SEO has evolved from keyword optimization to focusing on authority, presence, and authenticity. AI-driven search engines and chatbots now recommend businesses based on signals across Google, directories, reviews, social media, and genuine job stories—not just keyword rankings.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:

Welcome to another web class masterclass, whatever you want to call these things. Every single month we do the deep dive into everything that goes on in, in the world of marketing, growing these cleaning businesses. What you need to be focused on kind of the methodologies we talk about having multiple poles in the water. What’s changing? What’s why business owners need to care. Can’t I just hand this all off to a marketing company? They just do it for me and I don’t ever have to think about it ever again. Wouldn’t that be nice? But no. We are owners of businesses.

John Clendenning [00:00:36]:

We are the marketers of the business. We have to have the core focus. Once you’re at 5 million a year with one of these cleaning businesses and beyond, you’ve got a marketing manager, stuff like that. We’ll engage with the marketing manager, that’s fine. But until you get to that enterprise level scale or small businesses even, that’s considered a small business in the world of small business. But the whole idea is if you market your company well, you will run into an operations problem that you have to learn how to solve, Right? It doesn’t just solve itself, right. And then you solve operations problems and you keep marketing operations and now you grow. Every business gets stuck in our cleaning world at very specific levels.

John Clendenning [00:01:15]:

Like right around that $250,000, one guy in a truck, sort of, you know, you might make your way all the way up to their high end clients that do the right things the way we teach and train. And that’s a stuck point because you haven’t figured out the next step. And there’s a lot of people that just get there and never move beyond that. They get sick, grandma gets sick, you know, whatever. They have to take a couple months off and they lose all of their momentum, most of their company and they’re done. So the risk is huge at that level. The next level that everybody gets stuck at is about that 550 to 650,000, right? Or say 500 to 650, that kind of window and you fluctuate around there and that’s where you’re really busy. You’re, you’re spending.

John Clendenning [00:01:57]:

If you don’t have the structure and the systems in place, you haven’t learned sort of yet. Nobody explained to you what business is. As you get to that level, you won’t move through that. You will be up and down and miserable and team issues and all this. And you just think that’s what business is, right? If that’s sort of you and you Think that’s what business is. Go listen to the podcast I just did recently with Ricardo of Carpet Monkeys in Las Vegas and Tiffany Couture Cleaners. He doesn’t live in Vegas, he doesn’t run the companies, he buys them. And he’s grown beyond most carpet cleaning and cleaning business levels already in a couple of years.

John Clendenning [00:02:32]:

He only bought Carpet Monkeys less than a year ago. Already taken it from an average job of 220 to I think we talked about 500, 600 is the average 4. 400, 500, 600 somewhere in that range is the average job now and moving up. Right. Because it’s the right systems in place. That’s what you need, right? So he, he is marketing and growing the company, building the right operation system, building the right team in there as it grows. And some people can do that really quickly. You can be a million dollar business cleaning business in one to two years if you have the, the business acum and are able to that place the rest of us, I was me included.

John Clendenning [00:03:04]:

You have to learn what you don’t know and you have to push, push, push on marketing and sales. Marketing. Marketing generates sales conversations. Sales conversations generates ideal clients. We’re going to talk about a lot of this today as it relates to the new SEO reality. So today’s conversation is one of these pieces where this is something that is changing massively in our world because of AI. If you’ve been following these, you know how much I’ve been harping on and droning on how AI is changing everything around us. If you followed the kind of the beginning of the year trainings, if not, go back and watch them, you know the, the worry, the scared 25% like or sorry, but within the next year, 12 to 24 months, the vast majority of cleaners will not be in business anymore because they haven’t figured this out.

John Clendenning [00:03:50]:

This is one of those things we’re going to talk about today that they haven’t figured out. The other one is who should you be targeting? That’s part of this as well, but it’s part of all of what we, we are helping with now even more so than ever. The reason why Jeff Cross from CleanFax magazine and I are getting on calls on a regular basis going, ah, everybody is scared. If it hasn’t quite affected your local market yet, haven’t quite affected you yet. One of two things is true. You’ve either built a really good business to the right consumers that still have job security in their brain and have money like high oil, gas prices, high interest Rates high, you know, all that kind of stuff isn’t affecting them or you know, you’ve built it into the right place or you’re just currently lucky because you’re in a little bit of an insulated area that hasn’t seen the writing on the wall yet. Everywhere else it’s already starting, it’s already showing up in the news, it’s already showing up everywhere that the middle class is getting worried again. Like 2008, 9, 10, recession, they’re going, oh crap, oh crap, we better not go, go out for dinner every Friday night, honey, we better not go on that vacation, we better not clean our carpets or that sort of messaging.

John Clendenning [00:04:58]:

We had better sit tight because I’m a little worried. And that worry and that fear creates a self perpetuating problem because it’s not just one or two people doing it becomes 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100, a thousand. A community, a country, right? And that’s what’s happening right now. So what we want to talk about is where the opportunities lie when everybody else is scared.

John Clendenning [00:06:07]:

So we’re going to talk about the new SEO reality for, for cleaners, how AI and chat recommendations have changed everything forever. Let me put myself up in the top corner there. There I am, right? So and what you can do about it because this is forever, this is, this is a forever change, right? What’s happening right now is, is, is, is, is getting more evasive, more involved, not less. Google’s changing their algorithms more, not less. The whole world of what you need to be doing to stand out, become the best known cleaner as we talk about is changing more, not less and faster than ever before. I was just hopping we were a little bit late because two things were happening. One, I was talking to Srika and we’re having a little bit of a conversation and a laugh about something. But I was also talking to my chief of staff, digital EA chief of staff called Carrie.

John Clendenning [00:07:01]:

That’s on my telegram that I built through Claude code that manages all my calendars, my inbox to inbox zero puts things in front of Me pays my bills. Like I’ve just more and more and more things I have added to this, this AI agent, because that’s available now. Wasn’t three months ago. Right. Knowing a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and leaning into it. Well, that’s just me. Right. Okay.

John Clendenning [00:07:26]:

You say, John, you’re, you’re kind of geek out in this stuff. Cool. But we’re also being asked by business after business after business to help them. I’m on different podcasts. I’m on the AI Marketing experts podcast. We’re getting reached out to all the time about, hey, can you build that for us? Right? They, they need that too. So what does that mean in a world where maybe there are certain people on, you know, employees at their company that they, they don’t need these individuals anymore. Maybe they, you know, things are changing all the time.

John Clendenning [00:07:56]:

Right. So. And part of this things are changing is not going more digital. What it is is as things go more AI and digital AI is trying to look for authenticity. We’ll talk about that today. You have to be more real and more human. Keep the human in the loop. So let’s see what that’s all about.

John Clendenning [00:08:13]:

Let’s have that conversation today. Hopefully you can lean in and get some ideas what it means, make it practical, what you can actually do to make this happen. Right. Let’s double check here. Hey, and we got some sack on the call. Hey, some sack. Thanks for jumping on other people as well. Just make sure.

John Clendenning [00:08:32]:

As long as you can hear me, all that kind of stuff. I think you can hear me. Well, Sirika hasn’t piped in and said she can’t yet, so that’s probably a good sign. And we’ll get rolling. Okay. To do the whole turn off your cell phones, turn off Facebook, home service company, cleaning company. This is a serious 60, 70, 80 minutes. We’re going to cover the great divide.

John Clendenning [00:08:54]:

How AI and conversational search has transformed our world, transformed SEO. It’s the new search ecosystem. What’s needed now to win in the search everywhere optimization? Get rid of search engine. There’s no engine anymore. There’s no engines. It’s search everywhere optimization. The new search everywhere optimization formula. Out are keywords in is omnipresence and authority.

