The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Optimize Your SEO Strategy and Start Converting (Nate Fischer)

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Nate Fischer is a technologist and the CTO of Local Optics, a digital marketing and SEO company focused on helping home service businesses dominate their local markets. With a background in software development and search engine optimization, Fischer has built his career at the intersection of data, automation, and performance-driven marketing. Throughout his work, Fischer has helped contractors and service companies rethink how they approach online growth—moving beyond traditional SEO tactics and toward systems that leverage real-world job data, customer interactions, and proof-based content to drive results. His approach emphasizes turning everyday field activity into scalable digital assets that improve rankings, increase visibility, and generate consistent inbound leads. At Local Optics, Fischer has played a key role in developing strategies that integrate CRM data, reviews, and multi-channel marketing into a cohesive growth engine. By focusing on measurable outcomes and long-term infrastructure, he has helped businesses reduce reliance on outdated agency models and take greater control over their marketing performance.   Timestamps:   00:00:00 Cold Open   00:00:11 Title Sequence VO   00:00:30 Show Notes VO   00:01:15 Intro Into Interview   01:07:43 Outro FOR MORE GREAT EPISODES: The Mello Millionaire - https://open.spotify.com/show/1jsZaiMgWe0EGaPfLtelDW?si=3de6091af58d41b4 Check Out My Social Media: TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@officialtommymello Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/officialtommymello/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/thomasmello/

If you are not already running ads, doing SEO, testing e-local, testing thumbtack, then I don't think there's a chance that you're going to be around in five years from now. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, The Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I ask the team to take notes for you. Just text

notes, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-2-99, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevate and win.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, welcome back to the home service expert. I got Nate Fisher in the house. He spent some of his time in Lake Tahoe and some in San Francisco. today I'm super excited. Reminds me of a story.

I interviewed the C.T. Or the CMO at Groundworks, Matt Malone's company. And they were telling me their lead ag percentages. They were telling me what they spent on PPC. And the reason I'm really excited is I was like, how could you spend 24% of your money on PPC? And 22% of your comm on lead ags. And I went through all these questions, and he said, dude, organic. He's like SEO, Google optimization on the GVPs.

He's like, you've got to dominate those, and that's what will pull it down to 10%. And I think most contractors miss this. Nate is the CTO of Local Optics. It's a modern marketing platform helping home service companies turn real job activity into digital authority, with a focus on automation, CRM integration, and search visibility. Nate leads to technology to transform completed work into optimizations. content across Google Business profiles and company websites without adding extra work for operators. By bridging operational data with marketing execution, he helps contractors show up consistently,

stand out in a competitive market, and build trust at scale. Nate specialized in building systems that make local visibility, effortless, measurable, and sustainable for growing service businesses. And Nate's a buddy of mine, you know, we work with these guys on a regular basis. He spent the night at the house a dozen times. And I think you're a genius. I think you understand algorithms. You understand code. You started building with AI about a year ago. Let's just get started by having the audience get to know you a little bit. Tell us why you got so obsessed with development and code and why you got so obsessed with getting found. And you probably work with a thousand agencies as well. Yeah, definitely. So background was a,

lucky enough to grow up with a dad who was a computer scientist, math guy, aerospace engineer in Orange County, just started on a computer at a very young age, probably 10, maybe even nine, you know, looked up to my dad, wanted to do what he did, so got into software. Very early on, I actually started in what is probably the nerdiest thing ever, which is there was a world called IRC, which was like the OG chat rooms from the 90s. Started there, was distributing music in some chat rooms and needed to figure out how to get more eyeballs on it. So probably 11, 12 years old figured out that there was a world of digital marketing that Google could bring a lot of traffic to me and to the things I was working on. So started there and was just kind of in the right place at the right time with the right interest.

It turns out getting into software at a really young age was a really good thing to do. As I got a little bit older, got into some affiliate marketing, got into deeper and deeper into SEO and just kind of mixed in software, SEO. And then really the only other thing I did in my whole life was play soccer. That's awesome. And you spent a lot of time overseas as well. Some of your teams in Europe and Ukraine and other places, right? Yeah, I spent about a decade. I was in Southeast Asia, spent some time in Brazil, Argentina, Spain,

and then about three, three and a half years in Ukraine. And so local optics, been around since 1998, but kind of reimagined this past year. Many things have changed the last 25 years. what do you think has made this company last so long? I mean, digital marketing and SEO and just search engine marketing is something that I think will always be around. And as an operator, as a builder, as a strategist, just focusing on staying ahead of the curve or at least on the curve is something we've been doing for essentially my whole life, my whole adult life, definitely. So just having a good mix of clients, our own businesses, consultation with other companies,

and seeing what actually what it takes to win at any given time. And is Google still God or is the LLM's catching up or what about Bing? Great question. Google is still God. They have the lion's share of all search, the lion's share of all lead flow. Depending on the industry, Bing can be a really valuable channel. And then LLMs are definitely up and coming, shifting consumer behavior, shifting how people search. I think we'll see more and more of the chat style search results from Google as LLMs become more popular.

And LLM is large language model. It's like a chat chit or a clod or there's perplexity. There's a lot of different ones. You know what's really interesting is Google's changed a lot. It used to be the seven pack. So basically with GVP or Google My Businesses, it gives you the hours, the reviews, and it doesn't really cost much.

I mean, it's not like PPC or LSA. You pay for that stuff, and you're going to pay more for PBC than LSA. And then organic is still works a lot. We still get a ton of traffic, especially in the research terms, but they're not as intent-based. Yeah, I think a big shift that we're seeing,

I know you guys are seeing, is Google is sharing, if we put it nicely, more of the inventory of search with the paid channels. So we saw the rollout of LSA. Historically, AdWords was a fairly complicated ad platform. You had to have marketers and analysts alongside setting up successful AdWords campaigns. And then LSA came and it was basically Google saying, hey, let's make this as simple as possible.

