and this comes really from, from my background as an SEO is. We seek the story behind the data, and this is something that we want to encourage our clients and our team to stay persistent in being inquisitive, especially over 2025 as you know, Google search is going to change. You're going to start getting more zero click searches like you're talking about. We need to have a realistic conversation about the data, and I'll be super vulnerable, and maybe you guys will pull me off the podcast at some point. But like, you know, over the last two years, we really struggled where I think we got caught telling the story behind the data. Yeah, and it became an ego battle with a lot of our clients, where they weren't answering the phone, not taking care of your leads. Yeah. And, you know, we have account executives that have never run sometimes, a home services business, but we're just trying to tell you, but we're marketing experts. Here's the story, yeah, but it might be somebody they got a personal relationship with the call center, and they know that this person's dealing with something, and they don't want to press them, yeah? But I think it's important to make an initial assumption and then ask yourself the question of, What if I'm wrong? And you know, there's a client that hurts me, that super awesome client. I talked to them yesterday, actually, and they left about a year and a half ago, and we were talking about the call center we create, uh, automations to kind of get around it, sending them text messages when a voicemail happens, and I just saw them, they left a review on a call center company that said, you know, over the last six months after hiring them, it's never been better. Revenue is great. Yeah, it's like we were saying this a year and a half ago, but in the way that we said it, maybe it pushed them away and so, but that's our job. We're supposed to tell them the story behind the data.

Dennis Ayotte 16:43
Yeah. And, you know, when we talk about core values, I think I resonate a lot with just the service mindset. And, you know, we're all about the greater good. And you know, it's such a important point on, you know, sometimes the call center, it's, you know, the owner's wife answering the phone, you know. And he doesn't want to hear that they're missing calls and stuff like that. But that's the reality of it, you know. And those calls can be expensive, you know, in HVAC, it could be up to 200 bucks just to get the phone to ring. And so it's not like we are trying to pass on blame. We just want people to understand like, hey, super important. And I think it's part of the reason we launched lead pulse, which, you know, is our AI call grading tool, to be able to let folks know, at least, like, at a high level, hey, this is how many missed calls you had. Here's some calls that were handled poorly because we know we don't want to give pricing over the phone, or don't want to be rude to customers and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it's, it's a tough battle that we're always you know, but when we have the data, it makes a little bit easier. And when you can send a call recording to a client, because we have had clients who have made actionable steps, and they've shared the data that we had with their coaches, their business coaches, and their business coaches were able to also tell them. So sometimes we do have advocates that will help us get that across, and, you know, help us kind of win that battle for a lack of better terms. But the end of the day, we just want to do what's best for for them and make sure we're not wasting any dollars. Yeah, Monday

Aaron Watters 18:17
morning quarterback here, like, I think, another tactic that we could have handled this differently with some of the clients. With some of the clients is playing some of the phone recordings in the meeting instead of emailing them along. Because, you know, I was 10 years ago, yeah, 2014 a good friend of mine and in Ben's Elmer here in San Antonio, we we had him listen to a couple and one of them, like the AC was not working, and his his CSR was talking way too fast, and it was clearly a no, cool, like the it was not working, yes, it's a replacement opportunity. And she lied after being three times saying, What did you say? Oh, wait, it just clicked back on left that meeting 10 minutes in, said, I gotta go talk to my team. Yeah, like we gave him the tools necessary for him to take action, but a lot of people don't either want to take action, or maybe it was presented in the wrong way, and the truth doesn't lie. You gotta, gotta play that for

Dennis Ayotte 19:12
him too. Yeah, we had a we had another client. This is a funny story. Their 24 hour service, and his CSR was answering the phone like hungover in the middle of the night, and they didn't want to believe it was true, until we pulled the call, you know, recordings, and he was embarrassed, you know, and he had a conversation with them, but that one was brutal to go through, because, you know, it's just like, hey, here's The recording. And like, clearly, this person is not in a state to be answering the phones. So we ended up losing that client anyways, but you know, at least we got to share that with them. So cool. So we mentioned zero click search a couple times. Yeah. So what is zero click Search to you? Like, what do you. When you start to hear that term like, what do you think? You know?

