Google Maps Zero-Click Search Impact: What Carpet Cleaning Owners Need to Understand

Zero-click search means customers get answers directly in search or AI tools, bypassing websites and Google Maps. Carpet cleaners must ensure their business is referenced in AI-driven recommendations and maintain authority across many platforms.

John Clendenning [00:00:05]:

I know you like that one, Chris. So I’m going to call out Chris on this one. He loves it when we do the cheer. So, and I found the button this time. So welcome guys back for another talk, as we like to say. I appreciate everybody leaning in. I know there’s been a lot of sort of our monthly deep masterclass training like this one. This one’s going to be really, really interesting on Google Maps.

John Clendenning [00:00:27]:

Everything’s changing around us. And every single time, this isn’t part of me, part of me. I’m going to have to keep saying everything’s changing around us. Bunch of things that you guys got to keep an eye on. I just got off a call with a gentleman I’ve been talking to for a while now. Very, very successful fellow in our industry and been around for years and years and years. And we’ve had chats before. He’s realized As we all are, if you haven’t realized it yet, it’s coming that everything has changed, right? He’s down 55% on a big business and it’s like, oh shit, what’s happening? We’re going to talk about what’s happening.

John Clendenning [00:01:06]:

I’ve been talking about what’s happening. So this is on Cleanfax Magazine, right? So I’m an author and contributor to Cleanfax Magazine, but this was an emergency session. There’s a video here. Jeff and I went for, I don’t know, 30 minutes, 45, because he’s getting calls. Cleanfax is getting calls. How AI has changed how customers are choosing cleaning companies in the last few months. I talked about this last year during the, the Cleanfax ISSA Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters 2-day intensive. We had 120 people join, you know, at $297 a month, or $297 a month, but $297 to join for the VIP.

John Clendenning [00:01:46]:

I think it was $197 if you regular join and $297 if you want the VIP experience and get the backend coaching and stuff like that. We had 100-some-odd people jumping on that one trying to figure out what’s happening in the world. We had Frankie Finn on, we had John Braun on, all kinds of guys, Nate Sisney and Kevin Kluth. It’s worth going back and seeing that. It’s out there if you don’t know, you know, it’s out on Cleanfax and all that kind of stuff. You can ping me and we can find you the links to that or whatever up on our website somewhere too, I’m sure. But again, that was last March. We’re almost there again.

John Clendenning [00:02:17]:

Like, we’re, we’re almost a year out from that, and what’s happened in that year is incredible. Like, it’s hard to fathom, right? Today we’re going to be talking about how the modern Google Maps is entirely different than everything you’ve known about Google Maps. So Google Maps kind of, kind of came out in the, the late or the, the early 2000s, and then by 2010 or so reviews showed up. And then the service area business opportunity. So it used to be way back in the day, it was called Google Places, Google Local, and then eventually sort of became Maps. It was all about driving directions and maps, but then they allowed other businesses in better, like service area businesses and things like that. And you had to know how to play the game. There’s lots of ranking factors, and, and, and you wanted to get people to call you.

John Clendenning [00:03:06]:

It was one of the best places if you could rank in the 3-pack, not just for a mile around your, your property where your pin drop is, but like 5, 10, 15 miles, 20 miles if you’re in a small town, but 10, 15 miles for any one of your 200, 300, 400 possible sort of service key service terms that people type in to find carpet cleaners, upholstery cleaners, couch cleaners, rug cleaners. Like there’s a, there’s all these terms, right? Carpet shampooing near me. Like, you know, you think every one of them comes up with a different different listing. And it was like, hey, you know, I can either be in the— I can be in the paid ads on Google, I can be in the local, the local service. So the people that pass the paid ads, the next thing they see was local service. And then, or I can be in the organic, which normally gets you a farther and wider if you know how to use it, and even a lot more volume to your website. But most people can’t figure out the organic game, so they could at least try and play in the Google Maps. And every time they checked on their phone, yep, I’m, I’m on number one.

John Clendenning [00:04:04]:

Yeah, they didn’t realize they’re sitting in the office where they— of course they should be number one. Go 10 miles away, 20 miles away. You still number one? Probably not. And for what term? Did you check one term or did you check 300 terms? 400 terms, different ways people say things because everyone comes up with a different listing. Anyways, that was the game to play. And there’s a lot of nuance. I don’t even show you what the nuance was for that, but that whole game has changed in the last year, but I’d give it last 3 months and it’s going to continue to change. And if you’re not ready to make those changes, go back to the last couple of training we did.

John Clendenning [00:04:40]:

Go to some of the emergency trainings. Go to the, the free database marketing training we did because we’re getting calls from everybody. Talk about this near the end. Calls from everybody is like, like, hey, this whole lead gen thing, I need more leads. I need— it’s not working. And it’s like, no, no. And it shouldn’t have been the way you ran your business in the first place. Your database is your most important, right? So Google Maps is a way to attract the right people.

John Clendenning [00:05:03]:

Your apps, your customers should never go back to the internet, Google Maps, or anything ever again to find you, their carpet cleaner, because you should be in their world so well that they, like the old days, don’t go back to the Yellow Pages, don’t go back to Google Maps, right? Oh, and I was going to show you this. So yeah, this is on Cleanfax Magazine. AI just changed how customers are choosing cleaning companies. Just. And this was out, out we literally recorded on the Wednesday, he had the article up on Wednesday, the video up on the next afternoon, right? And there’s the podcast as well, 33 minutes. And we went deep on how old school is now new again. Welcome to the Carpet Cleaner Success Podcast, a show created to inspire carpet cleaning business owners to build their own thriving residential and commercial cleaning business. Your host, Jon Clendenning, has built and sold successful cleaning businesses for multiple six figures over his 30-year career and is the founder of Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, a digital agency that turns your online marketing into a lead generation machine.

John Clendenning [00:06:06]:

Tune in as Jon shares proven tips, strategies, and expert interviews to help fast-track your success in the carpet cleaning industry. We’re going to talk about how, um, is your Google Maps dying because of zero-click search, which is a real thing that is now maybe 40, almost 50% of searches. I was saying about 30% of searches at Christmas time, 1% of search only a year ago, arguably 40 to 50% depending on who you listen to already. Fastest growing and adopting technology in human history. And how do you adapt to that? How local service businesses stay visible as AI intercepts the traffic. It’s no longer where it was, right? So if that makes sense, if this seems like, you know, you know, again, I don’t want to keep sounding like Chicken Little, the sky is falling, but you need to be adjusting. This is 2008, ’09, ’10 if you’re in business, and the recession and how you had to adjust. And most people didn’t, and most people didn’t make it.

John Clendenning [00:07:13]:

40, 50% of cleaners went out of business as competitors showed up because they, they they got laid off and then they came into the cleaning world. And there is enough disruption in our world. If your neighborhood isn’t feeling it yet, um, good for you, but it’s still happening in our world. So, and it is coming for you. So what we’re covering today: the visibility shift from rankings to AI selection. Google Maps is becoming an AI feeder environment. Are you feeding it? Right? I’m going to actually move my little camera person up here. There we go.

John Clendenning [00:07:52]:

Up there. Conversation is now the new search intent. Conversation. We’ll prove that. I say that all day long. I’ve said that for a long time. A long time in the world of AI, 3 months, 6 months. That’s like the olden days., right? But it is, and it’s, it’s, it’s getting more so every single day.

