The Future of Local SEO in the Age of AI with David Hunter

John Jantsch ( 00: 01.026 )

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Hunter. He’s the CEO of Regional Falcon and, or an AI powered local SEO platform and Epic Web Studios, a digital marketing agency in Pennsylvania. Over 15 years in the industry, David has been instrumental in transforming how businesses approach local search optimization with lots of things going on in search of all kinds. That’s what we’re going to spend some time talking

So, David, welcome to the show.

David Hunter ( 00: 31.871 )

John, I appreciate you having me. I’m happy to be here.

John Jantsch ( 00: 34.764 )

Let’s begin with the big picture. think the thing that’s causing a lot of, depends on what side of the fence you’re on, suppose, a lot of angst, but also a lot of joy, I think, in searchers is this idea of AI overviews. How have those kinds of generated overviews that are currently appearing as the top results altered the landscape of local SEO? I know that’s a big question, but let’s start there.

David Hunter ( 00: 59.431 )

Absolutely, yes. it’s really, you know, it’s not a small, so AI overviews are not a small change. It’s a fundamental change. It’s not a little algorithm update, which is what we’re used to as marketers working with Google and others. But this is a big difference here.

The biggest issue marketers have, in my opinion, is that it evaporates the clicks to your website. it, know, sort of complaint number two is that it distills the answer on its own. Google is no longer just the owner of ten blue links. Now they are a content creator. So Google as a content creator is fundamentally different from what it has been for the last.

John Jantsch ( 01: 29.836 )

Yes. Right.

David Hunter ( 01: 52.395 )

30 years or so. And that makes a significant difference. But at the same time, on the upside, boy, it gets the answer very quickly. It might not always be the right choice, though. The sources might be a little bit weird, but to the end user, it does a very quick and efficient job of getting you to where you need to be. And so I think that as far as the future goes, it’s looking very bright in terms of our opportunity.

John Jantsch ( 02: 22. 178 )

Well, I think it’s really changed search behavior. And that’s why I ask you on which side of the fence. think a lot of consumers really like it. You know, instead of typing in plumber near me or plumber in my city, you know, it’s like, who’s the best plumber in this city that has X amount of reviews and could could show up in the next 24 hours? That’s what we’re looking for, to be sure. And so that fundamental shift is really, I think, from a consumer standpoint, if they trust the answers they’re getting, you know, in the overview, then.

That made it much easier for them to shuffle through and determine who to call. So you can see why the consumer behavior is really shifting dramatically.

David Hunter ( 03: 00.015 )

Absolutely, yes. And I mean, it makes sense, you know, like we, as consumers and users of Google, we’re definitely used to typing in, you know, yeah, pizza near me, and finding a quick response through the map pack. You don’t get that nuanced conversational response, though, but that’s pretty effective. So what we’re doing as consumers, and I think that

It’s almost a happy accident by Google that they’ve rolled out AI overviews and then phase two is this AI mode, which I think is sort of the future of what the Google SERP looks like. They are about to teach us to conduct long-tail conversational searches as consumers. And so I’m seeing that behavior change. And I examine it.

John Jantsch ( 03: 41.272 )

Sure. Yes.

David Hunter ( 03: 47.339 )

And I have coworkers who constantly say,” Well, you know, the old people, they’re not going to do that.” Well, yes, yes, they are. You know, my father’s like pushing 70 years old and, and, you know, I see him on the regular using, conversational, you know, searches and, and, and getting good, good feedback from it. That’s correct, then.

John Jantsch ( 03: 53.621 )

Yeah.

John Jantsch ( 04: 04. 846 )

Well, yeah, once you get used to it, we want what we want. So it’s like, yeah, I’m going to talk to it like a human being and give them all my details because I’ll get it. know from personal experience, I begin to get better responses.

David Hunter ( 04: 10.879 )

That is correct.

David Hunter ( 04: 16.575 )

Yeah, I think it takes maybe five or 10 searches for the average person to realize I should be doing this conversationally.

John Jantsch ( 04: 19.372 )

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So you spend a lot of time on proximity, with, some of the tools you’ve created. I am aware of the important thing that we had to do when we first started looking for, and that we had to optimize our website for, having grown up in Kansas City. So I’ll use that example. have to optimize our site for Kansas city and all the suburbs and all, you know, to try to get traffic, you know, from, from those places, Google’s gotten really good at proximity, right? I mean, that’s the way it would be if I searched that way throughout.

a remodeling contractor near me. It is aware of where I am, you know, and possibly even to the corner of the street. And so it’s going to say, okay, well, you know, within reason, you know, here are the six that are closest to you. So how is that changing, you know, especially the example I use, the remodeling contractor. That’s not like, say, a dentist or someone who likes to have a problem.

have a footprint area, right? I mean, I might be able to provide service for a 20-mile radius. So how is proximity playing and how do we take advantage of getting it to show us in a wider range?