Aaron Watters 20:02
It's there's nothing new about zero Quick Search. It's just got some rocket fuel behind it. Rand Fishkin is probably a name that most trades guys don't know, but he's one of the leaders in search and SEO, and he was at Moz for a long time. He's a big advocate for small businesses and a lot of things. And in 2012 I went to Mozcon, and he really went after man, I think it wasn't salary.com but it was a net worth website. So if you Google search, what is Floyd Mayweather worth, right? Then they have all the details. They paid all the researchers to go in and find out what Floyd mayworth, mayweathers net worth was, right, okay, well, back in the day, Google then rolled out the knowledge graphs where they would scan and crawl website data, like on the net worth.com Yeah, and then they would just give you the answer in the search results. So if you search what is Floyd mayweathers net worth? You would never go to that company's website. Google just answers it for you, and it's in the best interest of the searcher. And you know what? That business tanked because they couldn't pay their researchers anymore, because everything was off of ad traffic. Like you go to their website, they make money off of ads, right? Yeah. So when you cut out 60% of their traffic, if not, if not 70% of their traffic, how are they going to make a living off of those, those page views? And you know, coming up 12 years later, that's, it's the same philosophy. It's, it's zero Quick Search. People are getting answers in either chat GPT. They're getting answers in their search results pages on Google or in Bing, and it's it's not going to slow down. And so it does not make your website any less relevant, but what it does make us make more important is branding. And like you mentioned earlier, right? And so when you do get an answer that is a zero click search and an AI summary comes up, they still give a footnote of where they found it, right? So does your logo stand out? Does your brand name stand out? Yeah. Or are you San Antonio AC repair of San antonio.com you know, yeah, and making sure that you're memorable and that you stand out. And you know, that's something that kick charge has done a really good job of for the space, making brands stand out. And it's an opportunity, if you've got a lot of similar vehicle wraps and similar names in your area, look at the color comps around you. Yeah, are you blended in? And so I think that's part of it. I think making sure that you understand where, where your honey holes are, if you look at like Yelp, or, you know, Yelp is much hated. We're a Platinum Partner with Yelp right now. Yeah, I know the trades hate it, but Yelp gets really good rankings in Google, incredible. And so if you have a really good authority on on Yelp and take care of your customers there, you're going to take care of them everywhere else. Yeah, and it's the number one ad buyer on Yelp. They've got some bad Yelp reviews, and Yelp won't remove them. So so the person bringing Yelp a ton of ad revenue is is not able to remove reviews on Yelp. And while that may seem shady to that agency, it's just that's Yelp's core values is making sure that they're the voice of the customer. How did I get on to Yelp when you're asking about zero fixer? Because

Dennis Ayotte 23:22
we back, yeah, I think just Yelp, they have done such a good job. Like, anytime you search top HVAC company, it's like, in the SERP, they're like, boom, at the at the top. So they've done a really good job of that. So on zero click search, what are going to be? Like, some of the implications now, because you mentioned, like, yeah, the knowledge panel was there and stuff, but now it's, like, at the very top of the SERP and so, like, you're not even the scroll rates, I'm sure are going to go down. But like, what are, what do you think some of the other impacts are going to be specifically to, like, in the trades, like, because of this, you know,

Aaron Watters 23:58
improvement on zero click, yeah. I mean, the footnote here says organic traffic, organic traffic is gonna decrease. Okay, baseline, right? You know, of course, organic traffic is gonna decrease, but there are implications of that organic traffic decrease, and one of them for us is first party data. So organic traffic, if somebody searches, why is my AC making a dripping sound, then they land on your website. We now historically have that person to where we can follow them around the web, and we can keep your brand Top of Mind with your really cool core purpose and everything that differentiates you. Well, if they never visit your website, we're gonna lose that first party data, yeah. And so that's one loss, is making sure that so

Dennis Ayotte 24:45
retargeting, yeah, retargeting is going to be impacted. Yeah. How do you think like decrease and just organic traffic will impact like SEO and like domain authority and you know, that sort of stuff, because how much of it is it about? Traffic and how much of it is it about Google being able to scrape your site for these answers that will show up in these kind of AI snippets now, without

Aaron Watters 25:08
traffic, you're gonna have less value. Yeah, it just Google will tell you that that's not reality, but it's reality. I mean, we typically, and this is even a paid like a PPC conversation, where a lot of really good agencies love to build landing pages, because you keep the focus on the client's landing page, and you have a higher conversion rate. We do landing pages, we AB test, but we also see more organic traffic on websites that we send paid traffic to. So there is a correlation without even if Google's gonna say there isn't one. So yeah, I do think that. Excuse me, I think that the value is creating authority based on either a figurehead of an individual that leads the company, or turning the brand into an authoritative source. So I do think we're gonna start seeing more companies put out less content on their website and start putting it out on the social sites. So I think that's actually an opportunity for the clients that value their web. Gotcha, especially as people hire marketers in house, it's much easier for a marketer to control Tiktok or Instagram than to understand how to update your website and build long form content with the right silos and build authority that way. So I do think it's an opportunity for the ones that do website marketing, right? And you know, our philosophy is use your website as the hierarchy of I'm going to start all the content from the site. So if I've got a content silo that talks all about the new Freon changes and what's happening with with HVAC in 2025 and we've got 10 articles about it. We used to be using the website content to then create social content to then create everything off of that. And so I think it's an opportunity, and I think it's also an opportunity to make sure that your RE engagement tactics, like in service Titan or house, called Pro, whatever you're using HubSpot making sure that you're putting that content back on your website. And so when you're doing email drips, when you're doing push notes about filter changes, send them back to your website to create more value there. Yeah,