John Clendenning [00:08:16]:

And the great divide: reactive versus authority-driven businesses, right? So we’re going to cover, um, oops, covered all that, um, critical decisions owners must make now before the, the market changes on them, right? So all the normal stuff we talked about before as well. Turn your phones off. Turn Facebook off. We’re not streaming to Facebook yet, so turn Facebook off. If you’re on YouTube, watch on YouTube. We can stream there. But pay attention. I’ve been in this industry since high school.

John Clendenning [00:08:50]:

I’ve been in the cleaning industry. I’ve owned cleaning companies since my early 20s. 1995, I was out of the truck within a year. 1996, just the end of 1996, I bought my first competitor out in 1997. As a young punk kid who came off the road from a— from with a rock band, did window cleaning during the day, rock band at night, kind of happened together until the drummer got his, uh, um, it went to another band. This— the bass player got his girlfriend knocked up, and that was the normal band story. Um, and it happened to us. So we had won Battle of the Bands and had recording time at Emax Studios and, and had an EP and shopped it around and all that kind of stuff, and then ran into the normal stuff.

John Clendenning [00:09:30]:

So played 7 nights a week in the band, cut my hair, and started a carpet cleaning company and moved to the town of Stratford because I didn’t know anybody and I was, I was a shy kid and started a business where people had to call me. I didn’t call them and realize, hey, nobody’s calling me. And within a year and a half, I was doing $10,000 a month, then $20,000, then $50,000, bought competitors out, added to my business. Bought maid services because I was the marketer of the cleaning service. I’ve been speaking about this, did keynotes, presentations. Kind of the first one I did was in 2002 in Orlando, and I literally left the stage. 45-minute presentation, first time I ever built a PowerPoint, left the stage and vomited, stayed away from the conference for the rest of the day, had stomachaches, and showed back up at dinner time because I was, I was, I was that challenging for me. And eventually I was speaking at every Chamber of Commerce, I was speaking in front of real estate agents, I walked in the door of every customer, every, every, every, um, company that I wanted to get in the door of, brought them donuts and spot removers and all that cool stuff.

John Clendenning [00:10:41]:

Thank you, Howard Partridge, for all those great ideas, and Dan Kennedy for the right way to market, and all the people I learned from and mentored from, because I realized I needed to be the marketer of cleaning services, if I can grow the crap out of this thing, right? So anyways, I bought and systemized those businesses, sold the businesses all the way up, eventually sold all my businesses off, wrote the book on how to do the internet marketing, started— had started doing consulting and marketing for 20 years now since 2007. That’s crazy. And ran a coaching program for about 10 years and then helped a flood restoration company grow while still running all my cleaning businesses because I’d Got myself down to about 5, 10 hours a week at the most needed to work on my business. And the team ran the business, right? Small boutique, high-end, very profitable $1.4 million cleaning company. Right. Been on Cleanfax magazine, you know, as a buyer for 30 years, as, you know, contributor and all that in the world. For a while, quite a while now. Also help our clients do what they want to do.

John Clendenning [00:11:47]:

Been talking to Leanne a lot. If you’re on the call, hey, Leanne. But yeah, we help our clients grow to be number one in their marketplace, solve their marketing problems, because we want them to be the top brand in their local marketplace. It’s been a bit of an uphill battle saying, hey, we can do our part. We call it Done Together Marketing. We can do our part where we help you show up online everywhere you need to be, right? We can help you grow your business that way, get your Google, your ads going, get your website ranking, have a story brand built into your website like we talk about on those trainings where it actually feeds the emotion, emotional direct response marketing the way it always supposed to be. Because you don’t just show a brochure online and go, oh, I hope you buy from my brochure because we’re satisfaction guaranteed, number one, like everybody else does, right? No, you stand out like a sore thumb as being the best with the best message and you get into people’s heads. That’s what marketing is.

John Clendenning [00:12:43]:

Go read the book by Edward Bernays, Propaganda, the godfather of modern marketing. His uncle was Sigmund Freud. It’s how you get into people’s heads. It’s what marketing, inception-like marketing has become. That’s what we do, right? And if you do it well online, and offline, because we help with that, you can attract the very best clients in your marketplace, the ones that still have money, the ones that pay $500, $600, $700, $800 average residential job. Let the other guys go after the 3 rooms, no hall for $129. You’re able to charge those top rates. Why? Because you’ve built a business that can— is worthy of those top rates.

John Clendenning [00:13:26]:

You know how to find where those people hang out. They don’t hang out on Groupon. They don’t hang out on Facebook discount ads. That’s not where they come from. They won’t even click on them. So my— everybody’s, you know, a price shopping carpet customer. Yep. Because that’s all you’re marketing to because you don’t understand marketing yet.

John Clendenning [00:13:44]:

If you understand marketing, you’re one of the top 1, 2, 3% of all businesses. There’s only a couple of carpet cleaners that understand marketing well. There’s only a couple of plumbing companies that understand marketing well. And when they do, you know who they are because you’re booked out weeks in advance. At being the most expensive. In fact, we were able to say on our phone calls, you know, hey, yeah, like, you know, we say, let me, well, figure out an estimate here for you. Let me tell you why most people who call choose us to clean their carpets. Then, we give them a price.

John Clendenning [00:14:12]:

So most people call choose us. Then, we give them a price that’s way more than anybody else. Like an estimate range, not a quote, an estimate range on the phone. Part of proper script training, right? You don’t send people to a self-booking button on your website. Say that all the time because now, you’re a commodity. You don’t want to be a commodity. You want to make $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 lifetime value from your clients. You do that by targeting the right clients, and then you have a real conversation with them.

John Clendenning [00:14:37]:

Everybody else has to commoditize because it’s a race to the bottom. You want to have a category of one in your entire marketplace and a race to the top. That’s what you want to do, right? And you can actually say when it’s done well and your marketing is done well, you know, you say, well, I’ve got an opening for, you know, we’re one of the most in demand. So we’re taking appointments right now for next Wednesday and next Friday. Does either one of those— does the morning or afternoon work best for you? Oh really? Nothing today or tomorrow? No, those are the fly-by-night companies that are just waiting for the phone to ring to get work. In fact, most of our regular clients book a year in advance into our schedule. That was right out of our scripts. Every single phone call when anybody said, oh my gosh, really? Yep.

John Clendenning [00:15:18]:

Yeah, let me— okay, yeah, I guess next one. If something comes soon, do you have like a— you know, a cancellation list? Well, we don’t really get many cancellations because I hated that word. But if somebody had to reschedule for a doctor’s appointment or something like that, um, we definitely from time to time have that. I can definitely pencil you in on that as well. Um, but we can put you in for that Wednesday morning. Does that work? Yep. And then we start a marketing campaign to lock that appointment in. We’re not worrying about people no-showing because you market in between.

John Clendenning [00:15:48]:

Right. Anyways, want to be booked out weeks in advance. So how do we do this? It’s about the omnipresence marketing system, right? So you want to make sure that you are omnipresent everywhere in your market at all times. So we call it integrative omnipresent because we’re working with you. Your marketing company shouldn’t live in a bubble. They should be able to show you what they’re doing. You should be able to have ROI reports on paid ads and things like that. They should be listening to your phone calls and saying, ah, we should pause the ads right now because you suck on the phone.