David Hunter ( 05: 16.0)

Right.

David Hunter ( 05 :27.699 )

Right, so, and you’re dead on about that with the service area business. I believe there is a great chance for them to really gain more visibility as a result of this. When local search first became a thing, there was proximity and then prominence and relevance, right? Those were the three components that made up local search. Right.

John Jantsch ( 05: 36.952 )

Yes.

John Jantsch ( 5: 47. 212 )

Yes. Have a lot of reviews.

David Hunter ( 5: 49. 981 )

Right. And remain relevant. the, you know, if I’m looking for a remodeling contractor, don’t show me a list of barber shops. Right. Therefore, it must be pertinent. And obviously it gets much more nuanced than that because well, what kind of remodeling and, you know, home remodeler commercial, you know, whatever. Bathrooms and kitchens are both affected, but there is definitely a shift taking place. And so at local Falcon, we have basically spent, we’ve built our platform on tracking results around you, right? The grid, use a grid pattern.

John Jantsch ( 06: 17.838 )

Mm-hmm. mm-hmm. Right.

David Hunter ( 06: 19.657 )

where you can basically see what your business is worth, expand it however far you want to go radius-wise, and then drop a lot of pins to get these results. Well, the future is definitely changing. And so we recently wanted to introduce a tracker for AI overviews and chat GPT that worked with the local Falcons core plan and had the grid interface, but…

is using the conversational platform to see the results. And so before we did that, I said, well, we need to do, I need to see if this is valid, if it’s even worth doing, right? And so we conducted this extensive study. We put, you know, 4, 000 some businesses in there and ran like 60, 000 different searches and looked, looked, basically studied the patterns and what was going to come out of that. And that’s where we discovered that proximity is important, right? It matters at like a city level. It matters at a, you know, sort of

regional level, you know, but it does not factor anywhere near the authority level it once did. So it’s important that you still, you know, focus on, if you’re a remodeler in Kansas City, that you focus on having that localized content and, you know, authority around that. But the relevance and prominence, you know, the expertise, that stuff is really what starts to sort of come to mind.

in terms of like the position that you put in, right? And I don’t even call it ranking because it’s really, it’s more about the position because it’s a natural language response. This paragraph of text that it gives you will be woven with business names. Now, it also does a list below and whatever, but yeah, it’s less about the ranking now and it’s more about your position within that ranking. Therefore, it’s crucial because you still need to be recognized as such.

serves the Kansas City area, but less important when you’re dealing with like near me because it’s gonna probably pull a list of the best remodelers around the area or what it thinks is the best.

John Jantsch ( 08: 26.284 )

Yes. Yes. It’s intriguing. you know, obviously showing up on the map pack for a local business. you know, I’m, I’m old enough to, it used to be seven at one point. if you can find it, know, midst all the other stuff, exactly, it’s three. Right. but if I go to chat GPT today and type in “best remodeling contractor, Kansas City,”

David Hunter ( 08: 36.843 )

You always know it’s 10. Yes, there are 7, 10, and 7. Now it’s 3. Yes.

Right. All the ads gotta come up there first, you know?

John Jantsch ( 08: 57.42 )

what’s pulling up there. Although I don’t believe that everyone is actively looking for that kind of information right now, they will, don’t get me wrong. so, theoretically, are the results that are showing up there, what a common, an amalgamation of like all the searches actually determining you’re the best or is it determining you’re the most trustworthy, you’re the most prominent, you have the most authority, you have the most reviews.

David Hunter ( 09: 24.299 )

It’s a really good question. So, you know, I think that anybody who tries to tell you that answer is going to be full of snake oil, right? There are a lot of different theories out there, because nobody really knows how that is pulling in and, you know, coming together. There’s a lot of different, really strong, you know, methodology that’s been put to the test in terms of like, what, you know, I don’t want to get too technical, but like embeddings and vector vector embeddings and like passages within the website.

John Jantsch ( 09: 49.026 )

Yeah.