You're a garage door company owner. You tell us what type of jobs you want, and we will deliver those jobs. And in order to do that, they added LSA ads above the local map pack. So you have LSA or Google screens, and then you have AdWords and then the map pack. So that was, I think, the first shift against organic traffic, a really big shift, where if you were getting 100 leads a month prior to LSA, LSA comes into your market, you might be getting 50, 60, maybe. maybe 70 leads now. Moving forward, and what we've seen in the last year, is Google is putting more and more effort

towards having companies pay them. So that is in kind of a direct attack on organic traffic. Maybe attacks the wrong word, but it is lessening the amount of organic leads that all companies are going to be receiving. And they're expensive. Look, I spend anywhere from 20 to 25% of, I'll give you guys that example.

I'll spend $250,000 to get a million dollars for garage door leads. And I think we're in a very unique situation because our booking rate or conversion rate and our average ticket

so much higher. But yeah, we still get five-star reviews. And when I met you, I just was blown away because you were like, how many reviews can you get? Can you get the pictures in them?

Can we help train your clients how to get the reviews? Can we? And then there's a lot of other things let's just jump through these hoops because there used to be this thing called nap, name, address, phone number, and the citation sites. And this is really why I wanted you on Nate, is to educate people because I don't think you could run a business only off just having this listing in the map pack.

Definitely. I want to talk about optimization real quick. So let's go through just some simple steps that someone could take right now. I'll give you one real quick. Make sure you're open 24-7. because if you're not, you're losing to your competitors when it says closed, even though you could have somebody answer the calls. So when you go search your company and you see the reviews, see if it says open hours, including Saturdays and Sundays, and you're going to make a lot more money. What else?

I think the simplest thing to start with that you guys do a great job of is actively being involved in the process of getting reviews and having that operationalized across your company. So we've worked with hundreds, if not thousands of companies, thousands of agencies, and there's a stark difference between a company that's doing well and a company that's not doing well. And it's usually an ownership decision to have review generation as a first principle. You have service techs. They need to be incentivized to get reviews. They need to be trained on the soft skills of being able to interact with customers, provide a good experience. And then you also need automation or software and processes to back that up and at scale request reviews. Make sure they're getting routed to the right location if you're a multi-location company.

And there's a little bit of nuance around Google reviews versus Facebook reviews versus Yelp and some of the other third-party platforms. But I think the first step of any sort of digital success is making sure that you're treating review generation and your reputation. as a first principle. Talk to me a little bit about citation sites. So back in the day, I used to go on, I mean, this is a long time ago, Fiverr, and I get a list of, and there was some tools that would tell me where all my competitors were listed too. Yep. And we'd go through, and I'm talking yellow, but there was thousands, and you'd go in and you'd

maximize the profile. You'd put in the exact, and here's the thing. The name needed to be A1 Garage Door Service, not Southeastern, not S&S, SRVC, it needed to be the exact same name. And if you're on street, either you spell out street or you put ST, but it needs to be the same every single time. And I've probably spent 100 of thousands of the dollars on tools that would fix these things. They find out and say this one's broken, this one's broken, this one's broken. How important are citation sites now if you don't have any? So to your point, 10, 15 years ago, even within the last seven or eight, people would slam citations at their business they might have 500 400 several hundred links and a lot of those sites are just very low quality have no authority Google has no reason to value them to your point of the intricacies of the name address and the phone number being exact that used to be a big thing in the industry you'd always hear about

nap consistency hey let's do a nap cleanup Google has gotten a lot smarter over the years and that is definitely no longer an issue. Personally, I think in any given industry, there might be 10 and at a ceiling 20 profiles that are actually important. So gone are the days of building hundreds of citations. And what you should be focusing on is making sure that your Yelp profile is as built out as possible and that it has a good reputation. Your Facebook business page, your home advisor, Angie's List, all of these industries, specific. platforms that get actual traffic, customers actually go to, Thumbtack. Thumbtack, yeah. These are all places that... It used to be like Merchant Circle and some other ones.

Yeah, there's a whole cottage industry around citations. And I think it's a good thing that Google has gotten a lot smarter. We don't have to worry about that sort of low-level citation building anymore. And we can focus on more of the impactful, important things in digital marketing. You know, I knew this, but you really took the time and spent hours and hours with me and the team explaining that. Let's just talk about, and I've said this on many stages. Not necessarily, so many times you pick a location that's great for you. You pick a location that's in an industrial area. It's going to be a lot of square footage for your warehouse.

It's going to be perfect for your vehicles. It's close to a freeway. And what you told me is you need to change and reimagine the way you think about where you're going to pick your location. Number one, you don't want to be right next to a competitor that's got 2,500 reviews. Number two, you wanted to be in a fluent area without a lot of commercial property. Number three, you want to be somewhere where you know your ideal client lives. And you guys have kind of really worked with me because Phoenix is a monster. I mean, we've got six million people here.

There's no way I want every single guy coming to every meeting here in Phoenix. So we've got a location in Scottsdale. We've got one on the West Valley. We've got one on the East Valley. We've strategically picked these. Yes, it's difficult. Because we've got to go through advanced verification.

We've got to get, you know, we get the front of the building wrapped up. We pay for a lease. We actually have the internet and all the everything turned down. We've got security cameras. We've got parts. We've got a CSR running. out of there. We have Thursday meetings at these locations. But that changed everything. In fact,

and I think you know this, you're our number one lead source. Yep. Our Google My Business profile brings more leads. Now look, it goes neck and neck from PPC as far as revenue. But it's the clear winner is you guys bring in more leads for us through our Google My Business profile than any other marketing we do. How important, how should people think about when they're going to pick a location or expand their locations within a market. Yeah, that's a great question. And something that we see as an issue across a bunch of campaigns we work on is the very first thing we'll do is take a look at the location, do some due diligence analysis of the things you mentioned. The most important thing, if you're starting out, do not be next to a competitor in the same category that has more

reviews than you. It's an uphill battle. It's going to be a headache. There's ways to be that. Could take years. Could take years. I mean, we've worked on, in personal injury cases years ago that in major cities, it might take a year and a half and several hundred thousand dollars to break into the map pack if you're fighting against the possum filter or some algorithmic issue. So starting with the location, looking at what the competition is around it, making sure that you are not going to be hand-stringed from an algorithmic perspective to start off. It's just you're never going to get any traction.