Dennis Ayotte 27:15
I think that's going to be the other big point you just made. Is like the channel in which folks, the channel in which you drive quote, unquote traffic to your site, whether it's organic or paid, is going to have to diversify, right? Because, if we lose this big chunk of traffic from the SERP like, where do we make up for it, right? And so you know, having more enticing content on your site that someone might get through, through a newsletter, right, or through your social page, because the, you know, they saw your video and then they decided to go look at your website because they're interested in eventually changing the siding on their house or getting new windows, or, you know, they got a water heater. They know that's old. So I think that's an important point. Is like understanding where are you going to be able to get more sources of traffic to your site if all of a sudden you lose such a big one here. So cool. What about like for some of the nerds out there? What are like, some technical things do you think that you've been seeing? Because I still feel like it's such like a black box, like, we don't really know how they're like or why or who they're choosing for these AI Featured Snippets. And I think we've been really successful just because of the foundation. And since the whole eat kind of roll out, a lot of our content has always kind of followed that. And I think we've had like five or six clients that we've been able to get these AI snippets from, and I'm not sure if we've done anything specific for that, or we've just relied on writing just really relevant content. But from a technical standpoint, what are your like thoughts on this and like we have some notes on here about, you know, schema markup and avoiding common answers, and optimizing your Google business profile and full disclosure chat. GBT wrote this for us. So, so you know, what are your thoughts on from a technical standpoint?

Aaron Watters 29:08
Unfortunately, that you mentioned the footnote. I didn't read that one yet. Okay, but schema absolutely like authorship. Schema is a big one. So, yeah, yes, making sure that you have authorship, making sure that you have somebody in the business that's willing to put their name on it or creating a fake persona for the brand that is your author. That's one. But the second, really key one that a lot of people don't understand is content cannibalization. Are you answering the same question on multiple pages throughout the website and so historically, building out more content is always the win. Like, you know, go exact match searches and have a page for every exact match or exact match search. So if you're saying, let's do the why is my why is my AC dripping water, right? Well, then writing another piece of article that says, Why is my AC making a dripping noise like and then another one in the so you're in. Answering the question on all these pages, right? There's going to be because it can crawl, because the AI and their bots can crawl a full page quicker, answering it in a long form, and letting the AI use synonyms on its own, I think, is also key. So, you know, we've got some clients, and our content team and SEO team have done a really good job of when we inherit a website auditing. Okay, well, what content do they have? Because they may have a WordPress blog that has 300 blog posts and they're all saying the same dang thing, right? Consolidating that content, honestly, it's heartache for a lot of business owners. That's like, oh, I paid for that content, right? Yes, but it's weighing your site down. You're not tricking Google anymore, yeah. And so I think that's that's another big key, is cannibalization, going back to authorship. But then I think having a content repurposing strategy of getting it out on the social media channels, making sure that you're linking back from an ex post from comments and Instagram, and building that up to and

Dennis Ayotte 31:00
speaking of social, like, tell me about, like, what you've learned about the whole Reddit thing, because that's been a big thing, you know, within the past, like, few months with their partnership with Google, and so I know you've been looking into that more. What are some things you've seen there? Yeah,

Aaron Watters 31:18
so you know, Reddit has an agreement where they're going to end up in the top five organic results for just about any search, and we've seen it become a gray hat tactic from SEOs, if not borderlining on a black hat tactic, asking a question of who's the best AC company in in Norman, Oklahoma, yeah, answering it with a different user, and putting a link back to your website and then closing the thread answering it, saying, Oh, well, this is solved. Who it is, yeah. So I think there's always been, for me, a hesitation on doing black hat tactics. Reddit is where the trolls go to have their voice heard, and they're gonna have some rebuttal to any positive so as much as I'd love to put all of our business owners on an AMA thread on Reddit, yeah, there's still a lot of heat that you may take, and a lot of clients don't want to take it, but if you're willing to, Reddit is the place to go right now, and that's what's winning right now. But what I would also want to look at is they're not just putting Reddit. They're what they're doing is they're showing for a certain search they're showing, or, you know, the the ads organic people also ask, then they're showing communities, right? Which is, right? Well, there are other communities that are being pulled along with Reddit, So paying attention to the ones that are beneath Reddit as well. Okay, war has always been a big one, right? Yeah, but there are a couple others that I can't recall right now that I've seen in the search results, whatever happened?