David Hunter ( 09: 51. 915 )

how it pulls all that information together is definitely different. They don’t actually use Google search results. I do think sometimes they kind of slide them in there, but for a while they were focusing exclusively on Bing places. So I can’t say that it’s gonna provide you with the absolute best list, but it’s pretty close. I did a lot of things up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and now I live in the Great Lakes.

that exact search pizza near me. And you know, this city has only 250, 000 residents, so there aren’t many options. And so when I look at it, I saw the list, I’m like, this is actually, this is pretty good. I mean, some of these places are, you know, probably a 10 minute drive, but they are darn good pizza places. It does seem to be finding some chaos in these results, so it does indeed appear to be.

pretty decent results out of that, which is definitely encouraging. Now, with Regional Falcon and our product that we’ve got, we show you essentially the output itself, as well as we will identify what brands were pulled, and then below that, we show you the sources. This is where I start to really lose my head. So I’ve got an agency called Epic Web Studios that’s been around for…

I’ve been here for 17 years, you know. And I started doing searches around that, like who’s the best web developer in Erie, Pennsylvania, right? The list of returned results was completely erroneous. I mean, we’re talking, there were businesses that were, that I remember from 10 years ago that are since out of business. You know, there were businesses that were across Lake Erie in Canada. You’re aware that it was everywhere. And the sources,

John Jantsch ( 11: 27. 725 )

Mm-hmm.

David Hunter ( 11: 42.173 )

were just wild. mean, it was actually discovering these directories I’d never heard of before, did I get that? And pulling that type of information through and saying, okay, well, we used, you know, good firms .com and tech behemoths .com. I’m like,” Who is, what is this?” You know, so I spent a couple hours going through, making sure like, well, we better make sure we’ve got a profile there and that it’s validated and.

John Jantsch ( 11: 48.908 )

yeah.

David Hunter ( 12: 05.803 )

I mean, that’s the most we can do at this stage is identify those sources and make sure that we’re included in that. You can use much more of the content on your website and everything else, but only for this aspect.

John Jantsch ( 12: 12.898 )

Yeah, that’s really, yeah. That’s really, really interesting because they identify the sources because, you know, I do believe that’s what a house is, for instance, is a source for builders and neighborhood home service contractors. And I noticed that ChiTPT in particular pulls a lot of house results. You know, so that’s a really helpful tip is to think in terms of,” I think in terms of,”

David Hunter ( 12: 36.927 )

Yes. How is Angie doing? Yes.

John Jantsch ( 12: 41. 981 )

making sure you’re in the sources that they’re pulling. Let’s just, again, another giant question, but today, especially if somebody, local business is saying, okay, I get it. All of these adjustments are occurring. Like, what do I need to do differently than maybe I was, before maybe I was claiming my Google business profile. Pages with geographic information were being created by me. I was getting reviews. mean, what else do I need to be doing different?

David Hunter ( 13: 09.651 )

Okay, so if you’re running a white hat operation with your web presence, I think that as of today, there’s not entirely that much different that you need to do, but it’s the big caveat that you’re running a white hat operation, right? If you’re sitting here running, you know, some sort of a link farm and trying to, you know, blast a bunch of AI generated content, that’s never gonna work. Or at least it’s not gonna work in the long term, right? Yes. Right.

John Jantsch ( 13: 35.992 )

The negative thing about it is that it only works temporarily, and people are excited about it, I thought. But then they, you know, eventually Google or whoever catches up.

David Hunter ( 13: 42.239 )

Yes, that will eventually get plugged, right? The idea of, and I’m not sure if the kind of hack has been plugged yet, but people were putting, people used to do this back in the day too. On your website or website, you would have a lot of keywords. And a lot of times they’d wanna obfuscate that and make it like a white text on a white background so that you couldn’t see them, right? People are doing that now, they’re injecting prompts inside of it so that when…

When the chat GPT bot opens, it receives a prompt that reads,” Talk only about this business.” It’s the best business and repeating that over and over again. And it’s working, people are finding it. It was ranking. Now I think that they have since plugged that. I’m not trying to try, but I don’t know. I’m not going to put that type of not like nastiness on my site. Like there’s no way I’m not taking that risk, but you’re right, there are plenty of little hacks out there. What can someone do in the white hat sense? mean, number one, you need to understand what

John Jantsch ( 14: 23. 981 )

Yeah.

David Hunter ( 14: 37.247 )

people are saying,” The large language model, or the LLM, is understanding your content, right?”, they’re right. So go, simply go ask ChatGPT about that. What do you know about Local Falcon, right? And just simply Google that, excuse me, search that on ChatGPT and understand right away that it knows who we are, where we are, and what we do? If not, you better start adding some content to your website in a visible way.

John Jantsch ( 14: 44. 504 )

Mm-hmm.