You're going to probably have to get out of that lease. at some point, huge headache. So that's going to be step number one. Step number two is then looking at the demographics. So understanding who is your target population, who is, what are the neighborhoods you should actually be working on from a residential home type, whether it's a home, a condo and apartment, what sort of ownership versus rentals are going on? Yeah, but I want to be very clear here.

you're not making the Google My Business page or the GVP profile an apartment or a home. Definitely not. It's where you want to market for your clients. You don't. So many people that are listening right now probably have used a residential house as their business. That is a huge issue. There was a time, let's say, 2020 and before, and it still happens today. But so many businesses figured out, hey, an extra Google business profile could really help me.

And what did they do? They sent postcards to maybe a technician's house, maybe someone in leadership. And then you had all these home service listings that are at an apartment, at a residential neighborhood. And eventually what happens is you might get traction, you might get leads, and those get suspended. And now you can't get it back because it wasn't compliant with Google's terms of service. And now you have issues where all of a sudden you've lost a huge percentage of your lead flow.

To your point, if you were driving organic leads, your total cost of money, marketing is going down across your paid channels. Now that organic channel is gone and your cost of marketing goes straight up. Your leads go down. It was a horrible situation for a lot of companies that got them itself into problems with their location selection. I want to just define the possum filter so we don't lose people. Just go ahead and define what that means. So in very simple terms, possum filters, when you have a Google listing at a location and let's say your category is garage door company. And there is another business on Google Maps within, called 200 yards, that is in the same category. That is something you want to actively avoid.

So it happens in home services. Think about dental offices. You might have a dental practice with a bunch of different dentists. They're all at the same location. Tons of algorithmic issues there. You used to work with a very large hospital, 1,500, 1,600 locations, all within two or three metros. And you can't imagine the algorithmic funkiness that was happening on a daily basis, even an hourly basis, because of how many locations of the same category are sitting next to each other. Explain to me, so Google's getting very, very smart. I mean, they've always been smart. You're one of the things you told me. And this, I'll never forget this. You said, the most brilliant minds in the world, look, the GVP algorithm as well as S's

CEO is basically makes you show up for free. I mean, yes, you got to pay for optimization. But you said the greatest minds in the world are working on making it so you have to pay. You have to do PPC. You know, Google wants to make a fortune, and they do. Tell me a little bit about that conversation and the people you've talked to about this. Yeah, so being an engineer, essentially my whole life, I have a bunch of buddies that went into some of the, the big tech companies, whether it's Facebook, Amazon, Google. And these are the world's best minds.

They have enough capital, all these companies to just hire the best engineers and have them thinking about all of their business problems. And whether or not you do know this, Google is actually an advertising company. If you look at their quarterly statements, they are just an ad company. They want people to pay them money for advertising. And so with that at their core, they have huge teams of engineers, really smart guys and girls, and they're just sitting there tasked with increasing their advertising revenue. And so if we think about Google search, you type in a search plumber near me. You've got, again, Google screened or Google guaranteed or that LSA ad at the top. You're going to have AdWords, and then you have the

map pack and then organic rankings. And so that's what we would call the inventory of Google search. And what we've been seeing for years now is Google and the engineers there are tweaking and turning knobs trying to force businesses to pay them more. And so that is the advent of LSA. That is things we're seeing right now where you might type in Plummer near me. You see the Map Pack, but you only see one listing that has a call button. And that's the listing that is advertising. So what we have essentially is some of the smartest engineers in the world sitting around with plenty of budget, plenty of time, plenty of intelligence, thinking about how do we get people to pay us more money? How do we get businesses to pay us more money? So that's the kind of the environment we're in.

And at the end of the day, you just shift and move your marketing budget around and move your strategy around and make sure that you're showing up in every channel that you can. I think the biggest theme of the last five to 10 years, especially the last five years, is being multi-channel. You can't just be relying on organic traffic. You can't just be relying on LSA. You can't just be relying on AdWords or performance marketing, buying leads, remarketing. You need to have all of these things working together. When you get a client, how do you know it's not your ideal team, your ideal client? Like what, and I'm guessing that they're just, someone's calling you saying, my business is about to go bankrupt.

I need more leads. And they don't have any money to spend. But you tell me. Great question. So definitely if you're talking about SEO and even local SEO, GVP, it is more of an investment and a longer term strategy. You shouldn't be putting your last dollars into organic marketing. You probably should test out some of the other channels that are going to have a tighter return of revenue, AdWords, performance marketing, buying leads. So that's problem number one is

you need to understand that SEO and your digital marketing strategy as a whole is an investment that does return an ROI, but that can take time. I think secondarily would be the health of a website. So if we're bringing on a search client, there is a bunch of different ways to make a website unhealthy you from an SEO perspective, whether that's having slow page load time, whether that's not having the right content, whether that's having too much content that encroaches on each other. So that's a big one. And I think the third one would be a company that tells me, hey, I just can't get reviews. We can't get reviews.

And being in the industry so long, especially working with you guys, obviously getting reviews is possible. And so somebody that says, I can't get reviews, I think it's a mindset. that thing where, yeah, you probably can't get reviews if you think that, but if you just take some time, listen to Tommy Mello, for instance, about review generation and how you've done it, I think it's very clear with the right attitude, with the right systems, with the right training, any company can get reviews. So this would be my top three of clients that wouldn't love to work with. What does proof-based content really mean in a world full of generic

marketing? It's a great question. So, One of the things that we developed and taking a step back, my experience as a software developer in the industry, been on the agency side. We still have an agency and we have a pretty big white label shop that powers thousands of agencies. One of the things that's very hard is producing content at any level of scale. So whether you're a lawyer, an accountant, a home service company, after a while there's only so many blogs you can write. There's only so many listicles, the top 10 most beautiful garage doors you can buy.

At a certain point, you need to satisfy Google's algorithm with content, but you don't want to have pointless blogs and light, airy content that users don't find valuable, that Google doesn't find valuable. So one of the main things we've been working on for the last few years is a system where, we can take job-based content, so whether it's a landscaping company, a plumbing company,

HVAC, garage door, and we can quite simply take media, whether it's video, images, before and after pictures are great, write a little blurb, mix it with our technology that hooks into a website, and dynamically routes content to the correct pages that it should show up on. So I'll try to make it a little bit more of a simple example. Let's say you're a plumbing company in L.A. and Orange County. You do commercial plumbing and residential. So your website, plumber.com forward slash Orange County forward slash residential. You also have the commercial page.