John Clendenning [00:16:20]:

Your booking percentage is only 30%. You need to be 45% in an average job of $375 before pay-per-click even turns a return on investment. Hopefully, your marketing companies are saying that, but you want to be omnipresent everywhere so that as somebody sees you in pay-per-click, as somebody sees you in Google Maps, we’re going to talk about today, as somebody sees one of your happy customer stories on social media and stuff like that, they see your yard signs with the QR code that starts a chat conversation. They see, you know, They, they, you, you, you walk into a carpet store, you walk into a real estate office, they already know you. Everything works better when you’re omnipresent because people need to see your brand 11, 15, 20-some-odd times. It used to be 11, 0, moment of truth. Google ZMOT, they call it. Now it’s closer, over 20.

John Clendenning [00:17:06]:

They need to see your brand, see your brand before they’re ready to pick up the phone and call. Or grab the box of the product off the shelf. That’s, that’s how the human brain works, unless you’re a commodity, and then that’s the wrong customer. A commodity-buying customer will buy from somebody else next time, and you’re doing a transaction of one. The money in carpet cleaning, the money in selling your business, is the recurring database— commercial, residential, all of it. And you can prove that, and you can get 10, 5, 10 times EBITDA If you know what that is, if you do this right. Maximize your opportunities to generate a qualified inquiry, not a lead, an inquiry. Maximize your opportunities.

John Clendenning [00:17:49]:

Where is your best people and where do they hang out? And how do you get in front of them in a whole bunch of ways? Not one pole in the water, 20, 30, 40 poles in the water. If your best people are on Golf Course Road, interior designers are beautiful people to know. High-end maid service are beautiful people to know. Right. Well, how can you maximize your opportunity when you go to one home? Do you know how to target the 20 around where you— in gated communities, you’re not walking up the driveway and putting a door hanger on, which you would in middle class. You definitely do the 20 around. But high-end neighborhoods, you’re not— for one, you’re not walking all the way down the driveway, all the way across 5 lots worth of grass, all the way up the other driveway just to— and they don’t want it there anyways. No, but you can actually send a personalized letter or personalized postcard on a single click because you know you can maximize the opportunity saying, we’re at one of your neighbors.

John Clendenning [00:18:39]:

We’d love to come and give you a healthy home audit assessment and one of our $75 healthy home gift sets, right? All kinds of cool stuff. 2, maximize your brand impressions. Why? Because they got to know your brand. AI needs to know your brand now too. AI finds the best brands. A brand is not a white van with a magnet on the side of it. A brand is not your business card. A brand is a feeling, a logo, color, story, right? You got to be impactful.

John Clendenning [00:19:12]:

What is different about you, right? You got to build that brand message same everywhere. You know, we’re not talking about, you know, that we clean every corner and all of those things. That’s not a brand. Why are you different? You got to work that out because that’s what you put into your sales copy. That’s what you put into your website. You tell a story that is different than anybody else’s. AI will pick it up. SEO will pick it up if it’s done right.

John Clendenning [00:19:41]:

And a human will pick it up and call you versus anybody else. Your websites and everything will, will convert 2 and 3 times more. That story becomes on your Google Business Profile, part of your description. Right? You maximize your conversions. You can get a call, but if you don’t know what to do about that call, the scripts, the follow-up, do you follow up the next day with a phone call? If anybody says no, then do you wait? Do you send them an email? Then do you wait to day 5, call them again, send them a couple more messages about happy customer stories, why you got into this business, and then send them another, make another phone call at day 12 before you put them into your long-term nurture? We talked about that in one of our other trainings as well. That maximizes conversions. Every, every— for the— if you end up with 10 calls and you book 3 of them at the highest prices in town, or you get 10 calls and you book 3, 4 right now, 40%, you follow up with the rest and you book another 3 or 4, and now you’re at 80% because you’re targeting the right people. You just need to tell the right story.

John Clendenning [00:20:40]:

Sometimes they’re just going to think about it. Cool. Think about it. I’m going to drip on you. That’s marketing. That’s how we take a business from meh, $250,000 a year to $500,000 a year in one year. Better marketing into the mix. That’s how you stabilize a business when everything is— everybody else is, you know, wanting more leads and wondering why the leads have dried up because the average homeowner is worried about their jobs or worried about the interest rates and aren’t buying right now.

John Clendenning [00:21:08]:

And the best people You’ve got to be in front of them. If you’re not, somebody else is cleaning for them. Trust me, if you’re not on Golf Course Road every single day, somebody else is, right? So you want to convert these people and then hold on to them like a wiggly fish for the next 20 years. So question: does Google Maps even matter anymore with anything I just said? AI changing everything, right? And lovely picture, Sarika, by the way. Sarika helps me with the graphics, and I really love her graphics. Anyways, it’s no longer about winning more clicks at all. Zero-click search is a real thing. It’s about increasing your probability of being chosen inside the AI-filtered results.

John Clendenning [00:21:54]:

So here’s my little story as an example. Talk to my buddy Brad, known Brad for 25 years. He’s a— production manager at a, at a, um, in, in a factory or an auto parts plant or not auto. Yeah, I guess whatever. Um, and he’s just, he’s just trained jobs because the whole auto industry, right? So he’s actually, for the first time, as I started as a tool and die guy, worked his way up, right, right out of trade school, and he’s now gone on to working at a nuclear facility, right, doing project management and all that kind of stuff. Um, the auto industry Holy crap. Anyways, I asked Brad, I said, hey, if you and the wife spilled something on the carpet, you know, Valentine’s Day, spilled some wine on the carpet, whatever. Yeah, I’m your buddy.

John Clendenning [00:22:40]:

You’ve known me forever. You know I’ve owned cleaning companies. You’ve used my cleaning companies before, right? Would you call me to ask me what to do? He thought, but he goes, huh, where are you going with this, John? I said, I just wondered, like, truthfully, would you call me? He goes, no, no, I wouldn’t. And why not? And I knew where this was going because I just asked Chat. I go, yep, absolutely you would. So you wouldn’t ask me, your best friend who’s owned cleaning companies, let alone your neighbor or anybody else. Word of mouth is dead. I’m telling you that right now.

John Clendenning [00:23:13]:

So you asked Chat, cool. And it told you to use club soda, blot the stain out. We all know what to do, right? All that kind of stuff. What if it still left a mark? An off-white carpet and left a little bit of a pink haze. What would you do then? Yeah, I’d probably just ask Chat who could I call to get the stains out. And I said, he still wouldn’t ask me. He goes, no, I don’t own the companies anymore. I’ve sold them.

John Clendenning [00:23:34]:

So he has no loyalty to use the guys that bought the company from me. I think he should, but he doesn’t have to. Right. But I said, okay, so what do you go? Well, if it suggested two local names, I say, you know, I didn’t get the whole stain out, Chat. Um, who can I call to— who’s good at getting red wine stain out? That would be his search. There’s no Google Maps involved in this at all. People are doing that with their GPSs, they’re doing that with their Alexas. You’re doing that yourself, right? And if you’re not, you’re way behind because the majority of the population is now doing this for everything, and they didn’t do this a year ago.

