what separates the businesses who are crushing it with SEO right now from the ones who are watching their traffic slowly disappear well after analyzing hundreds of websites and working with dozens of service businesses I discovered something shocking SEO has already evolved but most businesses are still optimizing for a version of search that just doesn't exist anymore and unless you change how you're doing things now your leads are going to continue to dry up that's why in this video I'm I'm going to show you the shift that's already making traditional SEO obsolete the weird thing working
for businesses right now that nobody's talking about and the exact Playbook you can use to get more leads and sales from search in 2025 even if you've never ranked for a single keyword before but to understand how search has evolved we should look at another industry that had to make a pretty hard pivot just to survive specifically what happened to restaurants during the covid shutdown so when they were all forced to close most restaurant owners panicked and did what seemed obvious right they threw their menus up on every delivery app they could find but the
fees were pretty brutal you know these apps were taking up to 30% of every order that right there put a lot of restaurants out of business within weeks but the smart restaurants like Mexico and New York they realized something had to change so instead of just accepting those crushing fees they launched their own delivery service and then something crazy happened in the very first week their orders exploded not because they had a better menu or lower prices but because they stopped trying to make their old business model work in a new world they built something
specifically designed for how people were actually ordering food now that still made the money the exact same things happening with search in 2025 except unlike the lockdowns this change isn't temporary so your potential customers are still looking for your services but they're finding them in completely different ways and just like those restaurants if you're only optimizing for an already outdated method in this case traditional Google search you're missing out on a massive opportunity let me show you exactly what I mean this is what a typical Google search looked like 5 years ago now let's do
the exact same search today and this is what you get this big AI generated answer because Google just tries to answer the question themselves now then we have a few YouTube videos then whatever this is then if you're actually lucky enough and have done all the hard work to rank number one congratulations you're still basically pushed down to page two and if you're not number one we have all this other stuff people also ask Reddit threads then here's your number two spot and God forbid your number three year after that you've got more YouTube videos
and Kora thread before we even get to the rest think about that for a second so even if you achieve those mythical you know number one through three rankings that SEO companies have been promising for years your potential customers need to scroll past Pages worth of other stuff just to find you oh and by the way that search I showed you didn't even include any ads I watched this happen to dozens of my service business owners students you know one of them is a local consulting firm they were getting around 80% of their leads from
Google search just 2 years ago they were ranking number one for their main keywords life was good then these changes started rolling out and their actual leads from Google dropped by almost 60% so this might be happening to you right now too and it isn't going back here's what's Wild though even though the leads Google was sending them went down their overall traffic stayed the same know why it's because they saw the shift coming and they adapted to it just like those smart restaurant owners who built their own delivery service they sto trying to make
their old strategy work in a new world but before I show you what they did instead we need to talk about something that's completely changing how people find businesses online it's not just that Google search isn't working like it used to people are actually getting tired of doing all the work themselves think about it when you're researching something important like finding a business to work with do you really want to Wade through 15 different websites trying to you know piece together who's actually good or would you rather have someone just tell you here are the
best three or better yet here's the single best option and here's why this is why tools like perplexity and chat GPT are exploding in popularity right now you know instead of getting a page full of links to sort through you just get an actual answer and not just any answer a recommendation right it's almost like the old when your friend or neighbor just told you who they used and you should use them too but with a 2025 twist let me show you what I mean so I just tested this myself I asked perplexity who are
the best pool builders in Austin now in the old days of Google you would just get a bunch of links to Pool Company websites maybe some Yelp reviews and you'd have to piece it all together yourself and that would just basically become your weekend project but perplexity that instantly analyzed hundreds of sources and gave me three specific recommendations complete with why each one stood out and this is where Geo comes in generative engine optimization it's about making sure when these AI tools are making recommendations your business is the one they're going to recommend and unlike
traditional SEO where you know you just stuffed some keywords on a page and hope for the best AI is way smarter than that so it's looking for things like actual proof that that you're worth recommending so how do you become that top recommendation okay so let me show you the five specific strategies that will get AI to recommend your business including one controversial hack that's actually really easy and effective first and this is absolutely foundational you need to make your website crystal clear about what you do who you help and What Makes You Different cuz
most businesses just hide behind vague jargon and you know marketing speak so let me show you what I mean here one of my students is a marketing agency and last month they had this on their homepage we partner with growing businesses to optimize their efficiency in streamline processes and of course I had no idea what that meant so I asked them to explain what they actually do in plain English like they're talking to a friend turns out they help small law firms automate their client intake process to save them time and get more cases so
we changed their homepage to say exactly that we help small law firms save 10 plus hours per week by automating their client intake process and with that one change their AI visibility shot up because now both humans and AI can instantly understand exactly who they help and how they help them that's the level of clarity that your website needs when an AI tool is trying to recommend the best business to someone it needs to know exactly what you do not Wade through fancy language trying to figure it all out out second you need to get
your business mentioned across as many trustworthy websites as possible here's why that matters AI isn't just looking at your website you know it's scanning the entire internet trying to build a really complete picture of your business it's checking how often you're mentioned what others say about you and whether you're consistently described the same way across different platforms think of it like building your business's digital reputation third and this is a super powerful way to get those mentions quickly you want to use AI optimized press releases to do it it's actually a really easy process you
