Jeremy Rivera: I love working with home service businesses. They’re very different from, you know, e-commerce and they’re very different from national brands that are competing very large. They focus in on a specific region whether they’re delivering their precast concrete walls, they’re putting on roofs. What is it about working with a home service provider that’s challenging?
Kyle Bailey: The singular nature of that question is challenging—which challenge? You have a big attention gap problem because they’re so busy. They’re babysitting, they’re putting out fires. So they’re a firefighter and a babysitter all in one.
So getting in front of them with another task that they have to do—I try to take all those tasks off. For instance, images. If you’re in Houston or Dallas, Waco, Austin, San Antonio, you know, I’ll drive to you. I need you to cover my time and gas, but I’ll drive to you and take all the pictures. I’ll go out to your jobs. I’ll take before and after pictures. You know, if we need two trips, we’ll set that up.
But that’s one of the biggest things that is needed on a home service business is before and after pictures. And it’s also just one of the most difficult because if you’re a professional at roofing, it’s highly unlikely that you’re also a professional photographer or that you just know how to line a photo up.
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah.
Kyle Bailey: And so being able to do that for them takes all that off their plate. It’s a one-time cost. So that’s one of the challenges—getting pictures in, getting answers on content and stuff that can be tough just because again, they’ve got to run their business and the all-consuming nature of home service makes that difficult.
Sometimes on the flip side, what’s going on with AI right now—that’s one of the reasons I’ve pushed so hard into the podcast world. I mean, if you own one of these businesses, you’re out of time. You have no choice. You have got to get on the AI train. Now you’ve got to get out into the marketplace, figure out what’s going on. I doubt you have time to do that. That’s where professionals are going to come in. But if you do have the time, you need to get out there and figure out what’s going on because it’s changing so fast.
The entity and brand mention side of everything that’s happening is, you know, it’s like the Death Star coming around the back of the moon. That’s no moon, you know, that’s AI. And getting that truth across—because it’s been the same for 20 years. I mean, for 20 years, it’s been Google. And now it’s changed. Even Google itself has changed. So I would say those are the big challenges.
Leveraging a Business Owner’s Superpower: Their Story
Jeremy Rivera: What’s the superpower of a small business owner when they come in and they’ve got their worldview? How can you best leverage their capabilities to maximize what you can do on the SEO side?
Kyle Bailey: Well, I’m glad you asked that. I’m actually writing a book. It’ll be out here within probably 10 days. It’s called What’s Your Story? And it’s the path to connection with a homeowner.
And the whole point of it is that there’s a story that every single home service business owner has, and that’s what drove them into the business. That’s what has kept them there. That’s what’s made them successful. But then the links in the community—that’s the other side of the story. And it’s just something that I’ve found that most home service business owners just don’t know how to tell that story. They don’t see the value in a lot of the pieces and they don’t know how to put it all together.
And then the backside of it, executing that throughout the top to bottom throughout the brand—from the first moment somebody sees your ad to they see your truck to they see your mailer to they see your badge, to when you walk up, drive up to their house, to the materials you’re handing them, to the sales process—you’re telling that story all the way through if you do it right. And that’s what the book is for, is to give them a template for it.
I would say that most home service business owners are not ready for like the Donald Miller Story Brand. They’re not quite there. This is a pre, this is kind of a setup to be ready for like the Donald Miller, make the customer the hero. And so that’s what the book is for.
And the urgency of the book is again, you’re out of time. You’ve got to make it so that your brand gets mentioned more—so that a direct outcome of every marketing function you do in your community is that your brand gets mentioned more. So connections with local civic groups, linking that up right. You talked before we started about interlinking assets and things like that. So that’s what would maximize. That’s the biggest lever that a home service business owner right now can pull because it’s a fixed cost. You do that once, and now you’re just on your regular posting schedule. But you invest in that one time, you tell your story, and now you have this asset that’s just gonna keep printing cash for you.
Finding Differentiation in Commoditized Services
Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense because, you know, roofing is very largely the same from California to Tennessee to Florida, as far as the actual action. You know, we don’t have such a radical diversity of different types of roofs. So when you’re working with a service area business, you have to find that differentiator. It’s not necessarily in the product or the service itself, but in your personal connection to the story.