John Clendenning [00:24:07]:

Fastest adoption of technology in human history, and it’s rolling faster and faster and faster every single day. So why do you need Google Maps then? Because Google AI uses them as part of the filtered results. AI uses some of your pay-per-click as part of the filtered results. AI uses your stories on your website and on your social media as part of the filtered results. AI uses the way you answer reviews as part of the filtered results, not just on Google. It’s not about having 2,000, 3,000 reviews on Google. It’s about being well represented all around the web. AI goes to Reddit, AI goes to, um, Nextdoor, and, and, and, and, and if people are talking about you in communities and, and places like that, AI is trying to be a real person who checks around everywhere, not a keyword search robot looking on Google.

John Clendenning [00:24:57]:

AI does not care about Google. Even Google’s AI doesn’t care about Google. So yes, maps matter, but they matter for a whole different reason than they did this time last year. That’s what we got to get across, right? They could still be a prominent driver, right? Organic, Maps, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, again, Nextdoor local service ads. You should have a mix of that with your organic website, also with your social strategy online, telling happy customer stories, that make people know about you ahead of time online, right? Run some paid ads, and then offline you need to be yard signs and door hangers and 20-arounds and joining the chamber and meeting people and, and stopping into businesses and offering free spot removals and stuff like that. You do both of that, now you’re seen online and offline. You’re building a great business. So yes, they matter, they drive calls, but you can’t rely on word of mouth.

John Clendenning [00:26:01]:

It’s gone. Or paid ad lead sources as much. You’ve got to put all this together. Conversation is the new search intent. So whether you’re asking your ChatGPT friend, your Claude friend, your Perplexity friend, whether you’re asking— like, agents are now doing this work for you. I’ve got agents running right now, um, doing research and building apps and things like that for my coaching program. Like, agents, AI agents are amazing. They just go off and work and build and can create other little agents under them that, that do certain tasks, and then You know, send it back to the director and then off to making sure that it was, you know, doing a quality control check and back.

John Clendenning [00:26:41]:

And when it’s all done, here you go, John, we just built this for you. That already exists right now. Getting your travel plans, doing all of that kind of stuff. So we’re in that world where conversation’s the new search intent and it’s changing massively. So the old keyword search, carpet cleaning Denver, best carpet cleaning near me. Right? Search, search engines matched keywords, so the ranking was all about keywords. Do you have the keyword, the right keywords in your listing? Do you have— are you running Google Posts every single day? And do the Google Posts have the right keywords in it? And they’re mentioning your cities. Does your customers mentioning the right keywords in their, um, in their, um, reviews? And do you have the right keywords in your FAQs? Do you have your entire thing all filled out? Do you have it connected to your website? And on the website, are you targeting the right keyword pages? And do you have schema that ties back to your Google? There’s all kinds of stuff.

John Clendenning [00:27:31]:

I’m going to show you how much stuff there was and still is involved in, in making sure everything is optimized properly. But now we’re optimizing that for this third-party agent, little assistant who’s trying to be as helpful as possible to pick up on, right? New search: who’s the best carpet cleaner near me that can remove pet stains? Do you have on your website, on your pet stain subpage underneath your carpet cleaning page? Do you have a whole entire, um, page article, 2, you know, 1,500 words written about the local community, about you, your family, how you grew up with dogs? Like the real stuff, not AI dribble, not ChatGPT dribble that doesn’t get ranked at all, but actually real stories. You can use AI to help you write the content and the outline, but it’s got to be real and localized and all about you talking about how to remove— how you remove pet stains and happy customer stories about removing pet stains and 3 or 4 of those happy customer stories linked to the bottom of the pet stain page. Now you’re going to show up when somebody asks that question because it’s going to go find that. It’s going to find the social media post about it. It’s going to find the Reddit post about it. It’s going to find all that kind of stuff. Is your SEO company doing that to get your Google Maps to work better for you? That’s what we do for our clients.

John Clendenning [00:28:51]:

So I need somebody reliable to clean carpets before we move out. Do you have a page about move out that talks about this in very specific detail and share stories about that? Like this is the Neil Patel, one of the gurus in the online ranking space, runs Ubersuggest and a bunch of other things, has basically came out last year, halfway through last year and said, AI has changed things so much that you need way more content on your website than ever for less traffic. Why would I want less traffic, John? Because the traffic that finally makes it there, they’re either going to be told— AI is just going to give you a number to call, and that still worked, but it ingested your Google Maps, your website, your ads, your social, people’s sentiments. It ingested all of that. It goes out and finds the best answer, and it’s getting better and better and better. Every single week, right? And when they do make it to your website, they are twice as likely to buy if your website tells the right story. If your website shows a picture of babies lying on the carpets and families and dogs sitting on, on couches and, you know, satisfaction guaranteed, they’re clicking the back button. You have to be in the head of the person buying for all the stuff we talk about.

John Clendenning [00:30:08]:

So which carpet cleaner has the best reviews in my area. That isn’t a Google question. If all your reviews are on Google and somebody— wow, these guys got 292 reviews on Google, but this other guy’s got like, you know, 80 reviews on Google and then 50 on Yelp, and he’s got recommended all over Facebook and all that kind of stuff— seems to be a much more broad, um, review, you know, presence. More people seem to like them more than just on Google, right? AI interprets meaning and intent, not just keywords. You got to be real is the story here. Um, what, what’s changing in the Google Maps ecosystem? Listings are now being filtered, filtered before exposure. So it’s not just about a ranking and a pecking, it’s actually about being filtered in and out. Google and all the other search engines and AI are, are interpreting much more than just reviews in my area? That isn’t a Google question.

John Clendenning [00:31:52]:

If all your reviews are on Google and somebody, wow, these guys got 292 reviews on Google, but this other guy’s got like, you know, 80 reviews on Google and then 50 on Yelp and he’s get recommended all over Facebook and all that kind of stuff. Seems to be a much more broad review, you know, presence, more people seem to like them more than just on Google. Right? AI interprets meaning and intent, not just keywords. Wow, I like these guys and patched you through, right? That’s kind of what AI is able to do in a second. So paid placements are integrated into the AI results. So paid ads are starting to feed in AI as well because Google doesn’t want to lose their revenue. They don’t make any money off of Google Maps. Don’t sell you Google Maps.

John Clendenning [00:32:30]:

They sell you paid ads. They bring the eyeballs in to sell you the asset. Advertising. Newspapers write the stories so that they can sell the ads and make money. They’re not a nonprofit. They don’t write the stories to give you free, to give you news or pay for the newspaper. They write the stories so they can have eyeballs that they sell to advertisers. The advertisers make the newspaper profitable.

John Clendenning [00:32:54]:

TV, the advertiser, unless you’re paying for cable, and even then Netflix and all now, they’re cheaper plan where you got to watch ads all over again. Because, right, if the price goes up, you, you will trade your attention for an advertiser. YouTube advertising all the way through. The platform provides free videos. It’s never free. Somebody’s paying somewhere along the way. And if If it’s free to you, you’re the product. Google Maps is becoming part of the AI selection layer.