And then you have the L.A. page with commercial and residential. So as your teams are out in their trucks and they're servicing clients in commercial jobs, residential jobs in L.A. and Orange County, they are naturally taking videos and photos of those jobs. our technology hooks into your CRM, whether it's service Titan or any of the others, we take that content out and we publish it into an SEO-friendly format that goes to your Google listing, goes to your website pages, to the correct pages. And I think the main thing there is what we want to do is tell Google who we are, what we do, and where we do it. And if you're writing bad blog posts, that doesn't get that accomplished. But if you're actually taking jobs from the

field, taking photos from the field, publishing it to pages that are clearly articulating what geo and what service those jobs are doing. Now you're actually producing content that Google likes that shows them who you are and what you do and where you do it. You know, a great location for me will generate seven leads a day. And they're great leads and they're intent-based leads. They're not like calling up for a cheap tune-up. And I think this is the biggest, you know, I'm putting this out there just because I know you guys do a fantastic job. There's so many companies out there that are claiming to get you to the three pack and get you to rank. And, you know, this reminds you of a story when my mom was in real estate.

I mean, we're talking back early 2000s. She says, I talked to this Google optimization company and this person said we could get the number one rankings. Like, we could get my mom's Gina. Gina, we could get you to number one. and I go, mom, yeah, anybody get you to number one. It depends on the search terms. I'm like, if you want some long-tailed crap, you know, if you want to become number one,

as somebody searches number one real estate agent in Stirling Heights, Michigan, no one's really searching that, but you could rank number one for that. So all these companies, it's this kind of a lie, and it's this kind of scumbaggy way of doing things that you could rank for anything in the three-pack. But if you're really going after a garage door repair, then that's way more difficult.

And by the way, it's a two-way street. You guys got to do your job, but I got to do my job. Yeah, I think SEO has a long history of having a low-barrier to entry. So you don't really have a certification program. You don't need to go to college for four years. You could literally watch a YouTube video over a weekend. And if you have some sales acumen, you can be selling SEO by Monday morning. So SEO companies have definitely been, not all of them, but a lot of them have been,

kind of tricking small business owners, and that's a great point. There's a whole era of, hey, I'm going to rank you the first page, and I'm going to put a guarantee into my contract that you'll get ranked on the first page. But if you actually look at the fine print, it's for these obscure keywords that actually don't bring you any value as a business. So that's a problem that the industry's had pretty much ever since I've entered it in the very early 2000s, if not late 90s. So that's something that I, uh, I, I think business owners have gotten a little bit smartened up to. It's something that companies, the good SEO agencies are no longer doing.

And I think at the end of the day, the only thing that anybody should be thinking about, whether it's SEO, PPC, anything in digital marketing is ROI. What type of revenue are these activities driving? And GBP is a fantastic ROI channel. It gives you great leads at essentially a free cost minus, your labor and services for getting ranked. But I could go on forever about some of the questionable practices of the SEO industry. Yeah, they're not built to last.

There's what we call white hat, which is like you're doing it right. There's gray hat, which is kind of a mix. And then there's black hat. And a lot of these people, they, you know, I have so many fricking employees that if I don't do things above board and I scan the system, when we started working together, I said, look, everything's got to be compliant the right way. there's no way I want to take a chance on every person that I work with and their family's future. Yeah.

So that's what I like. You guys don't make empty promises. You consistently, you know, the way our meetings look, we sit down for about 90 minutes a month and we communicate weekly as well. But this meeting is like, okay, you're getting maximum exposure on these. These are the ones. And you'll say, Tommy, what can you do in these seven markets to get more reviews? Because you're ranked number one. the problem is the number two guy has 180 more reviews.

Yep. And that's just, that's kind of just Robert Cheney influence. It's probably like you look at it. This one looks to be the clear winner because they got more reviews. And then you look at the reviews and are they well written reviews? Are they crap reviews? Are they real experiences with pictures in them? Why does that matter so much?

So I think one of the main things in a lot of our background and my background personally is understanding all of the aspects of SEO. So there is what you would call white hat SEO, which is what we do at A1, what you would really do for any brand, otherwise that's wildly inappropriate. And then there's what would be termed gray hat, kind of in the middle,

Google doesn't want you doing it, and then there's all the way black hat. And so understanding the full spectrum of SEO is incredibly important to figure out, A, what works, and then to apply things that work but are safe to large brands or really any brand. If you're a small business owner, one of the most important things is not working with an SEO company that's doing shady things. You might get ranked for three months, six months.

Things might be going well. But the very second that an algorithmic shift happens, you're going to be out of luck. You're going to be completely nuked off of Google. Your lead flow is gone. and digging out of that hole can take years, if not a complete rebranding, a complete technical infrastructure shift. It's a really painful thing to onboard a company and see horrible SEO that was done previously. And now we're trying to fix that issue. So I think a big piece is understanding the entire spectrum of what SEO is and being able to intelligently apply that to small businesses

in their campaigns. What are digital signals and how do they impact Google businesses profile performance? So digital signals can refer to a bunch of things. Google is tracking what we would call off page signals. So a citation is an example of an off page signal. You have a Yelp profile. You have a Facebook business page. And a user can see that page.

Click a link to your website. That's an off page signal. Now there's other signals. there is anytime somebody searches and you show up, you get an impression. And then when somebody clicks on your listing, you get a click. Well, Google's analyzing how often are people searching? What are they clicking on? And then not only that, what are they doing after they click? If somebody searches garage door company, they click on a listing, they look around, they figure that they don't like it for whatever reason. They go back to Google. They do either another search or they click into a competitor. That's going to be a negative signal. Now you have reviews, you have other citations, you have this entire kind of corpus of activity that's happening. And our job as an SEO practitioner is understanding what are the different signals, what control do we have on them, and how can we create a system or a program that is consistently pushing the right signals at the right pace and not doing things in an unnatural way? What are most home service companies doing wrong when it comes to local visibility?