Dennis Ayotte 32:43
To Ask Jeeves

Aaron Watters 32:46
do what happened? Can we? Can we get an alert out there? Let's find

Dennis Ayotte 32:50
no idea. That's funny. I remember back in the day, you know that one, and there was another one, like Wolf fram or something like that, when just way back in the day when Google, I guess, didn't dominate the SERPs. But yeah, so Reddit, the big thing also there with Reddit is Redditors don't play around. Man, they will sniff you out real quick. So authenticity, I think on Reddit is more power Paramount than any other platform. Because, like you said, that's where the troll you think Yelpers were bad, like Redditors are worse. But there's kind of like a nobility in that, that they're, like, protecting the platform.

Aaron Watters 33:30
Yeah, there is, and there's when you actually bring value and you're authentic about it. Who cares about algorithms? Who cares about, you know, the visibility thing? Because you can do real good, and if I can tell a story really quickly, too, of how I used Reddit recently, I've got a friend that got out of the service industry that's running an HVAC company, and in that local market, there was a person that asked, How do I get into the HVAC industry? Okay, I'm in the food service business, and I hear that my friends or other people are making a lot of money in HVAC. How do I get into it? Yeah, so I called my buddy, had him send you know, well, what was your maturation process and what happened there? He sent me his content. I cleaned it up. I posted a link back to our website or to the client's website, yeah. And then the kid DMed me and asked if I'd be willing to put him in contact with, oh, from Reddit. Oh, wow, cool. So I was totally honest about, hey, I'm not this company. I don't marketing agency. Yeah, here's someone that has your story. Here's what he told me, okay, he's at this company. So I used a backlink to go to his company. Yeah, I said, you know, he'd be happy to talk and the kid, the kid, this just happened, like a week ago. The kid applied to work over there. Wanted to be a parts runner, and used me as a reference. He may be a terrible hire, right, but we provided him some clarity and an opportunity and actually provided real value. Yeah, we got a really good backlink off of it

Dennis Ayotte 34:58
nice, yeah, that's a prime example. Example, and I'm a huge redditor. I love it, and so it's always great when you do get like that type of content. Like, I love the subreddit of leadership, because I'm always on there. And, you know, people sharing, like, real stories and stuff that, like, we go through on a daily basis. So love to hear that. That's really cool, man. So awesome. What else on zero click search, anything else people need to know in terms of this. It's because when I heard this term, it was just like, like, mind blown. But then when you mentioned it earlier, like zero click has been around like forever when you talk about the knowledge panel and stuff like that. But I think now the page, you know, the SERP is continue to get retooled, and they just made it even better so you don't have to click through. But I will caution folks like you can't always trust. Like, what the the AI says, and always like, what do you always say, Trust, but verify. Yeah. And so, you know, we encourage, you know, folks to do that as well. But I do, like, as it's matured, that now, like, they're sourcing it, and there's links that you can click through if you need to. Because I think when it first rolled out, that wasn't very, like, transparent, and they were just kind of, you know, a race to get stuff out there so interesting in

Aaron Watters 36:18
that. I mean, I mean, I would say, like, I'd caution marketing leaders or business owners in a trades company from just going in harassing your SEO company and asking, like, What the hell are you doing? Just to save my fellow nerds out there, but also to paint the picture of we're figuring out what this looks like too, because we're putting out really strong content, hopefully, if you put out good content, it's going to get rewarded, is what's always been said. I don't agree with that anymore. I think, I think if you put out great content and you share it properly, you'll get rewarded. And so I would ask the, you know, your SEOs or your marketing team, what's our content repurposing strategy. And so when we find and what I would use is impression impression search in Google Search Console to identify what queries are we getting momentum on, or what queries may get zero clicks, but we're getting impressions on to then use that to build social content. So if we're saying hey, attic ladder installation pricing or deck staining is something that we're getting more impressions on in the past, that our team would say we're we don't want to tell the client, because it does, it's not getting clicks and it's on page two. Yeah, that actually is really valuable now, of like, look, there's a lot of search volume. We might be on page two and we're not getting clicks for here's how we do that. Put out a video. Host. It on YouTube, put out a video, put it on Tiktok, put out a video here. Get email content now, this is your email newsletter to your to your client database. Because this search is currently popular, we're trending for it. And then link back from your your outreach to your clients, because it's our job to educate our customers on what's going on in the market?