John Clendenning [00:33:18]:

Verification and entity consistency matter more than ever. You have to be solid. We’re going to talk about this, right? So search results from different locations as well. We talked about this earlier, right? You’ve got carpet cleaning Nashville, right? Or Nashville carpet cleaning here from one end of town, just searching the exact carpet cleaning. That’s it. Just went to— went to your phone, type in carpet cleaning., and then you walk partway across town, type in carpet cleaning. Totally different list, right? And over here, this, this, this person’s paying with their pay-per-click to influence into there. And above all of this is still the AI answers anyways.

John Clendenning [00:33:47]:

Now, what we’ll find is in a local search, if it’s very raw, old school, near me, the people still kind of grunting it through and not having these conversations, Google kind of plays down the, um, AI recommendations a little bit more and plays up the old school. But that whole intent is changing. More and more people are just asking questions, and they’re not even on Google, they’re on ChatGPT. None of this even matters there, right? So, right, then we’ve got the Google Maps and local service ads are tied together at the hip. That was about 2 years ago, 2 and a half years ago, almost in November. Google Like, local service had their own— local service ads, Google Guarantee, had their own reviews. And then, so you’d have different review count. They’d pull in your Google Maps reviews if you connected them, but they’d have their own reviews and they’d have their own count.

John Clendenning [00:34:26]:

So on one, you’d have 137 reviews, the other one you have 89. Why do I got more reviews on my local service ads? Because some people would leave reviews just in there. Google decided that was silly. So what they did is they connected local service ads and, um, your Google Maps. You have to have a positive rating on Google Maps to even be allowed to be Google Guaranteed, right? And any— as you get reviews, it’s the same ecosystem. The other thing it means as well, it’s also the same radius system. So if your Google Maps does not rank two towns over, having your local service ads turned on over there not really a smart idea. Hopefully your pay-per-click company or whoever’s doing that for you understands that.

John Clendenning [00:35:03]:

Because there is going to be other carpet cleaners much closer with better Google Maps listings that are within that 10, 15-mile radius for the search terms as well. So yeah, Google Maps and local service ads are now a one-two punch. So we do recommend every client that we work with start off with get the Google Maps optimized right away and start running local service ads to the right areas, the right targets, the right clientele, the higher end, right? Help train the algorithm not to have all the tire kickers. If you’re not booking any of the guys that are asking for, you know, cheap discount carpet cleaning, The algorithm plus your intent plus, you know, archiving them and, and all of those kinds of cool things that you do with LSA we talked about on a different call starts moving you towards the ones that say yes. You also geo-target better and stuff like that as well. And next thing you know, you do get Golf Course Road because that’s where people who want what you have, who’ve seen the marketing you’ve put out there, who’ve had multi-touches and go, I know those guys, let me call them, even if they came through local service ads, they had 3 choices and they go, I know Power Plus, right? Or I happen to know Coconut Cleaning. Yeah, that’s the guy with the big coconut on the side of the van. Let’s call those guys.

John Clendenning [00:36:22]:

They seem good. I’ve heard about them everywhere, right? So that plays a role as well. How AM impacts search results. So old school, like a year ago, old school, right? You had your local service ads, AdWords, you had your Google Maps, and then you had your organic. We talked about that for, for years, right? You want to be— when people go to Google, which less are going to Google, just so you know, but when people go to Google, you wanted to have all of these covered. So if they stopped here, you got them, but the right ones. If they stop the pay-per-click, you got them as well, right? Maximize your opportunity to generate a qualified lead. Write your ad in a way You know, if, if, if all your competitors are 3 rooms and a hall for $99, write an ad.

John Clendenning [00:37:08]:

We fix $99 carpet cleaning. Like, be smart about it. Do good marketing, right? But also make sure that you’ve maximized your radius of your Google Maps listing by having pictures from different areas around town, having stories, having blog or Google posts about different areas around town, having it tied to your website properly. Like, there’s stuff you have to do, the stuff that, you know, I guess a company could manipulate and try and do fake map, fake driving directions and stuff like that to get, to get you, you know, temporarily ranking until they— you get caught and they, they take you out of the maps. But done properly, done properly, um, you just be authentic and get real comments from real people and, and real pictures and real jobs and real reviews and done well, you can start moving wider around town by having the right content instead of like, and provide that to anybody who’s working with you on that. So they can do their posts, they can do their this, they can do their entity stacks and all the really cool things that help and citations. And we’ll talk about that in a minute as well. They can do all of that, but they can’t do everything.

John Clendenning [00:38:17]:

They can’t force fake to happen easily. There’s still a two-way street done well. It’s, you still got to run a real business, right? But now visibility is filtered before the click even happens. So selection is narrowing. We’ve got AI overview layer, paid AI LSA layer, paid search layer, then the Google Maps, then the organic validation layer. And all of that is feeding this guy. Right? That’s our little Carpet Cleaner Marketing Master AI friend. So all of it’s feeding that guy because he’s giving the answers to people.

John Clendenning [00:38:57]:

And that’s again, Google, but that’s not even, that’s just all of it is being filtered and funneled into less and less showing. Paid visibility is becoming part of the AI stack. You have to pay to play as well. Google Maps, you can pay to get into Google Maps with your pay-per-click ads, but you also want to be adding your story and content into pay-per-click as well, right? There’s, there’s ways to do all of that. So Google is blending AI overviews, local service ads, Maps, and pay-per-click placements. They’re blending them now, right? Paid placements are increasingly integrated in AI summaries positioned above Google Maps, triggered in high-intent conversational queries, conversational queries, and blended with organic traffic. So visibility in 2026 is now layered. It’s not, oh, I’m really good in Google Maps.

John Clendenning [00:39:49]:

Mm, you got one, sort of. Mm, how you doing everywhere else? Because it doesn’t matter anymore, right? So hopefully your SEO companies have been telling you this stuff. Hopefully you understand if your phones are quieting down, it’s for a whole bunch of reasons. People have gone to ChatGPT. Do you know how to get mentioned in as a choice when somebody asks their LLM or they ask their Alexa that’s got AI in it now, or they ask their Google Home that’s got AI in it now, right? Siri is so far behind. I don’t know what’s happened with Apple. So far behind. But everywhere else, leading the charge.

John Clendenning [00:40:30]:

So yeah, you, it’s everywhere now, right? So when you go to, if you haven’t signed up for local service ads or sorry, Google business profile, you go to adwords.google— oh, that’s sorry, that’s the local service one. You want to sign up for local service ads. Sorry, you want to make sure you have a Google Business Profile and you want to sign up for local service ads and connect the two. So that’s what we’re here because you do want to make sure that you are feeding the AI layer, right? So you go to local service ads, sign up, connect, get your insurance and stuff like that. Sort it away and then really make sure that you’re understanding that the paid layer and the maps layer all feed the AI overview layer, the organic layer. You need more and more content. 1, 2, 3 new pages a week of really good, high optimized. You need your pillar pages done well.

John Clendenning [00:41:24]:

What’s a pillar page? A pillar page is not a, we do carpet cleaning in a paragraph and a picture of a generic carpet cleaner, and then a bunch of boxes on the website because you, you found out Wix can make a website once. It’s not a pillar page. It isn’t going to show up anywhere. It isn’t going to tell any stories. You need deep, deep, deep website pages, and then you need supporting pages beside them, and then you need your Google Maps listing to understand that here’s my service, here’s all my subservices for that service, and here’s all my subservice pages, and connect them all together, and then do posts about those. I will show you that Google is strengthening its entity trust signals as well. So your entity, your brand, has become really important in all of this, right? So verified business entities, consistent name, address, phone number everywhere, category accuracy, real review velocity, not spikes. You don’t get 40 reviews, then none, 40 reviews, and then you have a consistent review velocity.