John Clendenning [00:09:23]:

0 click search. Why SEO matters more with less customer clicks. Right. Weird paradox right now. Just talking to a fellow the other day, runs a decent company in Virginia, I believe it was, and had his office manager and technician manager on the call as well. And we’re talking and Their website is old, it’s not ranking anymore at all. And every single service has a page under area rugs, for example, for every single one of the cities and towns and everything else they do the old, the old way, that’s way old. But the old way of just stuffing a website with very thin, light content and the only thing you changed was the name of the city.

John Clendenning [00:10:07]:

And the pages are pretty much the same and there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them and that’s useless now. In fact, they’re all, they are invisible. I showed them that they have less than, you know, 50, 60 people coming to their entire website in a month when it should be thousands in their area. They should dominate across organic search. Even as less people click and come through, the people that do should be far more likely to buy. And the AIs that come through need to see the right things as well. Okay, who am I if you haven’t listened before? So I’ve been in cleaning business since high school, started a window cleaning company, went on the road with a band at night and jumped over the store side of 40 story buildings during the daytime. And I’ve owned cleaning businesses ever since.

John Clendenning [00:10:54]:

So carpet cleaning, janitorial made services just kept buying and expanding and growing. Started in my young 20s, didn’t know what I didn’t know. Got out of the truck within the first year and a half, was doing $10,000 a month in a town of 30,000 people within, you know, the first 24 months just by having to learn how to do this. Because yeah, I hit the road with a band and, and did window cleaning. I didn’t go to college, I didn’t. I had to figure this all out, right? I’ve spoken on stages around the world, been flown to the island of Samoa. I systemized business, I ran coaching programs, I helped franchise networks grow like crazy while running my own cleaning businesses. Because I got it down to a system where I was maybe needed in the company five hours a week and I had a lot of free time and I started coaching programs and helping other things and eventually my marketing services and eventually sold off all the businesses and one by one by one and, and that, and, and came in all in on this to help the cleaning industry do what they need to do.

John Clendenning [00:11:55]:

So I wrote the book on it. There’s a new book coming out soon, it’s almost done. I keep saying that, but it is all about how AI has changed everything in, in, in the cleaning world. And I’m trying to keep it future focused enough because it cha. Everything changes so fast that there’s. I’ve done a couple rewrites to say, hey, overarching concepts that won’t be different in a year or two from now. Right. So that the book is relevant.

John Clendenning [00:12:18]:

This one’s still relevant. Internet marketing for carpet cleaners. It talks about the nuts and bolts in the core, which we’ll talk a little bit about here as well. But yeah, obviously cleanfax magazine and on stage with other people that, you know, stuff like that. There’s, you know, our good friend Dusty Roberts, Mark Sager, all that kind of stuff. So, yep, in the industry, do what you guys do. One of you guys, right? More importantly, these guys, we help these guys grow, dominate, expand, and not worry about the changes going on around them because they learn. Some of them are part of the coaching program.

John Clendenning [00:12:54]:

Some of them are like our clients are all, almost all clients of ours. All those are clients of ours, but also part of the coaching program, learning the pieces that the whole growth partner relationship that we have done together, marketing so that there’s things that you do, things that we do, build your foundation, expand upon it and grow properly. There’s no magic. It’s not magic. It’s proper marketing done the right way with the right amount of investment in at the right things at the right time. There is a formula for this and. And most people don’t know it, period. It’s just the reason why 15% of small businesses, home service businesses, ever make it to even half a million.

John Clendenning [00:13:31]:

So if you’re there, wow, you’re part of a small rarefied crowd already, right? That’s that 500 to $650,000 ceiling, right. Once you figure out what that is and the cause of that ceiling getting to a million is that next level and that, that level, that, that 80, $90,000 a month level, that’s only 0.5%. But interestingly, of all of that 4.5% that make it to there, a large majority make it to 2, 3, 5 million and beyond. And they get bought out for multiples of that and can retire out whenever they want and get, get, you know, private equity and bigger companies take them over to add resources to them, right? So buy smaller companies, sell yours to a bigger company, you know, go golfing. So what we do is we help make our clients top cleaning brand in their local marketplace. So you attract the best clients, the only ones around right now with money, you are able to chop the charge, the top rates. They don’t care about paying $1,500 to get carpets and tile cleaned in the house today. Talking to Carl, the guy that bought my business with the cruise, and he just, he was just talking about one of the clients.

John Clendenning [00:14:42]:

He was waiting for a check to come in the mail because the guy ran it through his business, but rightfully so, he entertains in his home a little bit. But it was pet stains, pet urine, and it was a $3,000 urine recovery, right? Because it saved 30, $40,000 worth of carpet from being replaced and done properly with the full guarantee. Done well, people will pay, right? Because to that person that’s, that’s an easy, an easy fix, right? So at that income level, it’s not a problem. So. And then you get booked out weeks in advance. So how do we do this? Three principles of omnipresence. You have to be the most, again, what we call the best known cleaner, right? So we’re talking about having that, that omnipresence in your marketplace that is integrated with everything else. So integrative omnipresence marketing.

John Clendenning [00:15:35]:

So everything works together. When they see the yard sign and the door hangers and the bottles of spot remover and the QR code on the side of the van, that starts an AI chat that then puts, puts them in your room. They see happy customer stories and they know you from around town. And then your website is getting more traffic and then your Google paid ads are getting more traffic and then your return on investment for everything you do. Marketing works better and better and better because Rising Tide lifts all ships. There is no one. I just want Facebook ads to grow my company. That’s not a strategy.

John Clendenning [00:16:09]:

That’s not a strategy. So one, you want to maximize your opportunity to generate qualified leads. Talk about this every single time. Maximize your opportunity, all of your potential qualified inquiries, your ideal customer avatar. Who’s your best target customer? It’s not everybody. It’s the right people, the right businesses. Who are they? Right, they clump together. They, they share same same values and things and they’re in the same types of places, in the same little groups and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:16:40]:

And there’s ways to get in front of them. And you want to maximize those opportunities by being in front of them at every one of those places. As your business grows, you invest the same percentage in marketing, but that dollar amount grows. And as that dollar amount grows, you have more ability to show up online and offline and in the right ways. So it’s again, it’s just a formula. You want to also maximize your brand impressions. If they’ve seen you 20 times as Google’s Zero Moment of Truth says. Zmot, you’re in their Dunbar numbers.

John Clendenning [00:17:11]:

Jason, not Jason Priestley. Oh my gosh, Daniel Priestley. Really good guy to follow about business and stuff like that. Daniel Priestley talks about Dunbar numbers and what that all that is is people can only remember so much stuff and you have to impress upon them, right? It’s about 1200 things that people can remember like faces and names like before it kind of all slips, right? So they know their family, they know, you know, maybe the make of their car things dumb our numbers, right? They don’t know you unless you’re maximizing your brand impressions and creating a brand positive sentiment. So the look, the feel, the sounds and the, you know, the humanics as we call it and the mechanics. You want to make sure you have all that right. Again, learned all this stuff to run a better carpet cleaning company from, from, you know, stood on the shoulder of giants and learned all this stuff and then started teaching it and building it. Because this is the stuff you need to know, right? You want to also maximize your conversions.