And usually because a service area business can be much smaller in size anywhere from, you know, one to 15, 20 on your team, you can really reinforce a lot of the messaging of your personal story and project your personal values all the way through the process. How do you get them to reflect those values in the marketing that they push out there? Whether it’s on-site copy or social media posts or ads. What’s that through line of making sure that brand concept and entity gets out there?
Kyle Bailey: Yeah, that’s a great question because you see it executed wrongly both ways. One is it’s all the kind of warm and fuzzy messaging. Then the other side, it’s all keyword stuffing. And so both of those are fails. Nobody’s going to buy a roof from you because you donate to the YMCA or whatever. On the other side, nobody’s going to buy from you when they feel this kind of push. And a lot of times, of course, Google is going to not treat your site very well if it’s keyword stuffed or over-optimized.
So what it starts with, and that’s what I start with in the book, is your story starts with your core values. And so a detailed and exhaustive examination of your core values is where it starts. And that sounds, I don’t know, cliche or whatever. But the reality is we over—I think we overestimate the importance of other people’s core values and then we underestimate the impact of ours, I think.
And that goes into, you know, we always think everybody can do what we can do, that kind of thing. But the reality is, you know, you have to be integrity-based as a company for this to work. You can’t be out there ripping people off or taking shortcuts and stuff. Don’t even try this. If you’re that kind of company, you have to be a company who’s dedicated to the betterment of your customer. And that has to be the beginning of it.
Now, after that, you’re going to work out a lot of things like: on time every time, we always use the best material even if it cost us a job, we’re always going to tell you the truth even if it hurts and it might cost us a job. Those are core value statements and the longer you work on them, the more boiled down they get. So they get really, really nice and compact. And I always compare it to the difference between a shotgun and a rifle.
So you take the same amount of gunpowder, you shoot a shotgun, it’s ineffective after maybe 150 yards at max. Shoot a rifle, you can be effective over a mile. So, and it’s actually less bullet. So it’s about making that message very, very dense and then being able to communicate that as often as possible.
So what you want to do through this exercise that I take people through is you want to boil down what is the core. If you could only say one thing to your homeowner, what would it be? And that takes some time. That takes some effort and it takes some meditation. I always recommend that somebody take a couple of days. If you’re one of these home service business owners, you know, take a couple of days, get an Airbnb by the lake, turn your phone off and really chew on what motivates you. Think about all of the dopamine payoffs you get from your business. And then that’s where you really want to center on the core of your message, and then think about how it works out.
Now, after you get that done, now you do an employee audit. By the way, this is not going to work super well for a single person team with contractors doing the roofing. This is going to work best with a team, a company with a team. So they’re running, you know, three to five trucks minimum, I would say. You’ve got five or six salespeople out in the field. You’ve got four or five inner office personnel. You’ve got warehouse personnel. You’ve got install personnel—because that’s where your culture is going to come from.
If you don’t have those people, it’s hard to say you have a culture because you’re subcontracting and you might use the same subcontractors all the time, but it’s still not the same. So you do that employee audit. Now do a friend audit and your last 25 customer audit. And you know, then you begin to get this kind of osmosis of core values that maybe you wouldn’t even recognize. I would go so far as to say I would put money on—you’re going to find core values that you didn’t know you had because again, you’re always looking at things from your eyes. You’re not looking from your customers. That’s impossible.
So that’s where I would say, because that’s going to put you on the road to be able to speak a different language than all of your competition. It’s an immediate differentiator. And again, this causes your brand to be mentioned more because it’s a connecting thing. You’re not just one more roofer driving by—you’re that roofer who’s connected to this, who I felt something when I read their story. When you connect on core values with your ideal customer, they feel something. Even if they never buy from you, they feel it. So that’s the goal.
The Franchise Limitation
Jeremy Rivera: I’m curious how that applies if you happen to be like a franchise owner. You know, you picked up a pizza franchise. There’s obviously benefits to that—you’ve got an established brand. But within that, is there still wiggle room for your franchise location to echo that or is that more limited to non-franchisees?
Kyle Bailey: Yeah, sadly they’re pretty limited. I’ve not found many franchises, if any, that will allow you to write your own story, because it’s about the franchise. Now, on the upside, the franchise, if they’re doing their job right, they’ve got some kind of story. And I would just counsel anybody who’s thinking about a franchise—just grab some of their marketing material, go grab three or four of their other websites in other cities, and then just put it in front of some of your friends and ask for an objective look.