Dennis Ayotte 38:02
Yeah, I think the fundamental principles of, like, how you build trust with consumers, hasn't really changed. And, you know, it's about building authentic content. What's changed massively is just getting it out across all the channels, because there's so much noise out there. One thing that I heard Gary V say the other day, which was really interesting. He, you know, made a bold claim that he says, I don't think it's social media anymore. I think it's interest media, right? And people are, like, going to platforms for things that they're, you know, interested in, which, you know, I think is, is true, but the way we consume, like entertainment and knowledge now so much different. And even my user behavior has changed. Like, you know, used to all be about Google, but now I have perplexity, and I have chat GBT, but then also like tick tock, you know, because everyone is a different form of like, learners. Some people like to read, some people like to watch videos. And also it's like, depending on what you're, you know, trying to do. So, yeah, so all good points there, I think, you know, main thing there is just remain authentic. And the author profile stuff is, is super huge. I think we've seen some major gains around some of that stuff as well. So cool. The next topic we had here, and we might be out of our league on this one a little bit, y'all, but at least want to, you know, talk about it, because it's, you know, very, going to be a very big topic in 2025 and it's the changes in the HVAC refrigerants. So, you know, Aaron, you've been working in the trades a lot longer than I have you know, can you talk about when you've seen similar changes, whether it's refrigerant or just different laws changing, and kind of, what implications has it had overall, and maybe what some HVAC business owners should be kind of preparing

Aaron Watters 39:56
for? And I've got a meeting here in three minutes, so we. Talked about earlier too, was we'd love to get a subject matter expert in this to talk about the details. But for me, I think just coming from a marketing angle, this is the opportunity where you see a lot of bad faith actors trying to upgrade families into home or into systems that they don't really need. There's some big fish that I've seen do some really interesting financing deals of like, long term financing, yeah, using fear as a tactic works, and I hate it, and we don't promote using fear as a tactic for sales and for marketing. But you know from everything that I've seen that Freon, the old Freon, is going to be fine for the next five years, possibly even, like, eight years as new systems get in there, yeah, just making sure that buildings are up to code. I think that's more of a commercial change, that the new Freon is a little bit more flammable. So there are some building codes which, yeah, we're saving the environment by putting in more flammable free. It doesn't make sense to me. The math, doesn't math, yeah, it's okay, let's, let's, let's save the environment here. Yeah, yeah. A couple

Dennis Ayotte 41:03
other points on that is just, you know, really making sure your techs are trained on it. They understand it. You're sharing that information and then obviously communicating it to customers and keep them informed. Last thing we had here was just chat GBT launching a new $200 subscription we all knew was eventually going to go up. But check it out. It's just got expanded memory, capabilities, more powerful tools. You know, who knows what it's going to do. We haven't had a chance to completely jump in there, but just so you guys know that is rolling out for chat. GBT, so for some of you guys, it could be useful. Others not. If y'all find some good use cases for it, let us know. We'd love to know. So cool. Alright, well, that's, that's the end of episode, triple zero. Man, yeah, hopefully

Aaron Watters 41:49
we can stitch in here. You get, get an interview with with an H back owner, Yeah, buddy in the trades. That has more than technical stuff, yeah,

Aaron Watters 29:25
is. And I'll I want to add two things. One's a tin foil hat. The first is, it's accountability. It's in the same way that, if you know that something's going to be tracked in your CRM, yeah, then people are going to fall in line your CSRS are going to take a little bit more time. They're going to put more notes in there, because you're tracking that in the same way, if your texts know in the field that there's a requirement for images, or they will be asking the customers via email sequences or anything along those lines, to get photos, there's an accountability of cleaning up your workspace, not leaving nails in the yard, making sure that the garage door. Is clean, like there's a lot more there, from an accountability standpoint,

Dennis Ayotte 30:04
yeah, man, I didn't even think about that. That's 100% true.