John Clendenning [00:18:08]:

It’s not okay to generate, to do marketing, to generate an inquiry. The inquiry needs to be sold, converted. And that’s, you know, marketing generates the right people. The better you market, the more right people show up to see, to learn more. The conversion happens by better scripts, better follow up, staying in touch, sharing happy customer stories again and again and again and again and again over time. And those can sit until they’re ready to buy. Not everybody’s ready to buy today. That’s a, that’s a fallacy, right? So you want to make sure that they’re ready to, when they’re ready to buy, they still remember who you are because they won’t remember you, right? You’re not in their Dunbar numbers.

John Clendenning [00:18:48]:

You’re not one of their, the things they remember and lock in. Even your existing clients don’t remember you. You need to stay in touch with your clients. That is your biggest opportunity once you get them. So we’re going to go to the front end and find out. Does SEO even matter in 2026? Do you need to worry about, you know, where you show up in organic? So what, what is SEO like? Organic rankings was used, used to be where we all talked about, right? So it used to be that, you know, you would get, you’d have the business would be coming from organic rankings below the maps. People would search readers are leaders, they would read content. They.

John Clendenning [00:19:28]:

That’s also where Yelp and home advisors and anybody else who wanted to try and sell you leads would rank. They’d spend a lot of money trying to rank for keyword terms, search terms, all those different phrases people use. And you know, if, if I type in carpet cleaners near me and you typed in carpet cleaning near me, that’s two different searches. Different maps show up, different businesses show up underneath because they were optimizing for those. That was all these were search engine optimization, right? Then you had your Google Maps, you had your Facebook paid ads, Google AdWords, local service ads mix into that and, and stuff like that and social media content, right? And you would get a good mix, right? The new reality, the great divide, is AI and conversational search has transformed all of this. So now when people are thinking and searching, they’re doing that not necessarily in the same places they did before. They’re not typing in carpet cleaning near me like they were trained to do that, right? It was, you know, first they would type in the service and the city. Then they realized near me started to work better because maps would show up and stuff, stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:20:39]:

So now they did that. And you know, every SEO company go, oh, look where you rank for, for your carpet cleaning Phoenix. If you actually did a keyword search, the number of people that searched that term that way was very low. But they ranked you number one for that and you go, thank you. It’s how many calls did you get? What was the traffic? What was the roi? That was the important stuff, right? Are you being seen in the right places? Can you connect those dots? The great divide now is it’s conversational sucks part of it because people are going, you know what chat? My, my dog peed on the carpet last night and this is like the 20th time. And I’ve tried everything. The vinegar, the, this not working. I’m gonna need somebody who can actually get the urine out properly and save the carpet.

John Clendenning [00:21:24]:

Who would you recommend? That’s the new search and every, every iteration of that and every other way to say that a million times over, right? So there’s no longer keywords, it’s all intent, right? So this is what customers were see, are, are not. Are what. What customers are not seeing anymore is the layout like this. There is no make a search term Denver carpet cleaning. See the local service ads, then the pay per click ads, then the Google Maps and then the organic, right? And it used to be that about 15 of people stopped there, another 10 or so 12 here, about 30 there, and a whole 50 of the people made it down to here to see the 10 best in Yelp and the three best rated and what companies just for that one term. And again this mixed and mixed and mixed and mixed and mixed. And that’s what you used to see. Right.

John Clendenning [00:22:19]:

So again, we used to get 73% of the clicks roughly or happening in the organic sections, the maps and the organic. Outside of the paid. A lot of you? Oh, I don’t, I don’t worry about that. I just want to run paid ads. Okay. You’re running paid ads to a small percentage of the people that are searching today that skip those entirely. Right. That’s what the game used to be.

John Clendenning [00:22:42]:

So. And then again, the first five listings, it’s only 67. That was the other one was all 10. But the first five, the three here in the first five, even less. Search behavior is shifting now. There’s no scrolling, no comparing, just recommendations. AI is popping up Google AI mode is popping up Google like so the full AI mode. Sometimes you search and you don’t even realize you’re not even in the search environment where you’re literally dropped right into AI mode.

John Clendenning [00:23:17]:

You actually have to hit at the top and go to all to get out of it. That’s where Google took you without you asking, and it gave you an AI answer that’s baked in with some information from websites and content and sentiment and stuff like that. Or you get the Gemini at the top, the answering the questions and the businesses that it relates to. And now Google’s putting ads in there. So if you’re not running paid ads as well, you’re not having the content, all that kind of stuff, you’re just not getting recommended. And that’s before any again, even the recommendations include your Google Maps rankings. But it’s also, it’s, it’s not just using Google Maps to do that. This is not just a keyword search.

John Clendenning [00:23:54]:

This is not just a oh, whoever’s first in Google Maps if they’d searched right now, right? So top random recommended carpet cleaners in Denver would come up with a whole different search. If you’re not being recommended, you don’t exist to the new people who go to Google or the people that go to ChatGPT and don’t even ever go to Google or are now starting to use Claude or Manus or any of these other tools as well. There’s a lot of them and they’re all starting to get baked into other tools and apps and GPSs and stuff like that. Right. So it’s all about how are these tools recommending you? So yes, SEO still matters, but it’s changed. It matters because that’s how you get recommended search everywhere optimization. You have to feed the engine, the beast with the real right stuff and we’re going to talk about what that is. So the rules of visibility are completely different now.

John Clendenning [00:24:46]:

And most businesses, here’s your opportunity, wide open opportunity. I talk to businesses all day, every day, folks looking for our carpet cleaning market master services and they’re noticing we’ve got people that are down 50% in the last year. We’ve got people that have stalled like crazy and don’t know what’s happening, are trying every door mail right now and this or that and you know, they’ve got a very, very minor marketing budget. They think marketing should be about 5% of their revenue and they have, they’re targeting the wrong people and their half million dollar business. Four or five $600,000 businesses are about to fall off a cliff and they, they know something’s different, but they don’t know what. Right? And this is one of those things. Most businesses are still playing the wrong game. So there is an opportunity right now, a short window, but this window isn’t like the next year.

John Clendenning [00:25:35]:

It’s months, right? So the new SEO reality is your website, your Google Maps and your AI recommendations, they’re all part of the same ecosystem. They all are necessary and need the right attention so that you do get recommended. And some of the people that are interested do make it to your website a lot less. But that’s where, that’s how they got recommended. And we’re going to talk about why the content is more important than ever before. Content is more important than ever before, even with less people seeing it at the front end. So yes, SEO still drives calls, but not alone anymore. Customers find you across multiple platforms before they ever call you, right? So it’s not just about rankings, it’s about signals.

John Clendenning [00:26:33]:

Your website needs to have topical depth. We’re going to talk about what this means, not keywords. Let’s just get rid of the whole idea of keywords. It doesn’t matter where you rank for keywords. If you go look at your own website, I typed in my keywords and I’m ranking on page four. Okay. You, you’re the only one that typed in your keywords this month, year, right? Your presence is really critical, right? So shows a little Google Map there. But your presence is much, much deeper than Google Maps.

John Clendenning [00:27:06]:

Your presence is treat AI as just a really super fast real person. If they looked everywhere, if a real person looked everywhere to see what people are saying about you, um, and where and why and how and you know, were you in the newspaper when you’re flipping hamburgers or pancakes at the local charity auction, we doing this like all of those things, like how grandpa ran a business. As I always say, what’s old is new again, right? That presence, if that’s being picked up properly and you’re giving the trust and engagement signals that you have, the experience now you’re dominating because you’re getting seen here and you’re getting, you’re driving people to where, how that all feeds in and that’s how it should be. This is the authentic, this isn’t the game. This is the authentic authenticity that we’ve talked about, right? So what we’re talking about is the three core signals. Your authority. Are you seen as the best option by real people and AI? Are you being talked about in the real world and online? You got presence across platforms. Do you exist everywhere your customers and AI are looking? This isn’t a game.