And if you don’t get an overwhelmingly positive response, that’s a red flag because you’re stuck with that. You are married to those folks. You are not getting out of that contract. You are going to pay that fee, whether you do anything or not. And a lot of them, you know, they’ll do marketing for you for the first year or so. Then that spigot starts to run dry. And so you’re on the hook for it. That’s the downside because—you remember Quiznos?
Jeremy Rivera: Yeah.
Kyle Bailey: Yeah, Quiznos, man, they were so dominant that they made Subway change the way they did things. And then they just went away and all those franchisers were left holding the bag. I knew a couple of guys who had Quiznos franchises and because they quit advertising and they were really—they were handcuffed because most franchises don’t allow you to kind of go your own way. You can’t create location pages. You can’t do all the things that for SEO you need to be able to do to differentiate. You can’t do it.
And then on the messaging side, you’re even more handcuffed. So I would say with franchises, I’m happy to do a free discovery call for anybody. I always do. My first call is always free. I’ll be happy to walk through it with you and we can even sign in to the back of your website. We’ll share a screen and I’ll see what changes we can make. And if it’s good enough, then great. We’ll put a package together for you. But I would say out of a hundred conversations I’ve had, maybe three—I mean, it’s that low. Maybe three could make the kind of changes that you need. Yeah, franchises are tough.
Community Co-Marketing: Driving Past Free Money
Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense. Going in a slightly different direction, but tied into something that you said previously about thinking about a business’s, especially a small business’s connection to community. I was talking with Matt Brooks of SEOteric about this aspect—that some of your best work in terms of marketing and hopefully reaching out to somebody and getting a link or getting a blog post out somewhere is actually looking at the nexus that you’re connected to.
So if you’re a realtor, you know, if you’re a pool installer, the thing that connects you to other businesses is the home, and you’re trying to address that same homeowner audience as dozens, maybe even hundreds, maybe even thousands of other hungry business owners who want to get in front of that person. So what advice do you have to give to business owners about co-marketing, about effective outreach, respectful connection, and leveraging that capability and conversation to build links, to do interviews of other small business owners, or to have events that tie in marketing with other organizations, hopefully in the same community, but maybe just within the same focus, industry, or niche?
Not necessarily, “I’m going to cross promote another competing realtor,” but no—home inspector, painter, landscaper.
Kyle Bailey: Right, right. Yeah, man, that’s such a good point because the reality is if you’re a home service business owner, I can almost guarantee you you’re driving past free money every day. Just think—every red light you come to, every red light you come to, there’s a barrel of $100 bills over there and you just drive right by it.
And here’s what I mean. Number one, every neighborhood you go into, if it’s a neighborhood that you want, it’s almost certainly going to have signage on it. I know here in Texas, I live in a place called Mayfield and Mayfield is on the exit. It’s on the entrance. It’s on several signs. There’s parks around here that have names. So you have the ability to take five, six seconds, hop out of your truck, take a selfie with the neighborhood name in it, then shoot a quick selfie video. “Hey, I’m over here in Mayfield today, and you know, we’re doing this. We’re doing another roof in Mayfield.”
Now put that on your location pages. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do with that. You put it on Instagram, you put on TikTok, Facebook reels, YouTube shorts. Now pull up to your job. If you’re a roofer in Texas, it’s almost a hundred percent guarantee that you’re not doing the whole job. So hail is a big deal in Texas. I don’t know if you know this, but Dallas, Texas—the area is the hail capital of the world. Literally, they get more hail than anybody else in the world.
And so you have—it’s a very, very mature ecosystem. You know, you have dedicated painters who only do painting for hail damage. You have siding people, window people. And so all these roofers have these relationships, but you would never know it looking at their website.
So going back to your point, I think if I’ve got this right, an easy win—just I mean, it’s free money. Take a quick selfie. “I’m here with Pete the painter. We’re about to paint this thing up. We have hail damage. This is the two inch hail we had over here on the east side of the Metroplex. You guys know out here in Garland and Rockwall how tough it was. We’re going to take care of this home. We’re out here in Mayfield and you know, we’re happy to be out here.”
Now you’ve got tie in with Mayfield. You’ve got tie in with the Rockwall and Garland, the city areas. So you’ve got the macro location page. Then you’ve got the micro. So macro location page would be like the city. Then you know, do stuff for the neighborhoods that you really want. Or especially if you’re a hail damage person, because you locate marketing energy around where one and a half inch and up hail hit. Because those are the places that are going to search “hail damage roof repair near X,” right?