John Clendenning [00:42:25]:

Is more important than a review count. Um, engagement and behavior signals, and behavior signals, right? So people are engaging. There is, um, there is— you’re responding to reviews they’re getting as well. There’s people that are checking out your FAQs and looking for answers to questions and, and, and things like that. Google is prioritizing realness, right? What this means, it’s harder to fake. Harder to fake. Easier to reward structured credibility. AI systems prefer clean data ecosystems and authority compounds over time.

John Clendenning [00:43:02]:

The AI environment rewards verified, structured, and consistent business data. The system is getting harder and harder to manipulate. It’s not something that you just pay somebody. My guy made me number one. Do you know why? No. I got fake reviews. It’s not a good thing either, right? Legitimate operators doing a proper job running the company or hiring somebody who knows how to do that and work with them, done together. Best way to, to deal with all of this.

John Clendenning [00:43:30]:

We’re, we’re— AI is helping the world not be fake anymore as well. So if it was a game for a while, that was, you know, first mover advantage. When, when Google Ads first came out, first people on it pennies a click, pennies a click. Now it’s $15 a click, just for a click, 5 clicks to get a phone call. Still worth it if you know your math and know your numbers and you know how to hold on to a client and stay in touch with them that they stick around for years and years and are worth $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 lifetime value. Totally worth it. If what I just said is meaningless or you don’t know what that is, it’s not a good environment for you. Right? So, Yeah, pay-per-click was cheap.

John Clendenning [00:44:10]:

There was— back in the day, you could do keyword stuffing on your website and rank number one until that was caught, right? Until it matured. There was cheap ads, there was cheap Facebook, cheap backlinks, until there wasn’t. Local service ads first showed up, that was cheap. Facebook ads first showed up, that was cheap, until it matured and wasn’t. And then you had to be real, a real marketer again. There’s no, there’s, there’s no, no shortcuts, right? You might get away with it for a little bit, but as soon as you don’t get away with it, if you didn’t find the right customers and build the right business, it wasn’t just an advantage that got you to the next level and then you hung on to them as that faded away. That’s one of your 20 poles in the water. Hey, that worked for a little bit, you know, that kind of thing.

John Clendenning [00:44:52]:

But we’ve found great customers. If that was your way of getting a job and not a customer that came back, a client that came back again and again and again, You got a job and never— and chased new people all the time. I’ve watched guys get to $20,000 a month with Facebook ads and then back to zero and go out of business when Facebook ads became expensive or stopped working or got competitive because it was one pole in the water and it was all transactional. So the days of transactional, standing in front of a freight train of money because people have low interest rates and all that, all gone. Back to how grandpa ran the business where Things are more expensive, things are harder, people are more skeptical, people are hanging onto their pennies more, people are more worried about the world around them, then what do you do? Right? So if your map visibility has slowed, which a lot of people it has, ask yourself this. Am I set up where I’m trying to rank? Right? If you’re going to rank 5 or 10 miles, to start and the best customers are 25 miles away, do you really want to clean for your neighbors? That’s the question I always ask. Does my business information look clean? Am I earning trust consistently? Does my profile look natural or manipulated? Right? The pictures, are they real or are they AI-generated slop or, you know, Like, do you have a team of like, you know, like Colgate commercial looking technicians? And when you show out, they show up, you know, Kyle shows up in his baggy jeans and a floppy t-shirt and a hat, you know, on backwards. And maybe just a little teardrop tattoo.

John Clendenning [00:46:39]:

Who knows? You know what I mean? Right. Would Google see me as the safe choice? An AI-driven environment map rewards clarity, consistency, and credibility, not shortcuts. The 4 signals that drive map visibility: optimize and structure your Google Business Profile. Clear categories, accurate services, complete data. Most of those— the Google Business Profiles that we audit, even ones that came from other, other, other agencies, don’t have this figured out at all. Build entity consistency across the web. Your name, address, phone number, locations. You audit your competitors.

John Clendenning [00:47:21]:

You know the local citations, national citations, competitor citations, and you make sure you have all of those and then more. Cross-platform validation. Earn consistent, consistent review velocity. Real reviews, steady growth, natural engagement. Answer them all, not with, ‘Thanks so much for the great review.’ Next one. Thanks so much for the great review. No, answer them for real. Hey, really appreciate cleaning for you.

John Clendenning [00:47:47]:

The technician George said you guys were awesome, um, and can’t wait to come back and service you again. All the best, you know, hope your dog gets better soon. Like, wow. Align website intent with map signals. On-page clarity, service pages, conver— Conversational relevance, right? Map visibility today is built on structured trust, not shortcuts. There is a lot of connections that need to go back and forth, right? So actually, I’m going to show you this. Um, so don’t believe me, this is the 2026 local search ranking factors by Darren Shaw. Whitespark gets together every single year, going down here.

John Clendenning [00:48:33]:

With the top 150 SEO gurus on planet Earth, right? And they all feed in what’s working right now to rank, right? And if you look at this, for example, this one’s kind of cool. These are just the top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, top 8. I was going to show you how deep this is, right? Local Maps Pack, the signals, review, like your Google Business Profile signals, are the most important. Do you even know what that is? 32%. Your reviews are only 20% of the weighting of where you, where you rank. On-page signals from your website, 15%. Behavioral signals of people you engaging, link signals from like press releases and, and other, other tools, citation signals, personalization, and social signals. Again, that’s just the top 8.

John Clendenning [00:49:24]:

Now, ranking your website On-page signals. Well, it’s number 3 here, but it’s number 1 there, like, like with a bullet. Linking signals, even more important. Behavior signals. GBP signals helps your website a little bit. Now let’s look at AI. On-page signals again, your website, very important to help AI, but it deals with that. Then reviews.

John Clendenning [00:49:45]:

Oh, number 2, not just on Google, but everywhere. Oh, now we’ve got kind of, kind of, we’re doing a little bit of this and then we’re doing a little bit of this. Then citation signals, really important for AI, right? So where citations, people, oh, they’re slipping, they’re not quite as important. Well, they’re good for websites, they’re good for Google Maps, and they’re great for AI. But these, this is the mix of just the top 8. What do I mean by the top 8? Let’s go down and see how many. So local maps pack. When we work with clients, this is how many things we’re thinking about.

John Clendenning [00:50:19]:

Well, no, it keeps going. Just wait for a second. That is the 180— I think we— 87— 187 different factors weighted that help a Google Maps listing rank according to us And according to the top SEOs in the world, they just track, hey, what’s helping you this year? And they all talk about it and it gets weighted. Everybody’s got slightly different opinion, but across hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of clients and sites and decades of doing that, right? So optimize structure for your Google Business Profile. Make sure that you have a login to your Google Business Profile. Update your name to your to read company name and don’t add keywords. If you add keywords, Google will suspend your listing because your, your business name has to match your doing business as. Doesn’t have to be a corporate name.