John Clendenning [00:28:23]:

You definitely need to be in all the right directories and stuff like that, but are you actually authentic? This doesn’t mean more time and actually you can probably do this with a lot less time than you’ve ever thought before, but you need to be doing it right and doing it well, right? And experience, do you, do users trust and engage with you? Is that obvious? Right? Are you getting feedback and reviews not just on Google, but everywhere? And are you answering them? Are you sharing out something from over here to over there? Are you building your reputation on, Are you marketing your reputation? That shows trust signals, Happy customer stories shows trust signals. We’ll talk about all of that, right? So authority is what gets you chosen, right? So you want to dominate topics to get recommended everywhere, right? So that whole idea, like for example, like think of this where used to have like a page on your website, carpet Cleaning City, right? That’s keyword search. And you would link to that page, you would have dribble content on it, maybe a couple paragraphs and you, you know, if, if you worked with an SEO company, they’d probably put more paragraphs on it and a little bit more structure and stuff like that make it, you know, kind of rank. Well, even if the human didn’t like it, that doesn’t, that’s not a thing anymore. Now is Google still going to look at that page as part of an entity? Like they’re ranking your entity, they’re ranking you, but they’re ranking you on a topic, right? So all of the prices and deep cleaning and pet stain removal and area rug cleaning and wool and odor and you know, tile and grout would be part of your cleaning, your main, your main topic. But in carpet cleaning, you know, how often to clean, how to get rid of pet stains, what are the drying times, what is hot water extraction versus low moisture like? And you got to own all of that topical relevance, right? So that’s what I mean by more content than ever before. You need, you need to have content hitting your website at least once a week. You need to have content hitting your Google business profile at least once a day nowadays, right? You need content and topical relevance and you need to tie the two together.

John Clendenning [00:30:30]:

And you need to have your primary services and your secondary services all laid out properly on your website and that kind of stuff. And you need to have it done in the right way with what they call schema codes and internal linking and all these other sort of technical things. You need to have that. You can’t just go to wix and build a website, right? You can’t even just go to Google or GoDaddy and say, oh, they got the new AI website builder. Oh, that looks pretty. I’ve now got a website, right? Yeah, that’s a pretty website. Does it work? You can have a pretty brochure and a pretty door hanger and a pretty, you know, postcard going out into the marketplace. But if it doesn’t create sales, if it’s not part of an ecosystem, if it’s not part of a series, if it doesn’t have a great, you know, the right presence and make the person feel the right way and create the right emotions and all of that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:31:21]:

It was just pretty. Marketing’s not pretty. Marketing is about getting into people’s minds and building and building and building. Entering a conversation that the person is already having in their heads. That’s Robert Collier from the Robert Collier Letter book. You know, you want to be entering a conversation that’s already going on in their heads. That’s what marketing is. And then you enter it in the right way and they go, oh, they know me, they get me, right? That’s not three rooms in the hall for 99 on a flyer.

John Clendenning [00:31:47]:

That’s not know me get me. That’s definitely not know me get me into, you know, golf course road neighborhoods and condos overlooking the, the river. Somebody’s cleaning those. If it’s you, well done. If it’s not you, somebody’s cleaning those and they’re doing it by marketing it differently. And you’ve got to become an authority on the Topic to be seen on the Internet and to be, get to get recommended, right? So you know, we’re talking about one solid service main page, but with a lot of supporting variant pages, right? That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about also having job proof. So we call it project Capture stories.

John Clendenning [00:32:23]:

Happy customer stories in our world where you’re actually taking real authentic pictures, telling a real deep story about a customer interaction, sharing on your website, sharing it on your Google Maps, sharing on your social media, putting it out into the world, you know, next door, things like that, and really creating those stories that get picked up by AI, by real people, get engagement, all that kind of stuff, right? So you want to have that, you want to have neighborhoods woven into the conversation point of interests, those, those kinds of things as well. So if you clean something that you know, the city hall or the, you know, the museum that everybody knows of or whatever, the stadium, right? Take the picture, share the story, talk about it, you’re becoming an authority for the area and the services you do. If you don’t, you’re invisible, right? So depth beats keywords. Customers in AI want they trust complete answers, right? So the FAQs, here’s the questions people ask, and here’s how I answer it. Even when you’re writing articles, blog content, it’s better to have your, Your secondary, or H2S as they call it, secondary headings and smaller third headings, questions where the first line after that is answering the question in as part of the paragraph and the, and the structure, right? So that question and answer, question and answer makes you become an authority. If it’s just, you know, AI chat, GPT dribble, it doesn’t. If it’s real answers like you can use AI to help structure and format, but you have to have a real person and real stories. That reminds me of when I was cleaning, Mrs.

John Clendenning [00:33:59]:

Jones or you know, our technicians did this or whatever. You have to have that, that real authenticity in there. It drives visibility, coverage, creates visibility. You must own more topics. So carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning, tile cleaning and all the variants around it, PET stain removal, low moisture versus hot water extractions and, and you know, if, do you do them all? Do you do one service over another? Do you have a, you know, a position on that? Explain it, explain your position. Your unique and compelling sales proposition. That is your uniqueness, right? You want to appear everywhere. Authority spreads across platforms, Google Maps, AI, organic from the same signals.

John Clendenning [00:34:49]:

These aren’t separate anymore, they’re not siloed anymore. All of it is now because AI is so fast and so authentic and so so good at combining stuff really, really well that there’s. We don’t need to spoon feed anymore. We the. The. The algorithms with oh, here’s my backlink, here’s my this sure they still have a place, they still help good quality backlinks still create a vote. But again that’s a manipulation source that the Google can use AI more and more and more to just cut away all the manipulation sources because it can be a lot as it’s rolling out and being more trained, it can be way, way more authentic. So hopefully that makes sense so far is that you really want to make sure that you want to dominate a topic.

John Clendenning [00:35:37]:

You want to build trust with real stories and real reviews and real recommendations and real conversations and you want everything to connect. You want to make sure that all of those connection points are on your website. So if you’re like an entity authority, so about us pages become really, really important on your website for SEO because you want to be seen as an entity authority. Your authorship becomes really, really important. So the blog post being authored properly by somebody who’s got a LinkedIn profile who also is IICRC certified and like now you’re creating authorship entity. Right? So there’s only like with a marketing company, even with our clients there’s only so much we can do. We know how to do all of this and we know how to do it better than anybody else. We have a depth of this that is is built from real world experience in the cleaning industry, real world marketing experience.

John Clendenning [00:36:32]:

Why AI is trying to now, you know, prevent the gamesmanship and do it right and all of that stuff. But that’s why we we talked with about our clients as being we’re growth partners with them. They have a role to play. You own your company, you have a role to play. When when somebody says hey, if you’ve got your IIC or certification, can you send us the link to the the page? Have you paid your dues? You got a link for that? Like are you a member of the chamber of commerce? Have you gone to the charity auction? Did you do the home show this year, the home and garden show? Did you get put in the guide and on the website can like all of that stuff gets shared, gets put on websites, get put on social media, gets tied together and everything connects. Everything connects. So your marketing company should know how to do all of this their parts and help connect with your part. And part of what we do is we take all of that information.

John Clendenning [00:37:23]:

And we train like, almost like my AI carry that I talk about. We, we train an AI command center to know that whole story and history and be authentic in everything we do. So we still got humans in the loop, but we’re more authentic and we can do more when we’re being agentic as well. Right. So trust signals decide who gets recommended. Google calls it this eat, but it really just means trust. Right? AI doesn’t rank, doesn’t rank pages anymore. It selects trust options.