It's a great question. So not to harp on reviews, but I think what we've seen in the last few years is you're not going to win without paying attention to reviews. You are not going to win without having a system in place to gather more reviews. So it's going to be step number one. I think step number two, and maybe this isn't on the home service company themselves, because the marketplace is very murky. It's hard to tell a good vendor from a bad vendor. And so working with the wrong SEO shop, that can set you back for years.

That can lose you so much money. That is just a huge pain point. And then I think the third thing now, especially, is not being multi-channel. So again, gone are the days of relying on SEO only. If you are not testing other channels, if you are not testing strategies within channels, I don't think you're going to be around in five years from now unless you're in a very small geography. I agree with that. And a lot of these people, unfortunately, don't have a really strong budget to spend in marketing. And they wonder why they're not growing. They're not charging the right

price. They're not booking all their phone calls. They're not converting the leads. They're not getting reviews. And they say it's hard. Tommy, it's hard. You know, I went to a master's program to 2010 to 2012. Didn't learn anything. But I sat next to this group of Chinese kids, these Asian kids. And they were like these SEO wizards. They taught me how to add videos. They tell me how to fill out the profiles. They tell me you need to get this backlink. We'll show you how to do it. And that changed everything. That's why it's pretty much why A1 is where it is. When I learned in 2010, I mean, there was a time where I had 14 guys working in her room, just building up the website. And I get, you see our website. It's what, 64 domain authority?

I mean, that's pretty darn good for a home service company. And I will say that a lot of people, this is an afterthought. Marketing is an afterthought. thought for them. But if they recruited correctly and they spent the right marketing dollars, one day I was on a podcast so long ago. And the guy behind on his well said, he who could pay more per lead will always win. And you can't buy leads when you need them the most. You're never going to win. Now, this organic stuff is what brings my calm down. It cuts it in half. And this is why social media matters and influencer marketing and door to door and all these different teams I have. Because it's pulling the marketing spend down, but I want to be able to pay more on the BBC side.

You work with guys that are like, I got a thousand dollar budget a month. Yep. On their marketing. Yep. I spend three and a half million. This month alone will be $3.6 million in marketing alone. Yeah. And you said something that really almost gave me PTSD.

And it's when you are starting out in digital marketing, there's this path that most, if not all, good marketers follow where you start out generating leads for a company. And that's kind of your first goal is, all right, we bring on a new company. We need to generate leads for them. That's not that hard. What gets hard is once you actually generate the leads, what you start to see is most companies don't know how to actually be a company. They don't answer their phone quickly. They don't return a phone call.

Their CSRs aren't trained well. Their techs aren't trained well. And so as a digital marketing consultant, once you're in it, if you want to keep your clients, you need to start moving into more of a general business consultancy role. So it's not just generating the leads. Now it's helping your clients answer the phone intelligently, have either maybe an after-hours AI auto-responder that can pick up the phone.

A lot of technology. A lot of technology, yeah. So that's a huge thing is the difference between working with somebody like you who understands the need to invest and that this is a competitive space. If you want to win, you have to compete and you have to compete with dollars versus some of the other companies that have a different mindset where they view, marketing dollars as a cost center and not as an investment. And that is a huge difference. 100%. Marketing is everything. A CFO doesn't matter if there's no leads coming in. A CFO doesn't matter.

Your operations. Your second and command does not matter. If there's no leads. I mean, leads are the lifeblood of any company and I could beat this to death. But very few people, they're going, well, it's easy for you to see you got all this money. I worked in one broke down truck and I put in the years and I learn every day. And I'm not sitting here in a high horse. I'm just saying, if you don't prioritize lead generation is the number one thing in your company. Between lead gen and recruiting all-stars, then you're not going to survive the next few years. How often should a company be updating its Google business profile to stay competitive? It's a great question. So updating the Google business profile in and of itself is certainly not the only piece of SEO. But in this day and

age, the ability for either you as the direct company or your agency to have consistent update streaming is so easy that it would be insane not to do it. So I think of local SEO as it relates to updates where at the end of the day, Google's job is they want to deliver a good experience to their customers, who are the people that are searching. Sometimes it's us. A lot of times it's the people that we do business with. And what they want to do is they want to deliver a good result to that searcher. One of the things they're looking at is obviously reputation, is the business getting good reviews. Another thing they're looking at is interactivity.

Is the business picking up their phone? Is the business actually going to answer a call for this consumer and give them a good experience? And so interactivity on your GBP is super important from that perspective. And I would say it doesn't necessarily need to be a daily thing, but multiple times a week at a minimum. You should be piling in new reviews. You should be making GPP posts. They should be sometimes seasonal. They should sometimes include a discount that you're running or a promo. You should, you should have pictures of your reviews and you want to highlight some of the good work you've done.

You should highlight some of your technicians and show consumers who you are that you guys are actually human and that you're here to help them. And at the end of the day, that might sound a little complicated, but it's really not if you're working with a competent agency. You know, I heard this rule yesterday of you got to have at least six pictures on your profile or Google basically doesn't index you correctly. So I don't know if that's a hard rule. I would say what we look at as a minimum of 10 to 20 reviews at this point. You have to get that as to be your North Star.

You need to get some traction on reviews. You need to upload photos, whether it's six, whether it's 10. What you don't want is a consumer doing a search garage door company near me. They see your listing. You have five photos. They go back to Google. They see the next person down and they have 100 photos. They have a fully built out profile.

And they're going to choose to do business with them. So a lot of these actions that you should be taking, micro actions all add up to what actually ends up converting a consumer or a customer when they search and they hit your profile. You know, I've watched you on your laptop, and it looked like you were a hacker. There was like 80 windows opening, and you were like, you've worked on government stuff. You've worked on like high level shit. How many people do you have on your team on local optics in the background, the engineering and programmers and in the coders? That's a great question. So we have about 25 to 30 technical team members ranging from, uh,

stack engineers, back-end engineers, front-end people, designers, and then a lot of project management, product management, and QA. So we have quite a deep team. On the white label side, we have probably 120 to 180 people there. We are lucky enough to have a competent R&D team where we're testing SEO strategies. We are seeing what works. I mean, we're actively testing LLM visibility techniques because LLMs are a huge shift, if not the greatest technological shift in our lifetime, maybe minus the internet itself. So I've been fortunate enough to build a great team, both on the engineering side and on the SEO side, and just worked with some really great guys in the industry and girls over the last 20 plus years. So I think I've been very fortunate

to have a great technical team and to have had the foundation in software engineering that I was lucky enough to have as a child. It's fun to watch. I mean, I know a lot of people on the team, and they're all pretty advanced. They're all very confident. They're all helpful. I get, you know, Matt's always on the calls. He's a gangster.