And so but then you’ve got the co-marketing piece. Now you say, “Hey, Pete, tell me what you’re doing on this house.” “Well, we had two inch hail over here and you know, it hits this hardy plank, starts breaking off the chips at the bottom. So what we use, we use X fill because this is the all weather fill. This is high quality and it’ll last you, you know, 25, 30 years, whatever it is. It also paints up now. So you can see here”—and do a little illustration on the job.
Now take that video, go transcribe it. You’ve got a blog post—how you handle hail damage, paint repair. Put that on both your websites, you know, spin it. So it’s unique content. But most home service business owners don’t have time to do that. Roofers don’t have time to do all that. That’s where a professional comes in.
And people balk at the cost, but it’s just because they’re looking at it backwards. If I told you, you could have a high end employee for $15 an hour, you would jump all over it. But because you think of the $30,000 a year bill, you’re like, “no way,” right? But if you’ve got somebody on your side that’s a strategic thinker that can look into your daily, they can look into your calendar and get money out of it.
That’s what a high end local SEO and AI SEO person is going to be able to do. They’re going to be able to take these things that you’re already doing. You’re already doing it every day. Now let’s just take that, tease it apart, grab the pieces of it, add a little bit of juice here and there, and then you don’t have to do anything else. You know, we take all that material and we’re going to—and that’s how you tell that whole story locally.
You know, “we only connect with high end painters. You can look at Pete’s reviews. He’s got, you know, 325 reviews, five stars. And he’s been in the area for 35 years. His dad was”—you know, so you’re doing these deep connections, these deep connections.
And then on the other side, you’ve got the community. You were talking about community, you know, your community organizations—pick three or four, pick three or four places that you give back to. Either you attend their gala every year—it could be a gala, I always say gala. You know, pick that, link to their website. Do some give back stuff during the year and find ways to link back to that. You know, the pet stuff, there’s children’s homes. There’s lots and lots of good work out there. And they all need help. Yeah.
Community Cleanups and Local Link Building
Jeremy Rivera: A community cleanup. I’ve seen great success with like, “hey, our park is trash. We’re going to send some people out, send a guy out for two hours to go pick up trash.” If you post that on Reddit, you’re going to get a huge—Reddit’s often hard for very small businesses to find a good way to come up that isn’t like, “look at me.” And then everybody’s like, “no, downvote.”
But if you come in to the community and you’re like, “hey, I’m sponsoring a community cleanup, going to have a couple of guys, we’ll have gloves and trash bags.” I don’t know if you know this, but there is actually for every county across the United States called Keep America Beautiful. You can contact them, tell them the date and time, and they’ll either deliver a batch of gloves, grabbers, buckets for you to execute a cleanup or let you go pick it up, bring it to the location and bring it back to their central hub. There’s a chain of nonprofits nationally.
So, you know, I’ve got Community Clean Links. I kind of organize those over there and kind of execute that as my own nonprofit and help businesses execute on that. But it’s always a great idea. It’s low cost, high impact and tons—there’s like you get the event directories, because every community has three or four event sites that you can submit to. You’ve got the national aggregators, you know, Eventbrite, event listing type sites. Then Google itself has a special SERP for events. So you can show up directly in a SERP if somebody’s looking for “things to do in Houston.” Well, hey, trash cleanup by Newton Crouch, whatever. Brand mentions right there in the SERP, fantastic.
Kyle Bailey: Yep. That’s it. Yeah. And you know, the best practice on that is to take three hours on a day, show up with your team. Everybody’s branded. You know, “we’re coming out here, we’re doing some work in this place.” Show pictures of it. You know, don’t pitch, just show your team out there at work, you know, and if you can do before and after, that’s even better. So yeah, that’s all—I want to connect with you on that and understand more about that. So please send me more information on that. I’ll pass that along to my people.
The AI Search Reality: Your Least Trained Customer Service Rep
Jeremy Rivera: Absolutely, would be happy to. So kind of changing tacks, we touched on it a little bit. It’s the recognition of the horse in the room. My friend Michael McDougald says, “your least trained but most popular customer support representative is ChatGPT.”
So what can you do? Is there anything specific to do aside from the best practices we’re already talking about on SEO—making sure that your story is in the content that you’re getting placed out there? Is there anything actually extra or is it really just due diligence to execute on those things to make sure that you do show up and then just doing some spot checks to see, okay, does GPT—you know, there’s other tools that are developed that you can kind of spot check whether you show up or not. It isn’t like rank tracking tools. You know, there’s a lot of ambiguity in that. So how do you balance over paranoia about showing up in those versus not doing anything specific to show up?