John Clendenning [00:37:55]:

Right? So real experience, proof of real work, pictures of real jobs, not just the before and after. I’m draining actual stories of real customers and real work and before, during, with real team members in the pictures. You can make AI pictures. Yeah, but the more authentic, the more real, the more that that picture was geotagged on a cell phone, you know, two towns over doing tile and grout cleaning. Now you talk about tile and grout cleaning. You got a geotag of a latitude and longitude over there. The Internet AI picks all that up and puts it all together and goes, oh yes, they must do that. And oh, by the way, I’ve got these people on social media talking about they’re in this private Facebook group and they’re recommended for this.

John Clendenning [00:38:34]:

And it ties it all together, right? Consistent authority recognized across multiple touch points. It’s not all just one thing. And presence across platforms. If you don’t look trusted, you don’t get recommended. You’re invisible, period. So you build it authentically with a growth partner or learning the stuff, figuring it all out. But ideally your best job is to go out the door, land more customers, build more relationships, take the pictures, have the systems in place and hand it off to somebody who knows how to put it all together, stay on top of it as it changes. Right? So visibility happens long before the click.

John Clendenning [00:39:18]:

Well before the click. All of this stuff here, keywords don’t matter, visibility matters, authority matters long before you ever get recommended. And then when you get recommended, then they click to learn more, then they, they’re hyper, hyper, hyper interested in you and they end up on your website. So out is keywords, in is omnipresence and authority like we’ve been talking about. If you go back, geez, I don’t know how many episodes are on in this webinar. Five years or more I’ve talked about omnipresence for most of them. It was always important for growth because real people can find you now. It’s essential.

John Clendenning [00:39:56]:

Critical AI is just caught up to real, the games don’t matter. And Work anymore. Having, you know, hey, Cincinnati homeowners, I’m going to do something crazy on Facebook, right? Well, that’s that, that’s all that tactic, you know, I can show a carpet that’s black and then a wand going over it, making it look super clean. And I’m going to get a lot of Facebook leads. That’s not running a company. Sorry. Your best Facebook ads are actually talking about happy customers and authority that the customers in the right neighborhoods that spent 1, 2, 3,000 dollars getting their house cleaned with you. Right now you’re targeting the right people with the right store.

John Clendenning [00:40:35]:

Oh my gosh, they clean for people like me. None of those people have black carpet, didn’t have a boyfriend with a motorcycle that drove them or rolled the motorcycle down the hallway every night because he didn’t want to get stolen. And then you had to clean the blackout. That’s not them. You targeted the wrong people just by having a, you know, you know, an ad that works best for Groupon. Three rooms in a hall for $99. And the next time they’ll call somebody else. That’s not building a business.

John Clendenning [00:41:00]:

And the new search ecosystem knows that. So what changed? Behind the scenes search used to reward best optimized pages. Now the most reinforced businesses page structure. Content still matters, but it matters in the ecosystem of how everything is put together. So what this looks like, you know what reinforcement looks like. You want to have great content that expands all the time. Google posts every single week. Content on your website every single week, like Google posts every day is ideal social media content going out regularly.

John Clendenning [00:41:40]:

You want to have press releases. We love press releases going out to newswires because they get picked up. Well written, well, they’re the right authority signal. Then you know, we put for our clients a media room on their website that turns their website into a media source. So we wireframe it in from our media hub. So it’s got all the right code and technology and stuff like that. So we’re tying the website in into news and then getting those news articles picked up as news. So it’s not SEO, it’s not content for the website.

John Clendenning [00:42:10]:

It is actually a signal source. You’ve got reviews and syndicating those reviews and mentions and engagement because AI is going to validate all of that right content depth we talked about. You want to own the topic, not the pages. You want to have topical depth, topical authority clusters as they call it. You want to have, you want to be deep on a topic and you want to have extra pages about that. Topic and you want to have happy customer stories about that topic. And you want to have social media posts about that topic. You want to have Google Maps posts about that topic.

John Clendenning [00:42:41]:

You want to just be topic deep, right? And then another topic and then another topic. That’s how you’re going to start showing up and being seen as an authority for carpet cleaning, then upholstery cleaning, then area rug cleaning. You want to keep expanding as you grow. You know, percentage of revenue goes towards marketing. As you grow, you’ve got more dollars to put towards your marketing. You got more ability to add more of this topic of relevance. But you can always do it just by on the job. Take pictures, tell stories, create a whole page about it and share it out.

John Clendenning [00:43:14]:

That’s a good starting point. Good, better, best. That’s a good starting point. Platform presence is really important as well. So again, on Google, on maps, on social, on reviews, you, you want to be everywhere. So when we audit folks that are interested in our services, we typically find that they have a local share of voice in the range of about 10 to 15%. What does that mean? They’re not on any platforms that they need to be on. They have not gotten on the carpet cleaning, specific known source of directories and citation sources, the local ones that their competitors or maybe other business leaders in the marketplace have that.

John Clendenning [00:43:56]:

Maybe the competitors haven’t figured it out yet. Nobody’s ever done a competitor audit to see what, what, what directories and citations the competitors are on. That’s what social platforms, all that. Because I’ve got people going, oh, I don’t want to be on X, John. I don’t want to be on Instagram, John. And it’s like, okay, I don’t care. Like you can say no, you can tell me that, you know, we can post for you, we can do it right, so that you get the right signals from the right platforms, right? So that the presence is there whether you want to or not. You can have it done for you properly so that you show up everywhere.

John Clendenning [00:44:38]:

That way you get more calls and better clients and grow your business. So is the answer I don’t want to be on, on Instagram or I don’t want to grow my business, John? Like, hard to tell sometimes, right? So you want to make sure you have those authority signals. We’ve got clients that we have to fight tooth and nail for them to go out and actually get feedback and reviews. If you go back to one of our previous sessions on, on reputation growth and marketing, it’s not about hounding People for Google reviews, you don’t need 952 Google reviews. What you need is a feedback and review cadence that keeps up, that tells the right story, that’s about the right things. You know, has some, some people are taking pictures because they’re local service guides. And you, you, you do a great job. You look great, you smell great, you’re great in the community, everybody knows you, you’re being shared around.

John Clendenning [00:45:37]:

And then you ask for feedback and, and you ask for reviews and you make it a natural function, not a give me a review and I’ll give you $10 off your next cleaning. Don’t tell anyone. That’s not, that’s not the way to do it. You want engagements and mentions as well. All signals combined to create a trusted choice. Not, it’s not review hounding. That’s not a thing. And it doesn’t make you rank better in Google Maps.

John Clendenning [00:46:01]:

By the way, the guy with 950 reviews, he’s going, why is the guy under me only got 25 reviews and he still shows up. There’s a whole different story to that. So anyways, authority is not built on pages. It’s built on ownership of topics. Core service ownership. You are clearly associated with your primary service, your surrounding content. You answer related questions your customers actually have about other things around that topic. Can you get red dye out of a, you know, a wool area? Right.

John Clendenning [00:46:35]:

It’s a good topic, right? Can you remove musty odors right out of cotton upholstery? These are, these are surrounding topics that are all relevant as well. So local relevance signals. Your content reflects real service area jobs and context. We do not do stock photos. We don’t. And we don’t do fake AI photos on your main page of your website. If you got a little sort of corner of the Internet somewhere and you really think that you need a fake AI picture, be farther ahead to have like a lifestyle pic, you know, a living room or an area rug in a nice home or something like that. But ideally on your main core pages and everywhere you are, you want to have real authentic images and more of them.