Yep. These meetings that we have, you guys just bring up stuff that we're not thinking about. And this is an investment. I look at it as an investment. and Power BI Dashboard tells me that this is the best investment I've made up to date. I mean, it's better than anything I've ever done. But you're right, I got to motivate the technicians. We've got to do our part.

We've got to make sure we're cleaning up the site. We've got to make sure. I mean, that's why I've got all these videographers going out. And this is why I'm like, get a better picture, make sure the picture's quality. I mean, we're coaching guys right now to get more content. And this is what I love about user-generated content. And your system feeds it back into the website. causes us to get rankings even on the SEO side. Yeah, that's a major piece of the puzzle is content.

And we're in an interesting time with AI kind of devaluing content creation and really all forms of creation. But in the home services and really in an all SMB, right now it's more important than ever to have content that is real and content that resonates with consumers. So one of the things we've been working on that we have installed on A1 is our, it's called a website widget that gathers jobs, puts them on to pages that show up in search, and then are overlaid in a map that can have reviews attached to it. So imagine you're in bed, maybe you want a new pool and you do a search for a pool company, and you see a page that's phoenixpoolcompany.com forward slash phoenix. You click into it, and now all of a sudden you see your neighborhood. You see pins that are going around where jobs have happened. You can click into them.

You can see before and after pictures a beautiful pool work. And then you see your neighbor either recording a video talking about how good the service was of this pool company, or you see a written review from your neighbor. And that right there is one of these elements that helps with conversion significantly more than essentially almost any other conversion strategy. Plus, Google loves it. I mean, it makes the site crawlable. It makes you rank. You know, one of our biggest problems, I want to take a little pivot here,

was we have a lot of locations. We're in 40 markets. I mean, and some of our markets like Atlanta and Houston and Dallas and Detroit and Phoenix, are just massive. So obviously we have multi-locations. It's hard to keep track of all this stuff. I mean, it's hard enough. You could have an Excel file, but there's no really,

there's no way to monitor all this crap. So when you sell our account, you guys started building and you're still building. And let's talk a little bit about this product that you guys have built for us. Yep. So we are calling it MLAP, multi-location analytics platform.

And this is born from not only my experience with A1, working with tons of companies. And one of the big problems with digital marketing is there's a lot of data. So every location you add, you have a physical location, you have your Google Maps listing. There's all the data that's associated with that. Phone calls, impressions, clicks, driving directions if you're showing your address. You might have a Yelp profile.

You have one or two pages on your site that have Google Search Console data and Google Analytics data. And then you have your location data that comes out of your CRM. So your campaigns, maybe if you're using Service Titan, you might have, AdWords campaigns, you might have LSA, you might be buying leads from Yelp, you might be buying leads from Home Advisor. And so that's just one location. Now you add a second location, you just doubled the data. As you add more and more locations very quickly, from a data perspective, it gets really hard to even track things competently so that you can make decisions, whether that's dealing with an issue after you've seen a drop in lead flow. Or a suspension. You don't even know about it.

Or a suspension. Yeah, so there's just all of these. These go down all the time. They do. It's a constant battle. You have to have processes for getting them back up. You need to be TOS compliant. But so one of the things we've been building is a data analytics platform that puts in your actual revenue. So hooking into your CRM at the end of the day, nothing matters if it's not driving revenue. So we are pinning revenue data.

We're pulling in jobs, invoices, scheduled appointments, Google Search Console data, Google Business Profile Data, Bing data, all of this data, and essentially allowing us to have it all in one place so that we can do things and say, hey, out of our 150 locations, which ones performed the best from a review generation perspective, or maybe more importantly, which ones had competitors performing better in the last 90 days generating reviews. So a big thing we've been working on is having the same, single place, the single source of truth for all of our attribution, analytics, and digital marketing data so that teams like A1's marketing team can actually make heads or tails of

anything that's happening without spending dozens of hours, if not hundreds of hours, digging. Very powerful tool. And what's really cool about this is you're opening up the buying box outside of home service home improvement. So how do you identify new growth opportunities from job data. Can you ask that? Yeah, I guess, you know what's really interesting is service site allows us to see a heat map. Yep. Of where our clients.

And, you know, it's cyclical because when the house were installed usually, everyone knows the hot water heater goes out in 8 to 10 years and then the garage opener goes out. And then the garbage disposal and all these things. But job data is the key. It tells you what clients are paying the most, what areas you should be in. It helps you pick your next location if you want multi-locations. And I think it's so important. And so many people are like, dude, this guy gets lucky, but they're just doing pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded.

Yep. And we're using this massive amount of analytics to pick our location. So how important is that? So it can't be understated how important it is. So here's an easy example. Hopefully it's an easy example. You have a searcher performing a search. Maybe they're doing garage door company near me.

And if they end up doing business with you, that job address, their home address, will, make its way into Service Titan, come out of Service Titan back into our system, and we'll be able to see where actual jobs are coming from so that we can shift digital marketing strategy to try to push visibility in that direction. Maybe it's a location expansion, maybe it's a local link building campaign, maybe it's some extra citation work. There's a number of things, but using actual job data allows us to have an early indicator of where our rankings are moving or on the flip side where they're not moving at all. So if we say, hey, where are we not getting jobs, that can be just as important as understanding where we're getting jobs, because now

we can shift energy and maybe there's a competitor that's getting more reviews. Maybe this location has a really bad Yelp review sitting at the top. And even though you're visible, you're actually not getting conversions anymore because that Yelp review is killing you. Right. So data, it can't be overstated how important it is to have systems in place to be gathering the data and putting it into an actionable format. We've had that happen a lot. Look, you've called me before us to get a New Angeles review on this profile because it's this nasty one star. And it's visible, even though you're ranking with it, you got to get a good one in there to take the place. And not a lot of people, I don't know many companies that have those type of insights. No, it's definitely an ever-expanding amount of data.