Aaron Watters 30:07
Then tin foil hat, which we might need to put one here, nice and just speaking from like a the way software is developed, more importantly than the image having metadata on it, what I would say is, is user profiles within Google. Because you have to have a user profile in Google to be able to leave a Google review, right, right? So Google typically has our location data anyway, and so I would lean on the localization of images being uploaded, more on the user's profile information and going off of that. So, like, if you're in an area called stone oak, like here in San Antonio, the frequency of reviewers in that area, uploading images is going to be more relevant, from my perspective, than them all taking photos that are geo tagged and uploaded. And so that's, that's where I've done zero research on that, but logically, it makes sense to me. So let's

Dennis Ayotte 31:06
say, if that was a like, that was a thing, right? And you want to, like, prioritize that. Like, some things that jump out to me is like, how do you then get more of those types of reviews? And is it like, spiffing your guys? Like, hey, you get $5 per review, but you get another 10 bucks if they leave an image with it, right? And if you do it in the stone oak area or XYZ area, you get another $2 you know, is that, like, a wise strategy? Maybe not those dollar amounts, but I'm just saying, like, that whole model, and if, if it is awesome. But what else do you think could we do? Yeah,

Aaron Watters 31:43
we've seen so a lot of people do that. It's been successful. I think the spiffing is more successful for outbound callers to get jobs. What is more successful is just knowing the scoreboard. So if you're on podium, or if you're on service Titan or wherever, having a scoreboard of reviews by employee or by technician, yeah, like, okay, plumber, a Joe got 50 reviews and he ran 60 calls last month, but Frankie ran 60 calls and got 10 reviews last month. Okay, what's going on with that got you that level of accountability, and knowing that that's a part of their their grading of how they're doing at your brand, I think, is really important the other, the other tidbit, or a tip here, like in service Titan, you know, one of the things I like about podium is a follow up sequencing on reviews, where you'll send out the review request. You can hammer that person multiple times in their sequencing via SMS and email with service Titan native. I see a lot of clients have it turned off, where it's just a one shot one kill. Said I was gonna stop saying that one shot one kill. There is a toggle though, where you can turn on to send a follow up, so at least sending two and then making sure that you're doing SMS and email outreach for these reviews. And so just a couple of tweaks within your service Titan setup that can help lift it.

Dennis Ayotte 33:01
What is your So, real quick, this is strictly for Katie or SEO. She would love that. I'm about to say this is that you cannot incentivize people to leave your reviews, so don't do that. And we're not saying that. I think you can incentivize your people to, like get reviews and let people know that they can leave a review, but we don't want to incentivize anybody. So footnote there, which I totally forgot what I was just going to counter and ask you about in terms of

Aaron Watters 33:28
follow up, sequencing on reviews. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dennis Ayotte 33:31
So what do you? What is your like, sweet kind of spot for like touches, because I like the like, or what should the cadence be before you stop? I like the three touches in like, seven days, right? So one right after the job, or, you know, has closed and it's completed, and it starts with, you know, the technician, you know, asking for it, and then an automated touch. And then from that point we have another one, like, in three days, another one in four days, and then we're done. What do you think in terms of cadence? Someone's out there thinking like, well, how many times should I ask after the review? It

Aaron Watters 34:11
depends on job type. In my opinion, I don't go I would go three. I love your three and seven if it's a repair. So HVAC, repair, softener, needed service, something along those lines. Gotcha, if it's a new install, if it's a if it's an HVAC unit, that's a little different. I would still do five to seven times for an HVAC unit, but I would layer it out over a longer sequence. So hey, 30 days later, we still haven't gotten a review. I think it's totally okay. We want to hear about our feedback. Like, how's it working now that you've had 30 days with your new unit? Because, yeah, getting a new unit and then telling somebody one day later, you know, sending them them feedback is different if you're installing as an electrician, like, car charging stations. Like, that's a cool, sexy. Like, nice thing that they're happy about, or a generator, like, that's something you can ask specifically for photos on and say, We want to see how it looks like, brag about it. I think those are okay to layer out five to seven times, but just lengthen the process and ask a little bit more unique questions on the fifth, sixth and seventh. Touch, gotcha. But those are just, you know, something cool that service Titan does is you are able to filter by job type, yeah, and so you can have different setups based on job type. Very cool. And one more thing, I'm so sorry, one thing a lot of, especially water softening companies, they don't want to do, is the maintenance request. Oh, yeah. Like, your highest frequency is maintaining commercial water softeners or getting into the home on a regular basis. Yeah, and a lot of them want to reject asking for reviews from those people. However, you can ask every single time and and then you can turn it off once they've left you a review. Right? Those the easiest ones and should be the easiest ones that you see every single day.