John Clendenning [00:47:27]:

Again, that’s one of the reasons why we do what we call happy customer stories. We want our project capture stories. We want our clients to give us images of jobs because not all of them can be used as a story, but the images can be used in a lot of, a lot of places to be really provide local relevance, right? So you can put your van parked in front of a monument, write a little story about the monument and the van and clients in the area and stuff like that. And there you go, you got some local relevance, a real story, real authentic, all that kind of stuff as well. There’s ways to kind of do this that is real, but you know. And do you need to be involved in it? No. With a good marketing company, you have those conversations, right? You feed what they want, they provide this, the writing and content services and the coding and the schema and the linking and all that kind of stuff because they know what that means. And you’ve just go out and do your job and provide the right information.

John Clendenning [00:48:20]:

So connected, connected, contact, structure, everything links together. Kind of just keep talking about that, right? So the more complete your coverage, the stronger your authority. Website’s no longer just a page, it’s proof of credibility. So you want a clarity of offer. Customers instantly understand what you do. So right, when people arrive at your website, think of each page, but think of your main page of your website. The first thing is, can I trust these guys? Can you build trust at the top? Right? Is there a statement you can put at the top that makes them go, huh? And it’s not like 100% money back guarantee, right? We’re the best. No, no.

John Clendenning [00:48:57]:

Can you give them an actual risk reversal statement that makes them feel good and back that up, Right? You want to have real world proof, who are the real people that run the business? Why should they choose you? Answer that question right away. Why you should choose us, right? So this is not just great website conversion, it’s also great SEO, it’s also great optimization, right? So engagement signals. Cause like visitors scroll down your page and you’re giving them the right thing. Some people I’ve had a conversation with a gentleman. He was a, ran a carpet cleaning company, was a college professor. John, these magic websites that everybody talks about, I don’t believe them at all. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a magic website. He was also trying to build a business and never got it off the ground being a hobby.

John Clendenning [00:49:43]:

And he built his own website on wix. Didn’t believe in magic websites, right? And it’s not magic, it’s human psychology. You would think a college professor would have a little bit of understanding about that. Didn’t get it was kind of arrogant enough to think that, you know, none of that mattered. You know, all we need is more leads and that’s never a thing. You need to build real authentic connections. You need to nurture those connections and you need to honor your database. So your websites, your SEO needs to Be talking to that right crowd at all times and it all becomes part of the everything, everything all at once marketing, right? Omnipresence.

John Clendenning [00:50:25]:

You want a structured presence, clean layout, fast loading, mobile friendly, all that kind of stuff. So you know, you do need content, you do need to be telling the right stories and stuff like that. So it’s not just picture, picture, picture, but it wants to, you need to be nice and clean and fresh in that mix, right? So when it’s done well, you’ve got clean layouts, you’ve got ranking well, you’ve got organic, you’ve got all that kind of stuff, right? Authority signals off site. You want to claim and optimize all your, your Google listing for sure, but build out high quality citations as well. You want to make sure that all the directory, citation reviews, social profiles, brand mentions, local business references, what they call structured entity signals and unstructured signals. All of this like that’s even, that’s why we do the press releases. You end up with all these structured and unstructured signals coming back around the web saying these guys are great, these guys are great. IICRC certifications, National Air Duct Cleaning association link on their, on their website.

John Clendenning [00:51:24]:

Over to you. This Carpet and Rug Institute, Issa, Jeff Cross call them up, right? Join the Issa, have these signals, right? Build lots of high quality business citations that have the exact same name, address, phone number and have it anchored on your website. Have the right, the number of websites I check that don’t even have what they call local schema built products properly, let alone the 20 other schemas you need, right? You want to build lots of real reviews consistently and you want to have a lot of mentions and you want to have it not just all sitting on Google. Build authoritative and relevant links back to your website. So authoritative and relevant links. So yeah, you can go buy backlinks and backlinks to buy them proper ones are not cheap. 4, 5, 600 bucks, sometimes $100 link is not worth buying even, right? The world of backlink buying still needs to be somebody reaching out. Authentic links, real content on a real, real site that adds authority, right? The whole, the whole days of sort of cheap fake links for five and ten dollars.

John Clendenning [00:52:32]:

And that doesn’t work Again, all, all the gamesmanship can easily be found. It might last for a little while. You might have a little bit of a, you know, a room to run before it all goes back to needing to be authentic and real. That’s the, the story of today is that there isn’t a gamesmanship There isn’t a way you can buy your way through is with fake. You invest your way through with authenticity, right? So how to build up good, relevant links? You want local, niche and national citations. That’s your name, address, phone number on sites, guest blogs, you know, if you ever get the opportunity to, you know, be. Have a guest post or, you know, tell a story on somebody else’s site, that kind of thing is good. Industry, industry associations, we talked about the issa, local business groups, better Business bureaus, chamber of commerce, those kinds of things, right? You want to, you want to make sure that you have links, citations, your business listed on those coming back to you.

John Clendenning [00:53:32]:

Charity events, press releases, vendor links. Are you a vendor at the home and garden show? Get on their stuff, right? All of that shows up really, really well. You know, again, when you sponsor, when you go clean up the beach, when you do all that and your company got involved, right? We used to do, you know, coats for kids at Christmas, right? Where we’d. We would, we would talk to the local United Way and say, hey, we’d love to sponsor and help you guys with the thing in the mall, right? The coats for kids. So we put out promotions, would be. One of our annual mailings would be that, you know, here’s, here’s your promotion for the holiday season coming up. So, you know, late October kind of idea for the holidays. And we would run a promotion and give us, you know, a gently used coat or set of boots, whatever, from your kids, donate that to us, and we’ll give you this extra thing in your home for free, right? Maybe an armchair, maybe a flight of stairs, maybe one like a children’s room, clean, free, whatever.

John Clendenning [00:54:29]:

In with any minimum cleaning service, give us a, you know, a charity event. What will that do is we got listed on the United Way website, we got mentioned in the newspaper and in their, their publications, their online and offline publications. And then when we went and actually donated the bags and bags and bags of coats, we picked up and poured them into the big bin in the mall. We made sure the entire company came. We. We paused for the morning, went and did that, the technicians before going off to the next jobs, the office gals, all that. And we went to the mall and we did that. We took pictures and we sent it to the local media.

John Clendenning [00:55:01]:

And then they wrote up about us and then it was on their website, right? So this is how real businesses run. Sounds like a lot of work. Yeah, that’s how you get to a million bucks and then 2 million and then 5 million you start a little bit, you do a little bit while you’re in the truck, you, you get a little bit more, you get a little bit more, you come up with these, these ideas. You buy somebody out, you keep growing, but you build your authenticity and SEO builds on that as well. You are the marketer of cleaning services first and foremost. You do that well, everything else comes easy. So what actually drives visibility? Google’s not ranking pages, it’s validating businesses. Verified business presence, real, active, trustworthy, can be seen, can be found online as being real and active.

John Clendenning [00:55:45]:

And something happened yesterday, a week ago, a couple weeks ago, and they know it, right? That’s again, happy customer stories, Google business profile posts that are about stuff, good images going up, social media, people engaging, right? Consistent reputation signals, reviews, engagement, customer feedback, all of that is being shared around the web. We’ve talked about reputation marketing since I started doing that on the side while running all my cleaning businesses. And oh, what would that have been? 2012, 2013, when I started the reputation marketing business, helping cleaners and local businesses, talking at the chamber of commerce, right? All about this stuff, always important, always helpful for conversions and growth. Even more important now you want to reinforce authority, mentions, links and recognition across the web, clear service relevance. You want to have a strong association with the services that you offer, right? So you have happy customer stories about the services that you offer. You have like again, all of these things tied together. You got people mentioning the services you offer, you’ve got shout outs about the services you offer, right? So you tie that all together and you validate the business really, really well. So zero click search.