And you have to have been in the industry for quite a while to wrap your arms around it in a way that's actionable. That actually helps your clients, helps companies make decisions. Do you see Logal Optics as a marketing tool or infrastructure for trust? It's a great question. I think it's a little bit of both, but it's definitely infrastructure. structure for trust from two perspectives. One is the job site check-ins functionality where we're programmatically at scale trying to induce increases in trust by publishing the work that you're doing alongside a review. Then we have our geogrid or our local rankings tool where you can actually

monitor what's happening. So doing SEO is only half the battle. Monitoring what's happening is the other half the battle and that can get really complex. There's all sorts of data and analytics that you need to understand. And so I think it's definitely a bit of both. Now your team was the creators of local Viking. We were in. This tool, first time I heard about it was 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing because I could actually see the green dots, the bubbles, the pins, and then I could see yellow, and then I could see red. And I can understand how I rank. And that was a that was a masterful tool.

And it's still used today. Yeah, I think one of the big shifts that happened and the whole industry was kind of operating blind is, let's say back in 2015, if you were to call up your SEO company and say, hey, where do I rank in Phoenix

for a garage door company? They would give you a number back. They'd say, Tommy, you rank two or you rank number three. But the reality of local search is such that proximity of a searcher matters so much and all these other variables that there's no such thing as having one static ranking value.

It might be, I'm sitting here in your office, I type in garage door company, maybe A1 shows up number one. I could drive three minutes down the street, do the same exact search, maybe A1 shows up number three. And so this understanding that local rankings is much more complex than just a single, integer value is what drove the creation of geogrids, which you now see all over the industry. If we're not having our own customers, white label it and post pictures on Facebook.

There's the major SEO platforms have integrated it. There's some smaller players now. So it's definitely a huge fix to a problem that existed where we were all running around essentially blind. And it's helped infinitely for campaign strategy, for understanding. understanding what a Google listing is actually doing in terms of ranking. Over the next five years, what will separate businesses that win locally from those who disappear? Oh, man, that's a good question. I think let's ignore AI right now because I think the AI threat of shifting the landscape is big.

And that's a conversation probably for a unique hour-long podcast. Just in terms of competing in your digital strategy. If you are not already multi-channel, if you are not already running ads, doing SEO, doing email marketing, doing all sorts of performance marketing, testing e-local, testing thumbtack, all of these things, then I don't think there's a chance that you're going to be around in five years from now. It's one thing, man, we're always testing. We're testing stuff on Pinterest. We're testing things all over. You name it. I mean, We're going after the Torch Award. We're spending so much money on top of funnel.

Half the money goes into TV, radio, and billboards. Yep. And that's why we want to rank when people search us for a certain competition. And owning your own your own keywords, that's the whole strategy within itself. Let me ask you this. If you own a home service company today, what would your visibility strategy look like? Great question. So I would think about the main pillars of SEO.

So we have the website. I'd make sure a competence and highly technical company, built my website. It needs to be performant. It needs to have the right pages. It needs to have interlinking. It needs to have all of these things. Schema data. Schema. Now for AI and the LLM is super important. The metadata, the H1 tags that show you that'll help your click through rate. These things are complex. And 90 percent. I'd say how much percentage of agencies do you think are full of it? Like crap. At a minimum, 50, if not 75 percent. I'd say it's in the 90 percent. I wouldn't be surprised. One problem. One problem. them you consistently see. And if you worked with any of the bigger agencies, you probably know this. An agency starts generally with a very talented operator. And then they start to get clients. And now they hire team members. And every hire ends up lowering the quality of the agency. And then when you get to these mega agencies, you are basically in this game where the agency's goal is to spend as little

money as possible fulfilling on your campaign because they want their margins high. And that is antithetical to getting good work. So I think the agency industry in and of itself has this perverse incentive to do the bare minimum to keep you as a client. And then there's weird reporting calls where they try to bamboozle you with different keywords that don't matter that you're ranking for and they show you lists of links. You can basically cut your agencies, most people listening, you should cut your agency out, because they can't tell you, here's how much money. We have UTM parameters.

We've got attribution phone numbers, landing pages. We know down to the penny where our money's coming from. And I could prove it. I mean, I'm more than willing if anybody messages me to show you some screenshots of attribution. So what else would you be doing? I mean, just A.B testing, trying everything. We have the website. We have content.

I'd be building links. I'd be building good links. Links is probably the most dangerous spot of an SEO strategy these days. I'm sure you remember the Penguin Update back in 2012. Where we woke up, the entire industry woke up, and so many companies had been just slaughtered from an SEO perspective because people were building bad links, primarily because links are a huge part of the algorithm.

So I could go on about links, but you need to have a competent link building campaign in place. You need to have a competent review strategy in place. And it can't just be on your Google business profile. That should be where you first get reviews. But a very important thing to understand about online reputation is Google is looking at a holistic view of your company. So if your Google business profile has 100, five-star reviews, but your Yelp profile has 15,

one-star reviews, that's a huge problem. So understanding that your reputation is looked at holistically and making sure that you are doing things to affect your reputation across the web and not just on the Google properties. Let's just have one more question. We'll close out. So I'm going to go through some things. And you can answer both, but I just want a little explanation. So what's your personal preference on digital advertising, organic versus paid? It's a great question.

I think organic is still my personal preference, but with the caveat that you need to be actively deploying paid ad strategies right now, if you're not. Reviews or content? Reviews. With pictures. Reviews with good content. Automation or manual? Automation as much as you can and human in the loop to make sure that the quality is exactly what is expected. Speed or quality?

I think right now with AI, you need to be using AI to get both speed and quality. If you're not, that you're falling behind. The world is changing from a technological perspective. If you are not implementing AI to help you move quicker and maintain quality, you are going to fall behind. And for the listeners out there, I'm guessing half of them are really probably shouldn't sign up for you. I'm just going to be very transparent that if you want to sign up your website's crap, you don't get reviews, you have no idea what an H1 or metadata or schema data, and you've never worked with an agency, your website, it doesn't even have a site map. I mean, you're not a miracle worker. That's going to take six months of just purely just fixing stuff.