Kyle Bailey: It’s not mature yet. I think Pareto principle 80-20—80% of your effort should just go to just telling your story in a really clean way. And then 20% should be really strategic, tactical assets and efforts to show up in ChatGPT.
And easy way to do that is to publish a couple of blog posts a week, interlink those really well, and then see what shows up, then see what is showing up for your competition as well. So when you search your main keywords, what is showing up already? The nice thing about ChatGPT is, and all the other LLMs too, is that they’ll tell you to an extent how they arrived at getting there. Because they show you the links, they show you their sources, but that’s not necessarily the whole truth.
And I don’t mean that they’re hiding anything. I just think that we’re in the age of a maturing marketplace. I’ve got a page on our website—we just relaunched, so it’s not working right now, but all the data is there. We just have to get it cleaned up—but it goes back, I think we started late last year and almost every week we do a comparison of Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and maybe Gemini. And what we looked at is just “Chicago plumber.” And what I wanted to see was week to week, what are the changes?
And what motivated that was, I have a remodeling company in Dallas and we were dominant. We were dominant on Google. And I mean, we were probably number one for over 200 keywords. And when ChatGPT really came online as a mature force, we weren’t present at all. And it was shocking, even though at that point, ChatGPT represented such a small slice of the pie. I knew that we got something going on here that we’ve got to address. And that was over a year ago.
That’s why I say so often, you’re out of time. Because that was over a year ago. And now it’s matured more. And you can actually look through the list. Every week you can see sometimes, like week to week, it’ll be a completely different three or five pack on ChatGPT early on, but now it started to kind of settle out to be more consistent and Google is the same every week. That’s the crazy thing. You know, maybe once or twice in a year will that three-pack change in a big city like Chicago.
But back to your question, you really just have to determine your North Star has to be serving your ideal client and that’s why telling your story is so huge because you’re basically in a situation now where by the time somebody gets to your website, I say this a lot—your website’s now a vetting device rather than a discovery device because of the changes Google had already made.
Google had already moved you down in the SERP. It used to be 10 blue links and you were going to get directly found from that. Then here comes the ads. Then here comes the map. Now good grief. I mean, they seem to have done a concerted effort to jam as much stuff on there that’s not your website. You’ve got People Also Ask, you’ve got the aggregators, you’ve got Reddit, which comes and goes sometimes. But then you’ve got the featured snippet. Well, now it’s the overview. And now AI overview—kind of summaries are making their way even into the map descriptions. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but I’ve started seeing recently “this business offers this and this and this” where what it used to say was “mentions, you know, window replacement” and it would bold it.
And then when you clicked into it, it would kind of show you where they found that. But it was a direct mention, almost like a keyword match. Now it’s actually a summary. So AI is going in there and summarizing things. Because when I went into the account, I could not find that little snippet anywhere. It was nowhere on the website. It was nowhere in there.
So that’s again, I keep getting back to this thing—you’re out of time. You’re in that movie scene where the ferry’s pulling away, but the ramp’s still down and the car’s trying to jump over. That’s where you are right now. If you have not already started this process, that’s where you’re at. You’ve got to get on this because it’s a massive positioning change that you have to do. The days of optimizing for H tags and keywords are gone. You know, if it’s not part of telling your story.
Closing Thoughts and Resources
Jeremy Rivera: I love that. Thanks so much for your time. Give a shout out to your company. Is there any downloadable or—you mentioned your book. Is there anything else people should be looking out for? Are you on any particular social channel if people have questions and they want to follow up with you?
Kyle Bailey: Yeah, I’m The Kyle Bailey on LinkedIn and on Facebook and Twitter. I’m also Front Burner Marketing on Twitter. I think that’s the same, but you can just look at Front Burner Marketing on LinkedIn. Of course, my website, FrontBurnerMarketing.net. I’ve got some downloadable resources right there. The new website for the book will be up pretty soon, I would say within a few weeks. So that’ll be, you know, What’s Your Story?
But yeah, there’s some downloadable guides and we put together a pricing calculator for roofers and we’re working on one for HVAC. And so yeah, we’ve got plenty of assets. I’ve also got a pretty extensive book recommendation list that I’m updating all the time.