John Clendenning [00:57:03]:

Why SEO matters more when less people even click Search used to be click, go to a website, make a decision, right? That’s all about it. Let me go to the website, let me decide searches now you search, you see a bunch of stuff that AI and all pulls together for you, then you decide and then you might go to the website to make your final opinion and that website better match all of this, because if you do all of this and then the website’s a piece of crap and doesn’t tell your story and doesn’t have real people and has babies lying on carpets and families and dogs sitting on couches and let me start again, let me decide again. So again, it’s all got to tie together. Visibility now drives selection, not traffic. Your traffic to your website should be down right now. The conversions from your website should be up and your conversions from AI mentions and recommendations should be, should be up. AI visibility should be up. By now, it’s not an afterthought anymore.

John Clendenning [00:58:12]:

This time last year when I was harping about it, it was like, get ready. The ready’s gone, it’s now. If that’s not you, it is somebody else. If you don’t know, you need to be working with the right people that tell you. They should have been telling you for the past year that SEO is doing this while recommendations and AI is doing this. The writing was on the wall over a year ago and now it’s just accelerating faster and faster than ever before. So decisions are made before the click. Customers who choose based on.

John Clendenning [00:58:45]:

Customers choose based on what they see. Reviews, photos, presence, reputation. If you don’t stand out, you don’t get chosen. And those are being picked by AI engines more than algorithms. They’re being picked, brought together and presented to you. Oh, look what I found for you, says your AI agent Carrie, or says Google Gemini, or says AI Mode, or says your chat GPT friend Fabio, like my sister calls hers. Right, look what I found for you. I’ve done all of this research and I’ve got all of these things and I’ve pulled it all together.

John Clendenning [00:59:18]:

So SEO didn’t die, it expanded. It’s about being visible everywhere, controlling how your business appears and and becoming the obvious choice, the best known cleaner. You don’t need more clicks, you need much stronger, real, authentic signals. You can’t buy this from a marketing agency. You can get assistance and they should be asking you for stuff and you should be providing stuff so that they can generate more signals and help you. Because they know this stuff. Hopefully. Maybe they’re not the one writing the book on AI.

John Clendenning [00:59:58]:

And how come somebody else is getting mentioned by AI more than you in your marketplace, which is the working title right now? Maybe they don’t know any of this stuff. Maybe they do, I don’t know. Depends on how up in the game they are and how involved they stay in the marketplace, how many masterminds they join and how much money they spend investing in their education. Just like you should be investing in your growth and education as a marketer and business manager, grower of a business. You do that every day. You are. If you’re in the truck, you’re out of the truck pretty quickly, right? If you’re out of the truck already, you’re expanding and building a business that’s sustainable while the world is crashing and burning around you, you’re targeting the right people that still have money. So the businesses that win now aren’t the most optimized they are the most trusted, the most visible, and the most reinforced everywhere customers look.

John Clendenning [01:00:56]:

So it didn’t die. SEO did not die at all. It is now a game of trust. The website has to be clear, the right cues on it. The business has to have fresh photos, correct categories, all that kind of structure and stuff like that. But it’s also got to be visible everywhere. So you gotta, you gotta know what directories you’re on, who’s doing that for you and is it the right information and is it being refreshed and updated every single month like we do on directories? Hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of directories for our clients. Or is it stale and old? Do you know? Right.

John Clendenning [01:01:28]:

You have to have all that stuff in place. So what are some of the takeaways? Did you get anything out of this? Right. It’s a big topic. We got through it in about an hour. We the nuts and bolts of it. A couple more closing things to kind of go through. But you know, if you want to see if you are AI ready, we have the ultimate AI marketing checklist. Just go to the website.

John Clendenning [01:01:50]:

It pops up. Carpet CleanerMarketingMasters.com you can get it there. If you’re a member of the AI powered marketing secrets for cleaning businesses on Facebook, it’s one of the gifts you get when you join that group. If you’re not, probably should join the group. It’s really good conversations and a good place to be. Right. But implementation is everything. That’s part of my coaching program.

John Clendenning [01:02:13]:

You have to implement. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Businesses don’t fail because they don’t have enough ideas. They fail because they don’t execute them. And they don’t execute them in the right order. With a structure. Right. Get your minimum viable out the door, work on it, iterate it, measure right.

John Clendenning [01:02:32]:

And then finally turn the whole thing into a machine. I actually call it the MMM Framework. Like grandma’s apple pie. Starts with a recipe. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak. Finally dialed in perfectly. Then it gets handed down for generations. It built a machine.

John Clendenning [01:02:47]:

That’s the same idea you want to implement by building a machine by starting with a minimum viable version. Minimum MVP they call it. Right. Then you want to measure right. Then you want to modify and then you want to turn it into that working machine. The key to growth. Take immediate action. Pick one thing and do it.

John Clendenning [01:03:12]:

So if that’s to become, you know, is that, is that a daily post on Google business profile about. That’s not a bad idea. Right, that’s, that’s one. Is it, you know, is it possibly creating a blog post every single month, that would be another one. Right? There’s different things that you could possibly do to, to, to, to do this. Is it getting, you know, with somebody who knows how to do this and getting a roadmap, getting, getting a, you know, a diagnostic or something like that. Right? Best businesses are not the best operators. They are the best marketers.

John Clendenning [01:03:50]:

Dan Kennedy 101 who then need to refine operations because they got a scaling problem. They’re too busy. They market so well that they have to figure out how to run operations. Now they keep marketing and they learn how to be a better operator. They keep marketing, they keep operating. They learn how to be a chief operating officer and a CEO with bigger numbers and, and, and all of that kind of stuff. They get better and better and better at the, at the game of business. We’re not born with this, we just learn it.

John Clendenning [01:04:18]:

Commit to one major marketing shift this week. What top three SEO initiatives are you going to do right now? Right, because as we said, the reminder the AI is now the great equalizer. AI commoditizes, makes everybody look the same. If you don’t stand out with something different and compelling, a reason why you on authenticity in the marketplace, more, more, more attention and trust. AI will blur you with your competitors. AI will give your competitors who care give, give your customer your competitor’s name when they can’t remember your name anymore, right? Do you have the, the big magnet honeydew list on their fridge? Do you have the bottle of your spot remover under their, their counter? Are you staying in touch with them every single month or more often just with a regular happy, healthy home tips and updates that they welcome? Are you, are you giving them reminders at 6 months and 12 months? Are you having promotional campaigns around the holidays? Are you in their world in a meaningful way so that once you do have a client, a customer one time you turn them into a client where the asset value of your database, right? That’s what you want to be talking about and thinking about because the winners will be authentic, trusted and business businesses nurturing real human relationships. So you, you have both, you nurture AI’s attempt to be as human as possible online. That’s why it’s more and more authentic.

John Clendenning [01:05:50]:

Everything we just talked about, it’s not a game. There’s, there’s tools and tactics and strategies, but it’s not gamesmanship anymore. It’s not. Why can’t you get me more Backlinks so that I can rank more. That’s not what it is. It is a two way partnership done well. The best known cleaner wins over having discounts and deals. If you’re still discounting and dealing and giving price breaks and 15% offs and 20% offs and things like that, you’re on the wrong side of the equation right now.