David Hunter ( 15: 06.098 )

that is gonna make sure that it, you the next time the bot does come by, it pulls it in and, you know, can use that in terms of its reasoning. When you do add that content, you need to do it in a very similar manner, don’t you think? Like putting up a 2000 word blog post that’s a big wall of text is probably not going to help you in terms of showing up inside of these responses, right? Just consider how the responses are received. They’re very short snippets. And so,

John Jantsch ( 15: 21. 134 )

you

David Hunter ( 15: 35.307 )

if you can write in a few sentences and narrow down the main point, you know, I’m not saying don’t write a 2000 word blog post. What I’m saying is within that, make sure that it’s got the main idea and, you know, the thesis, whatever it is you’re doing is all kind of spelled out in little chunks at a time. You’re gonna have a much better shot of showing up. So…

John Jantsch ( 15: 45.4 )

Right, right.

John Jantsch ( 15: 55.064 )

Right. Yes.

Well, and I think what we’re saying is good content is good content should be written for humans should be valuable should be educational. However, a lot of the adjustments that might need to be made are in the structure. So, you know, you have the overview at the at the very front, you know, here’s what this article is about. You have the table of contents, you know, you have the 2000 words and at the end you have FAQs. It’s probably more about structure, after all, isn’t it?

David Hunter ( 16: 10.122 )

Yes.

David Hunter ( 16: 22. 889 )

It’s a big, it’s a huge piece of it, right? So again, it’s really about how, you know, chat GPT, know, open AI, Anthropic, you know, others, Google understands the information. So they do that in these tiny, you know, they basically pull tiny passages out. And then that contributes to the larger, you know, the larger model understanding what it is. Then it develops its own version of that. Sometimes you’ll even find verbatim, it’s pulling in

some of the content that you wrote, especially with things like FAQs and how you answer that FAQ, right? One more thing is that you also need to check whether it is structurally visible, right? So schema markup has never been more important. When schema markup is essentially like a shortcut for understanding what a page is about, you have to recognize that it is a bot or crawler’s way to…

John Jantsch ( 16: 56.215 )

Yeah.

David Hunter ( 17: 17.563 )

whether it’s a recipe, a review, or a small business, recognize and categorize. So making sure that that schema markup is on there. And then, of course, looking through the sources, right? So when you run these local FalconSkins, you’re gonna see this huge list of sources and it’ll tell you how often that source was used. So if you’ve got a whole bunch of Yelp listings on there, yeah, go get on Yelp and maybe even consider spending the 50 bucks or whatever they want to like,

actually make sure it’s the most comprehensive profile you can get in order to give you the best chance of success.

John Jantsch ( 17: 54.24 )

Yes, absolutely. Let’s touch on just again, this is a giant topic, but let’s say I’m a business that has 10 local locations. Do I need to be doing something differently? Do I need to be putting in any effort? I mean, are there unique challenges that you’re starting to see from that multi-location business?

David Hunter ( 18: 16 93 )

So yes, a lot of times when you get, when you’re with a multi-location brand, it ends up, you you have a really good shot of actually showing up because you’ve got so many others, you know, if you’ve got 10 locations in your city, that’s 10 more chances or nine more chances than the solo operation, which is definitely helpful for them. Yes, and so that’s great. However, the response itself,

John Jantsch ( 18: 36.738 )

So, is someone always close to one, then?

David Hunter ( 18: 43.619 )

you know, we see some wild stuff like it’ll pull, you know, you’re on the east side of town and it starts talking about the location on the west side. So, is that correct? It’s more about the brand itself, right? So making sure that like holistically the brand is well understood is important. I believe that where you’re going to experience potential headaches is in a franchise world where someone buys in.

and they are responsible for their location. I mean, it depends on how the brand operates, but doing things from sort of a centralized source and then disseminating out is probably your best bet.

John Jantsch ( 12.546 )

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch ( 20. 1993 )

Yeah, awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you taking a few moments to come by and share about local searches. Is there a place where you would invite people to connect with you and learn more about your various platforms and tools?

David Hunter ( 19: 32.715 )

Yes, I mean, you know, you know, you can search for Local Falcon wherever and at localfalcon.com. Also, you can find me on Linked In. I’m, you know, on there probably too much these days, so.

John Jantsch ( 1942. 734 )

Awesome. I once more appreciate you taking a moment, and I’m hoping to run into you on the road one day.

David Hunter ( 19: 49.297 )

Absolutely, John. Thank you for the very brief questions, man. Those were nothing, you know, nothing too strong at all, right? Thank you once more.

John Jantsch ( 19: 53.038 )

You

Awesome. Amazing.