John Clendenning [00:51:22]:

You don’t have to put the LLCs and stuff like that if you’ve got a DBA, right? So you could have John and Jenny, you know, LLC running Shine and Clean Carpet Cleaning. Well, then Shine and Clean Carpet Cleaning, you don’t have to do John and Jenny LLC, right? You can have a DBA. You’re at your— add your website address. This creates important inbound link. If you have multiple offices and locations, then you want to make sure that you actually add a link to the location page on your website. Use a local number. 800 numbers won’t do the trick. Google or— yeah, Google Business Profile allow you to have a tracking number in the number one spot.

John Clendenning [00:52:03]:

And your real number in number 2. But 800 numbers don’t do the trick. You got to be local. Local address, no PO boxes or UPS stores. You can do a service area business. It is actually proven that having an address does help rank a little bit better. It’s one of the signals, not all end-all be-all, but— and you want to upload photos, real, as many as possible. Personal photos, pictures of yourself, the owner, the staff, the office, of the customers, the trucks.

John Clendenning [00:52:30]:

You know, pictures of your work, pictures, you know, people connect and resonate with, with the pictures. But when you upload them as well, you’re also having a bunch of metadata into the pictures that Google picks up on when you load them up there and list your, your exact hours of operation and services offered, right? So you get to there by just going to, you know, as long as you’re logged into the, the Google account that owns your business listing, all you do is type your business name in and you’re actually going to get your whole Google Business Profile. They don’t have a separate dashboard now. That’s where it’s built. Easier to get to. I just drag and drop your photos in, update photos. It’s good to like, you know, you want to fill all the photo categories up, but you also want to be adding new photos. You want to look at your photos from time to time and make sure they’re strategic, kind of get rid of dull and dud ones and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:53:20]:

Make your photos strategic, but keep them updated. You want to make sure you know what your featured photo is so that— I’ll go back one— that this image right here is actually the one you, you, you want to see. So you can do that as well. You want to keep an eye on your performance. How often are you being found in search? What words are you being found for? You’ll notice that, you know, you might not be getting found for any tile and grout terms at all. You might not be getting found for any pet urine terms at all. You want to see what you’re actually being found for other than just your business name., right? And then how many people are clicking through to your website, and then how many people are, um, calling your number, checking for directions, all that kind of stuff, right? So, you know, you want to make sure that as people get reviews that you’re answering the reviews. You also want to make sure that you’ve got all the— choosing the right categories, right, for the services you do.

John Clendenning [00:54:11]:

What is your primary category and what is your secondary categories, right? So you want to be careful of not overstuffing categories as well., but you’ve got a lot of choices, right? If you don’t do water tank cleaning, do not click on water tank cleaning. Look at all the choices there, but you want to make sure that you’re— you’ve got a tight category selection that, that is about the services and secondary services you provide. Update your photos and add them on a consistent basis. Leverage Google Posts by posting at least once a week. We recommend once a day. We post once a day for our clients, right? And have it tie back to blog posts and articles and Happy customer stories and neighborhoods and, and all kinds of stuff. Really well-structured posts, right, with, with, with good data and structure that can be picked up easily by AI and by the algorithm. Respond to all reviews, all reviews, 100% of the time, and answer questions that get posted.

John Clendenning [00:55:06]:

AI or Google’s kind of sunsetting this whole question-answer thing. They’re actually using AI to say, you know what, you don’t even get to answer your own questions. We’re going to answer them for you. So you better make sure your data is filled out well because Google is kind of saying, hey, we’re not even going to let you answer the questions. We’re going to let AI answer the questions. What if AI is wrong because your information in the backend isn’t full and right and complete? Or the information on your website or the information on social media and everywhere else it’s going to check, right? So you want to make sure that’s all good. You want lots of quality citations across the web. That’s your structured, unstructured, local, niche relevant.

John Clendenning [00:55:40]:

If you don’t know what that is, you need to get with somebody because you need to have a citation audit of all your competitors. You need to be at least matching them and then having all the other ones as well. Some of them are really, really high-powered citations, edu, like education sites. You can get unstructured citations if you went and flipped hamburgers or pancakes at a charity auction and they put your business name down and your, your phone number and your address, like your whole, your whole name, address, phone number. NAP, if you have a service area business and your address is hidden, then you can still have, you know, an unstructured citation as well. The more of those you get, um, it helps Google anchor your identity and your listing. Cross-reference of company NAP— again, name, address, phone number— and limit duplicate or incorrect business information. You don’t want to be saying the same thing over and over again on your listing.

John Clendenning [00:56:29]:

You don’t have double listings. You don’t want to have an old company used to have that you closed at the exact same address, that’s the same type of business, without having the whole thing scrubbed because it’s going to confuse the internet. You want to be very, very consistent or get help being more consistent. You want to make sure that your data aggregators, right, and they keep changing. Some guys like, um, what do you call it, um, Foursquare bought out a couple of these guys and now, right, Info Group and stuff like that. So you want to make sure that you’re, you know, your data aggregators have all of your right information because there’s lots of directories that get fed from those alone. You can’t get on the directory yourself. Right.

John Clendenning [00:57:07]:

Tools that can help you with citations are obviously Yext, Whitespark, the one I just showed you, Moz Local, BrightLocal. These things are all like, you know, $400, $500, $600, $700 a year. Some of them a little bit more. If you want to get a little bit deeper, you can get up to $1,500 a year to lock in your citations. And do all that right. We do that for our clients, plus we do our manual and all that kind of stuff. So we provide included in our packaging a $1,500 a year service that is way better than all of these because we’re actually doing a lot of manual, a lot of auditing, all that kind of stuff. These guys don’t tend to audit, but they’re a place that you can go and, you know, research and get some citations and things like that.

John Clendenning [00:57:48]:

So run a free citation scan. You can go to carpetcleanermarketingmasters.com/scan. And you’ll see a lovely woman like this. You put your business name in. If you’re a service area business, it might not be able to find you. Google’s API is a little weird. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But you can put your name in.

John Clendenning [00:58:02]:

Put your— if it doesn’t find your— pull your business on the list, put the rest of the information in, the actual known address of where the Google postcard went and stuff like that. And you’re going to get a scan that is going to find your citations. It’s going to find your visibility online. We run these when we do, when we do audits for clients or for, for, for people that are interested in having a chat with us and doing consultations and stuff like that. We’ll run a deep audit. We’re going to, we’re going to check your website out and, and all that kind of stuff, find that your brand voice is right, like all kinds of cool stuff. So definitely worth running an audit, a scan to see how your citations are doing. That would be down here.

John Clendenning [00:58:39]:

But then you also get to see a whole bunch of the other stuff as well. And then So you’ll, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll see again what people are saying about you, any errors, what’s affecting your visibility. So, uh, manually claim and optimize Google Business Listing, obviously, um, leverage tools, um, and APIs to get into the top 50 if you want. Again, some of those, those, those tools I showed you before have an API where it kind of locks it and prevents people from changing it. Um, and you can do that all at once, but there’s a, there’s a service fee. Or you do it manually and you, you, you, you go to each one of them and you keep an eye on them because they can change. Somebody, they can allow users to change your data. Oh, he’s not at that address.