John Clendenning [01:06:18]:

Right, so move myself there’s right. Don’t want to be having discounts and deals. So you want to be the brand, the go to brand. They know they have to pay a little bit more to get with a little bit of a waiting list. If no one knows who you are, a great offer doesn’t matter. What does that mean? Even you don’t send out a postcard into a neighborhood spent. You know, I put out 5,000 postcards last month to a neighborhood and I didn’t get any phone calls. Yep, yep, that’ll happen every time.

John Clendenning [01:06:51]:

Did they know you in that neighborhood? Have they seen you 10, 15, 20 times already? So the postcards leaning into something, I would suggest that the postcard should probably go out for three or four or five months before, like in a neighborhood that they have started to see you yard signs and door hangers and sponsorships and a real business and the postcard falls into that neighborhood. Even better, not a postcard because most people send out, you know, glossy looking, put three rooms in a hall. That’s what carpet cleaning is. That’s called marketing incest. That’s not what carpet cleaning is, is at all. Right. So customers who don’t buy, customers don’t buy based on price alone very often at all. They buy the best customers.

John Clendenning [01:07:34]:

They buy based on brands they know, trust and respect. Right. So if you’re targeting the price shoppers, they are getting pinched more and more and more and more. I’m gonna move myself down from that lovely woman’s head. Right. If you’re targeting price shoppers, that’s not your ideal customer. And there’s more and more competition because as the market softens, the employment market softens and interest rates soften and all that kind of stuff. A lot of people who get displaced from their, their job behind a desk or in a factory or whatever that is, there’s a lot of new cleaners that show up and they run ads and they start competing with all the price shopper cleaners for all the price shopper customers.

John Clendenning [01:08:22]:

They don’t figure out most of them who’s actually targeting the higher end loyal clientele. How do you get in front of these people? It’s entirely different than you get in front of these people. They, the SEO that we just talked about, entirely different. The signals, entirely different. The marketing you do entirely different. But you get a much, much better client that repeats, that refers, that pays premium, that loves you. You don’t need as many of them. You only need a thousand of these people giving you $1,000 a year, two $500 cleanings, one good high end cleaning in their home to run a million dollar business.

John Clendenning [01:09:03]:

Business, right? So each truck on the road should be a couple like $250,000 revenue out of any one truck you have on the road. This is like a four truck business at the most. Done well, right? So interestingly, you got to figure out which one you’re attracting because there’s an exact blueprint for this. This is the exact blueprint I developed, learned, built, taught, perfected, got consulted on, got hired into franchise networks for, got hired into corporations and companies for, got hired by other like large cleaning companies. I’ve been flown out, I get, I get, I pay to walk through and build your blueprint. Been doing it for 20 years, right? So 20, 26 this year is that pivotal year. It really is. AI for some is going to be doom and gloom.

John Clendenning [01:10:03]:

It’s going to be loss of jobs and loss of clientele and all that. For others, it’s going to be the new superhighway. The right people are going to be exploiting and building like crazy. Well, you know, 20% of the office gets laid off because the AI took over the jobs and robots took over the factory. Right on this side these, these people, if we’re cleaning for them, if we’re running our business this way and we’re leaning into that. You’re leaning into the right side of the, the change that has already happened, the way people buy work and experience life has changed. There’s a catch up happening in the background, but it’s already changed. My little AI Carry chief of staff is not unique anymore at all.

John Clendenning [01:10:56]:

Didn’t exist as a technology in this way three months ago. Not unique anymore at all. Massively fast changes. Right? So we do have our blueprint for success coaching. That is something that we relaunched just over a month ago. We’ve got a founders group in there. We’ve got some limited spots opening up soon if you’re interested. We’re going to where we go deep on all of this.

John Clendenning [01:11:18]:

We help you with accountability, we talk about it together as a group. We, we, we, we work through the actual blueprint step by step by step in an easy way, provide AI prompts and chats and stuff like that to help with for anybody who’s not comfortable with AI. It’s just something I’m kind of ahead of and advanced on, but some people are way ahead of me. Still got my good buddy Chris who is on the AI marketing experts podcast with me who, you know, blows me away every week on what he’s put in place. But. Right. So if you’re, if you’re interested, reach out. If it’s, if you’re looking to grow the business, we’ve kept the, the, the price reasonable.

John Clendenning [01:11:53]:

Very reasonable. Like one customer a month covers the coaching and you’re going to be, you know, done well, you should be getting dozens. You have more poles in the water, you understand it, you can understand more of this stuff. You, you learn to be the marketer of the cleaning business, go out in the world, do what you’re supposed to do, have somebody behind doing the setup and infrastructure and all that the right way. And now you’ve got the clear path to better clients, predictable growth and a business you can scale and sell. Right. So the back end of it, there’s the coaching program right there. We’ve got members in, we’re growing again by invite only.

John Clendenning [01:12:25]:

We’ve got a few limited spots. So we had the first founders round in and now we’re ready for the next, next crowd to continue the journey and grow with everybody. So if you’re interested at all, we have got marketing kits and things like that you can get access to. Every month we, we, we give out a deep dive marketing kit and then we go through every single week. We got a call this afternoon in 45 minutes. Every Thursday we, we go, we go deep on topics and accountability and tools to make this all easier and give you that step by step approach. Everything we talk about just gets put into a, okay, how do I do this now? Right? And you just do your homework. Just like I learned when all the coaching programs I’ve been in and currently still am in.

John Clendenning [01:13:12]:

You do your homework, you do some thought, you put some time into it. You’re the, you know, you’re the commander of your own destiny and you grow. So anyways, if any of that seems interesting at all or you just want to reach out to us and maybe have a conversation about, take a look at all your stuff. Are you even in the game? Is your marketing company even know what they’re doing? Do you have enough poles in the water? Do you know even know what that means? Then you can go to carpet cleanermarketingmasters.com schedule and you can jump on a, you jump on a call, the team will reach back out to you. Sarika, I think she’s had to bounce off the meeting so she can’t say bye to you. But you can jump on a call, we can have a conversation, see where you’re at, where you want to go, what level of foundation you need in place, what you need to do, how it works together and build the right business and the right momentum, the right way, get the right customers and keep growing this thing properly. So anyways, if any of that makes sense at all, then, yep, you want to stay visible in our zero click world, then carpet cleanermarketingmasters.com schedule you can go there. If you want to reach out to us at all on any platform anywhere we’ve talked to you, any, any chat stuff like that, you, if you’re interested in, in potentially joining the group, the Blueprint for Success coaching group, we’d love to have you in there as well.

John Clendenning [01:14:35]:

And with that said, hopefully you had a bit of an awakening, understanding how everything we’ve been talking about month after month after month and how AI is changing everything, it’s changed. It’s changed this too. It’s changed what authenticity means and what rankings means and what, how people find you, all of that kind of stuff. It’s changed the Internet, but it’s also changed the real world. So how grandpa ran the business is how we need to run the business authentically in the real community. And then that same authenticity layered online. You do that well with a little bit of your involvement, a little bit of, you know, pictures of jobs and, and, and a little bit of outreach and all that kind of stuff with somebody working with you that knows what all of that means and what to do with it all and keep it all tied together and all the changes that keep coming fast and furious at us and you will be aligning yourself with the people in town that have the money, that want the best cleaners. You look the part, you feel the part, people are talking about you in that way and you start putting the everything code together, you start putting the integrated omnipresence marketing code done together properly.

John Clendenning [01:15:50]:

So anyways, if that makes sense, reach out to us. Love to hear from you. Otherwise, thanks so much for showing up again for another exciting episode and hopefully you learned something. Share it with your friends, talk about us and we’ll see you next time. Bye.