just want to start with one of your best case studies that shows how you got a really good result for one of your clients and then use this specific prompt to turn that case study into an AI optimized press release you can use whichever AI writing tool you like best I personally think Claude does the best job with writing right now now the prompted s is pretty long and boring so I'm not going to read the whole thing but feel free to pause it or better yet just grab it in the description below but you're
going to run this prompt attaching your case study to it then it should give you back a really well structured press release something like this then just use a service like brand featured to distribute that press release so when you do this right that press release should get picked up by hundreds of reputable websites and because you've written it specifically to train AI each one of those mentions is teaching AI exactly why they should recommend you fourth here is that controversial hack that I promised you that's working incredibly well right now so all you got
to do is create a detailed listicle post on your own website probably as a blog post that lists the best businesses in your category with guess what you is number one now look is this spammy yes I'm not going to deny that and that's why this trick probably won't work forever you know AI will likely get smarter about this kind of self-promotion but right now it's one of the easiest and most effective shortcuts to get yourself recommended by AI tools just make sure that your comparison's actually detailed and helpful explain the real pros and cons
of different options including your competition finally number five and this one's really important you need to be religious about asking for detailed positive reviews everywhere you can because these AI tools are really heavily waiting reviews in their recommendations and they're looking everywhere you know not just Google reviews but Yelp industry specific review sites social media mentions anywhere they can find them but here's the key don't just ask for reviews right give your happy customers specific prompts like would you mind sharing what specific results you got from working with us those kind of detailed success stories
then become the perfect training data for AI to understand exactly why you're worth recommending so all of these strategies are working great right now for getting AI to recommend you but there's another platform that's becoming possibly the best search play available longterm and unlike Google it hasn't been and likely won't be affected by AI at all video is about to surpass traditional search and I'll tell you exactly why so when we look at where people are actually going for answers in 2025 YouTube isn't just the second biggest search engine anymore it's really becoming the primary
place people go to to find real wisdom not just information and what's really powerful about YouTube right now is that unlike Google the algorithm is still laser focused on showing the best content there's no AI pushing you down the page no endless amount of ads before people find you so if you make great content that actually helps people YouTube's going to show it to the Right audience and I saw this firstand working with hundreds of my service business students you know the ones who shifted their focus to YouTube are seeing 10 times the results they
used to get from Google and when I say 10 times it's not just about the number of leads it's about the quality of those leads so when someone finds you through Google you're just another search result to them right they've still still got a lot of questions and you've got a lot of selling to do but when they find you on YouTube and they watch 1 2 3 10 of your videos everything suddenly changes you're a whole lot more to them than a search result now you're someone they feel like they know and trust in
other words not only is it going to be way more sustainable to use YouTube as your primary search strategy moving forward but the leads you get from it are just so much better than the lead leads you get from Google fight me on that in the comments if you want but I know it to be true and let's not forget that Google search that I showed you from before how many YouTube videos did it show before it showed even one website link so yeah YouTube lets you double dip like that and get the same upside
from Google searches too but now let's talk about exactly what kind of content works on YouTube especially for search so start with what you already know that your clients want to learn right every time a client asks you a question that's not just a question that can be your next video topic so start building your channel by answering those frequently asked questions the ones you find yourself explaining over and over again for example if you're a business coach your clients probably ask things like how much should I charge or who should I hire first those
exact phrases can then become your video titles no clever title tricks or clickbait needed just the straightforward Search terms that people people are actually typing into YouTube and here's a small detail that makes a really big difference so you want to take that exact same phrase and use it word for word in your video description too so if your title is how much to charge for web design in 2025 your description should start with in this video I'll show you how much to charge for web design in 2025 this really simple alignment tells YouTube exactly
what your video is about and is going to help you show whenever anyone actually searches for that question once you've covered those core FAQs that's when you can graduate to how to type content so these are the step-by-step processes you use in your business financial advisors might create how to start saving for retirement in your 30s or even just how to start investing right again you want to keep those titles exactly matching what people search for so save the personality and the insights for the thumbnail and your content itself cuz hard truth is people can't
benefit from your expertise if they never find your video to begin with but Wes won't AI start taking over YouTube too the beautiful thing about video content is that while AI can summarize videos all day long people who are looking for videos aren't looking for that right an AI summary can't replace the experience of learning from a real expert sure AI might be able to give someone that quick overview of what you said in your video but but anyone who prefers that quick AI summary over actually watching your expertise in action they were never your
ideal client to begin with now the one thing we do still need to cover here is the idea of local SEO so what if you're trying to rank right here in the map listings for your local business that's kind of a different story and it can be tricky to do especially if you want to be found for Searchers across your whole service area but lucky for you I have a pretty amazing strategy for that as well but honestly it's so big that it deserves its own video so click right here and I'm going to show
you the whole thing so you can get clients in your whole service area even in towns that you're not physically present in so click here and I'm going to show you exactly what you got to do