You never even heard of a backlink. So who is the people that should call up local optics and who are the people that? people that should absolutely like, and I hate to say this, but you're not going to be able to be successful if you're like, hey, Nate, I'm going to call you up. I got $1,000 or I'm going bankrupt. Yeah, I think it's the people that are ready to pour fuel on the fire. They have done the things with the website to make sure that it's at a base level of health. They have some level of review generation in process. They have some level of multi-channel marketing in play. And then, what we do is come on and we pour fuel on the fire. We can really help companies that are in a

good position. There are a ton of companies that you're absolutely right. They shouldn't be paying an SEO agency until they've done X, Y, and Z for getting their foundation in place. It's kind of like building a house. You have to have a good foundation. Anything you build on top of a bad foundation is at risk of going away. You know how many people I've talked to that are paying $1,500 a month to an SEO agency, and I look, and they're doing, they're adding a few citation sites, hey, we built up these three links. Like, they're getting it done overseas. I mean, almost every company is just using someone in the Philippines.

And they're probably spending a total of $25 on that $1,500. Yep. Yep. SEO has been a high margin industry specifically because it is a confusing thing for 99% of business owners to understand and that confusion is where SEO agencies have extracted a lot of, in my opinion, unfair value. How do people get a whole of local optics? Localoptics.com, you should be able to opt in right on the website or you can email me,

Nate.f, at localoptics.com. What didn't I ask you that maybe I should have? It's a great question. I think focusing on some of the. the other channels as the theme of the decade is going to be, I think, a decrease in organic inventory. Focusing on other channels is very important for you to stay alive. So that could even be non-digital channels. That could be forming referral partnerships with different entities.

That could be like you talking about billboard advertising. I think making sure that listeners go away, understanding that you need to be multi-channel. You can't just be thinking about it. SEO, you need to think about all the things and having a competent team, sometimes in-house, sometimes a vendor is of the utmost important. And I know you and I have spoken at length about processes for testing vendors against each other and making sure that the cream is rising to the top as it relates to your digital strategists. I had a guy sitting in your seat two weeks ago, 85% growth was door-to-door, $500 million pest control.

company. And this is what I'm trying to do is the reason you're in the room is we're exploiting. I mean, we are staying on top. Like, I have no ability. I can barely speak the words. I don't even understand the fundamentals of them, but I know you do. And it's people that I attach to like you. And there's a lot of people out there. Listen, if you're a big company that spent money, I mean, Nate's going to be able to, freaking, you're going to see massive results. If you're a three-man company, it's going to be tough, man. You don't have to. have the money, the resources, you just, unfortunately, it's been a hobby for a lot of people. And I got to tell you, I mean, this question that I ask myself all the time, could I redo this

starting in 2026, what I have today? With no money or no connections, there's not, I don't stand a chance. I wouldn't. I would, I'd still be curious. I still go learn, but I'd be so far behind. And I don't mean to be doom and gloom. I don't want to sound like that guy. I don't want to say you don't stand the chance. But it's just tough because we're private equity backed. I mean, I could go into a market and lose money for the next 18 months just to take ownership of that market. It's a great gain market share. Yeah, I think that's a great point. It's certainly not all doom and gloom, but there is a reality that every day that you are not starting an SEO strategy or a digital marketing strategy, you are getting dug into a hole by PE firms that are

rolling up a lot of the home services that are putting budget, being able to buy all of the lead flow in a particular market, starving out the smaller companies. So I think if you haven't started, you better start today. Cortec, when they partnered with us, spent $200,000 on research, just to tell us where we'd want to grow to. And it was all digital research. They literally, the step that you know how to pull, like what market should we go to next? And you're pulling that information. I mean, the fact is, they just spent a four, on another company telling us the best SEO or LSA practices. I mean, if the private equity guys are doing this,

and you know, they're in their penthouse in Manhattan, but they're smart enough to know that this is important in the AI search and all these different things. I'm going to have you close this out, Nate. Just one final thought for the listeners. This was excellent. I know, I think this is one of the most useful podcasts I've ever done because I just don't think that.

people understand the significance. And we kind of just say, well, I'm using Angie and it's generating enough leads. I pay for my little Yelp. And I've got a $2,000 on PPC. But they really don't know. They're like, oh, I love going to BNI meetings. I love the referrals. You know what I feel like I'll just say this about referrals? Garbage. I mean, referrals are great. I love them. It's the best compliment I could ever receive. But it's not scalable. You'll never get enough referrals unless you're the guy running the work. You're the guy with the work truck going to do the jobs. And you're like, that's not true, Tommy. I paid off my house. It's a $300,000 house. I've been in the game 10 years, and I'm happy. And me and my wife, it's a smaller company. Great. You're not going to be around it for years because that

business will not exist. I'm sorry. It's not going to exist because you're not visible. People can't find you. And referrals only work. See, I, we're at 25,000 homes a month. If I got one referral per, it actually makes a big difference for me. Because then I could double the business, but referrals and B&I meetings aren't going to save your life. But why don't you close us out, brother? I really enjoyed today. Yeah, thank you for having me, Tommy. I would say the most important takeaway is ensure that you're working with competent vendors

that care about the ROI of the campaigns they're working on. Make sure that you are having your North Star as revenue driven per location. Super important. Make sure you're doing review generation. make sure that it is institutionally built into your company. It has to be a first principle. It has to come top down. If you were the owner of a company,

you have to teach your guys what it takes to get reviews. You have to have the tools in place. And then you have to be running multi-channel marketing. You have to be making sure that you have a little bit of budget going into LSA, a little bit of budget going into PPC, a little bit of budget going into Yelp and some of the other channels. and just systemize it, operationalize it, and ensure that you're watching your numbers closely.

If I find a winner out of those, I pour a lot more money in, and that's how it works. Nate, it's been a pleasure, my friend. It's always great to have you. Thank you, man. All right. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today.

Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service.

So if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevate and win.com for slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.