Dennis Ayotte 36:02
Yeah? Because, yeah, sometimes like each new visit, if they haven't left a review, it's another opportunity for us to ask. The other thing I've found compelling too. You know, when you're really talking about reviews and trying to get as many as you can, is, you know, we've, we've known some companies, they don't even actually do work for the client, but they're still asking a review based on how you know, they felt in with the call center handling their call, right? They didn't pick us our estimate. But how do they feel about the entire customer journey? Because you can leave a review that says, hey, like, I didn't actually use them, but they were super fair. They were super transparent. I just chose the other company because of whatever, you know. And so I think that is like the next level black belt of probably getting reviews because, you know, it doesn't say anywhere like they must be a customer have done business with you. I mean, technically, they're still like interacting and doing business with you regardless, you know, and so they could be leaving a review on whether it's finished work or how the customer service representative treated them, because we all value like different things, I think so something to consider, you know, from that standpoint. So cool. Um, Alright, one last quick topic, this, because we always got to talk about AI is the whole idea of this LLM dot txt file. So to get really nerdy, you want to talk about kind of what a robots txt file is right now, and how it relates to SEO. And then, what could llms do? Yeah?

Aaron Watters 37:37
Yeah, absolutely. So robots dot txt file, you know, we talk about even on the writing content, writing content for users, or writing it for the robots, because that's how Google elevates rankings. This whole ranking shift that we talked about, or that rollout, is basically their bots going out, crawling the web, coming back, and then identifying what needs to be ranked where. So there's a robots dot txt file. It strips a lot of the visual elements that humans have to go through on a website, so it makes it real clean. It's just source code showing, hey, this is what's on this page. This is what's on this page. Part of an SEO and technical SEO job is making that file as clean as possible so there's not extra noise for the robots to go through. Yeah, what we're seeing with llms, they all have their own crawlers. If you're using, we're a client of Sim rush, they have their own crawler to go see in the web. Ahrefs, all these SEO tools have crawlers. Well, llms have crawlers. There's a bunch of funny memes about, you know, deep seek, stealing, GPT data stealing like they're going out there and they're stealing basically our website content data, but the llms are reading as if they are Google's bots, right? And so there have been strategies, and I talked to some SEO people that focus on like, big travel websites and very large directories where they actually tell and they write files specifically for the llms, and then they spam the heck out of it. They remove all the other stuff, because it's the wild west right now. If you can write a website that says, AC repair Baltimore, AC repair Baltimore, we're the best AC repair Baltimore. Here's a bunch of fake reviews. Put it into an LLM, like, only chat GPT is reading this, this JavaScript file. Yeah, that's that's something that I think can be really, really abused. And I think at the smaller level, like a contractor, 10 million and under, it's not really, not really something that's happening. But I think at the bigger level, it's something to pay attention, oh,

Dennis Ayotte 39:39
yeah, the more resources you have. And goes back to that, like, early adoption. And can you, like, do you have the resources to do something like that? So super interesting to just stay on top of that. Because I think, like you said, very much wild wild west right now. And like, how do we fine tune some of that stuff? And Google went through the same stuff early on, right? Like one of the you know, kind of black hat tactics back in the day was like all this white text on, you know, pages and stuff, right? And so, well, maybe we're not at that level with some of the things that you were talking about on these travel websites. But I think it leaves the door open for that with when we start seeing people get really creative, and how can you, like, manipulate the system, and eventually we're going to need some sort of baseline, because let's like, you know, everybody is taking everybody's information and everybody's data, you know, maybe deep seek did it to chat GBT. But chat GBT did it to, like, all of us, you know, and all these people who've been publishing their, you know, information and expertise and thought leadership. So at the end of the day, like, we just need to all like, share the content, but let's like, Let's protect us all right, because we're going to be the ones consuming it. And then if we have a level playing field on how we rank for that stuff, then even better. And now we can all follow, like, a certain process. And here, here's

Aaron Watters 40:59
a clip coming from my conversation again yesterday with our SEO Leads. So Bianca clip this, unless I mess it up, our clients want to know how often am I coming up in LLM searches? Yes. The simple answer is we don't know. The reason we don't know is there's no analytic tracking in the LLM models. And so while we can put some tools into GTM, your Google Tag Manager and into Google Analytics, we can track how many times the chat GPT bot hits our website, we can do that, what we cannot do is discern whether that bot is actually pulling your data because a user asked for it, or if it's crawling so that it can can expand its database. And so like right now, we've got a site that Katie and I were talking about that maybe it's like 5000 total visits from unique users on a monthly basis. It got 1200 visits from llms in the same time frame that if you have 5000 unique visits, that doesn't mean anyway, it's just, it's one of those scenarios like the math doesn't matter. Yeah, so they have to be using it. And also they may be using your website's content to answer something, but the source could be other people, so we don't even know. They might be in a chat GPT thread listing 10 sources that they use to come up with an answer, yeah. That may they may not have used just those 10. They may have used those 10 plus 20 others. Yeah. So it's just not clear yet. How

Dennis Ayotte 42:34
are we able to see where these LLM searches are coming from? Is there a source in like, medium for them now? Or do you think that's coming? Or

Aaron Watters 42:41
it's, yeah, she's putting a listener into our Google Tag Manager. And so we're then creating not key events, but like micro events that pushes based on the crawler source. And so people are trying to learn that. I think, you know, I don't want to invest a ton of time into that yet, because the second that we that that's up and running, yeah, GPT is going to say, integrate your Google Analytics with us now, or whatever. And so funny, it's one of those cost benefit analysis of, yeah, we can go and try to figure it out aggressively. Or would you like for us to just try to get you more leads, yeah, and so.

Dennis Ayotte 43:18
And sometimes that's part of it, you know. And I will say, adding to his clip is, we've been very successful in getting our clients, I don't know, very successful, but we have gotten clients AI snippets at the top of pages, a lot Aaron's words and and we've done that, I think, mostly by following kind of like, the E, A, T, like, just tried and true method, and we've been, you know, honoring that, and we've been rewarded in many cases. But I think eventually there's going to need to be more layers to it so we understand how to truly do it. So exciting to see what's going to potentially happen there from an SEO perspective. So cool. Well, anything else on your mind?

Aaron Watters 44:04
Um, yeah. I mean, I think this has been a little bit of a longer and podcast. So, Dude,

Dennis Ayotte 44:10
I got the wife text already. Are you still recording?

Aaron Watters 44:14
Yes, yes, ma'am, we are proof, yeah. I mean, I want to talk about the team building, but just everything we did, we did a team building at the leadership team level this week. And it was one of those Lego skill set going into a Lego it's called bricks here in San Antonio, we're there for four hours. And, yeah, really cool takeaways. Oh yeah. What were some of your your quick top takeaways? Well,

Dennis Ayotte 44:41
number one, I was just like, relieved that it was impactful. Because, you know, it's, it seems a little like elementary it's like, you're going to play with Legos, basically. And in my mind, I'm like, how is this going to, like, relate to leadership? But I just trusted, and I was like, shout out to Ron, who was. Our instructor there at BRICS, and he was awesome just at navigating us through it. And it's so interesting how you can parallel like creating or building something potentially as a team or alone, and the leadership lessons that can come out of that, right, if it is, you know, orchestrating it accordingly. So my big takeaway was, like, there was just a ton of value that came from that type of exercise. And I think, you know, the biggest one for me was, like the communication one. So there was a part where I was, like, separated in a separate room, and then I had to come in and try to instruct the team on how to build something. But I had very specific like parameters where I could not, like, say certain colors or certain words or certain things. So I had a limited like vocabulary and things that I could tell the team. And they were getting frustrated, because what happened is, later, the instructor let somebody else come in and say all the full details. They were able to say colors and shapes and everything. So, yeah, so I'm sitting over here, like, WTF, dude, like this guy, and meanwhile, I'm, like, thinking the whole team hates me because they were like, Why didn't Dennis just tell us? Because what you guys were initially building happy essence you had, like, what I thought were wings or whatever, but ended up they were flippers. And I was, I was thinking it was a bird, but it was actually a dolphin. But I couldn't say any of that, but here comes Ryan. He's like, Yeah, it's a dolphin with flip flippers and a tail, and then, like, seeing the shape just totally changed to what it needed to be, yeah, was was really cool. So the communication part of it was super interesting. And just having perspective on that, it's nice. So what about you? What was your big takeaway?

Aaron Watters 46:44
I mean, for me, was the planning in the strategy and making sure that we see things, and we talk about it a lot when we get clients, it's like, okay, day one, I want leads. Great. We understand that. But yeah, are we set up to take these leads and and for us also, it's onboarding tasks and making sure that when we onboard tasks, we're asking the right questions, we're getting the right information, so the SEO team isn't running around trying to do all these audits without access or that we're just like, stuck. Well, nope, I need GSC access, or I need this or that. But like the fact that one of them, he said, Okay, I need you guys take 30 seconds. Yeah, look at it. And it made me question. I'm so confident in myself that when I get a task or I hear about something I'm working on, how often do I take a step back and plan, make sure I've got all the right tools necessary, and then go? Because I think once you get into it, it's like, okay, ready to go, yeah. And I just start working. And that was a really powerful move as well. Yeah.