John Clendenning [00:59:19]:

Oh, that’s not the right phone number. APIs help you lock that down a bit. So we do that for our clients. Get listed in all the major data aggregators, right? Use tools, as we said, to help you with some of that. And the top citations for carpet cleaners. There’s a lot of them here. And again, this isn’t like, like, Thumbtack, they bounce around all the time. This was the latest list we got.

John Clendenning [00:59:41]:

Best Brands, best, you know, all the sites. And then, you know, but LivingSocial and MapQuest, they kind of move up and down and around. Porch, pretty good actually still. Groupon, not so good anymore, right? So again, they bounce around, but there’s a bunch of different ways to kind of figure out the top citations for carpet cleaners. But this list here was one of the most recent ones. I’d still pick at it a little bit and say, not really sure about that one, because we audit constantly and we know what, what actually works. These citations for carpet cleaners: ISSA, Jeff Gross, go buddy, right? So join the ISSA. That’s our association for the industry, right? International Janitorial Service Association, Rug Care Directory.

John Clendenning [01:00:23]:

Some of these are still around. Some of them have closed up. These are most of the ones are still around that here, Allen’s Best Carpet Cleaning, all that kind of stuff. There’s, there’s ways to kind of find the carpet cleaning ones. This list is still pretty, you know, again, it’s still pretty relevant. But as I said, some people just stopped running a directory, but they were, they kind of ran it themselves for their own reason. Other ones are set up like ISSA and stuff like that on purpose. So some of them, when it’s, when it’s related to a, some sort of a backend service or association, those ones will stick around.

John Clendenning [01:00:52]:

And sometimes other ones are just, they kind of got important for a while. And then the person running it decided not to run it anymore. So that happens from time to time, right? Earn consistent review velocity, not just reviews. Um, leverage your driving, um, driving, um, strategy for driving consistent reviews. Sorry, leverage tools to request feedback that lead to more reviews. I talked about this on our reputation training. I’m not a big fan of sending somebody a link to go give me a Google review. I call it review hounding.

John Clendenning [01:01:25]:

I think it’s terrible. You don’t need thousands and thousands of reviews. It’s not the reason why you’re number one in Google Maps. And again, number one in Google Maps doesn’t matter as much anymore. Being in Google Maps wide as you possibly can for all your service terms and having the right information and having the posts and having all that kind of stuff so that it feeds AI. That’s now 2026. 2025 this time, maybe being top of Google Maps. For 5, 10, 15 miles around your, your pin drop.

John Clendenning [01:01:53]:

Yeah, pretty important. You’re knowing by the quiet phone calls it’s less important, right? So you want— I love feedback first. Every time your customer is done, tell them that they’re going to be— get a feedback form and they’re going to be entered in a feedback contest, right? And then once they fill out that form, then— and you know that they’re happy, 4 or 5 stars, not a 1, 2, 3 star. If 1, 2, 3 star, You’ve had a form, you had a survey. You asked them how the whole experience with your company went, not just write me a review, right? And then once they fill out the feedback, how was it booking with us? How was it with the technician? You ask the really good questions that build a really great business and a really great rapport with your client. You ask them what other services might they be interested in future information and savings on, and you get them to tell you what they want you to sell them next. That’s a really good way to use a survey. That’s psychological marketing done properly, and you’ll build your business doing that.

John Clendenning [01:02:45]:

Then you say, hey, thank you so much. The thank you page. Would you mind doing us a favor? Now you get a chance to ask for a favor because they already did it. They already filled out the survey, right? Would you mind doing us a favor? Could you take your kind words and post them on one or all of these sites? Google, Facebook. You know, if they’re Yelpers, you just say, if you’re Yelp, you know what to do. Search us this way and, and write your review. You can’t give them a link to Yelp or Yelp will ban your listing and get rid of the reviews, but you can send them to the Better Business Bureau anywhere. Now what you’ll find is people will— the happy customers, the same number of people will get you a review.

John Clendenning [01:03:20]:

They filled out a quick little survey, take them a minute or two, and then they get a thank you, and the thank you gets them to write a review. You’re still going to get reviews out of people, but you’re going to also get them on more platforms. And you now got all of these testimonials, like 50-60% of your clients leaving you actual feedback because it’s internal. They don’t feel public about it. 10% are still only going to write reviews, right? If you’ve got 500 reviews, I guarantee you probably hit up 5,000 clients to get the 500 reviews. If you’re the owner-operator, you might only have to hit up 2,000, 2,500 clients to get 500 reviews because you’re going to ask differently than having a technician, right? But train your techs to deliver a world-class experience. That word should actually be in red and bold. And you’ve got to deliver a, what I always called a Disney experience.

John Clendenning [01:04:05]:

My good buddy Tony, came out and said, you know, we call that a hotel experience because he worked in the hotel industry. You know, every staff of a hotel step back, hold the elevator door, you know, no, you first, ma’am, how can I help you with that? You know, all that kind of stuff. You got to deliver that level of experience. That’s trained. That’s trained, right? That’s not just a given. You hire people and you train them to work that well in a hotel. You hire people and train them to work that well in customers’ homes, right? And then you can plant the seed, make a call after the service to walk them through the review process. So we always did it where we told them that the, um, we left them a flyer saying, hey, you can scan this, the office is going to follow up.

John Clendenning [01:04:43]:

You can beat them to it by scanning this here. You’ll enter into our feedback contest. We’d really just like to know how your whole experience with our company was today. And I wouldn’t mind if you could, if you’d mention my name when you fill that out. I get some brownie points back at the office. There’s your script for the technician, right? Then Within minutes or an hour later, however it wants to be timed, they get a text message asking them to complete, you know, were you happy? Yes or no? Give us some info, right? And then they can write a review. They can write, they write their feedback, write a review, do all that kind of stuff. Now that would be sent to the office.

John Clendenning [01:05:15]:

So if the next day Heather in the office didn’t see, hey, the guys did 7 jobs yesterday. And I only got 2 feedback. Guess who she’s calling? Next day follow-up call. Old school. Hey, just checking in on the work we did. Was everything done professionally to your satisfaction? Great. You got a few minutes? I got a couple quick questions to ask you. I noticed you didn’t fill it or we haven’t seen a feedback form come in yet.

John Clendenning [01:05:39]:

So I just wanted to kind of go through a couple questions for you. Take 1 minute. Awesome. Thank you. And how would you, you know, in your own words, you know, was that a 4-star service, 5-star service? Be honest. Because they said nice things to this point. Okay, great. And in your own words, how would you, you know, what would you say a little about the experience? Great, perfect.

John Clendenning [01:05:59]:

I have logged that in. You’re now in our feedback contest. She just filled out the form for them. And yes, I’ve just put your email in there and you’re into our feedback contest. And what you’re going to get a thank you message. That thank you message will also allow you to take your comments and post them online as reviews. Of course, you don’t have to, but other people who are thinking about our company will go online to read reviews, and it’d be just— it’d be really nice if, um, if, if yours was out there as well. So don’t have to, but you have a link to Google, Facebook, and a couple other things.

John Clendenning [01:06:28]:

Um, you’ll see that coming through shortly. Thanks so much. So if they didn’t do it themselves, we did it with them, right? You get volume like crazy and a personal touch. You say it right with a good script, you’re running a great company. It takes— it should take It, you should take it much farther. Sorry. What we’re talking about is trust engineering. So a structured system that strengthens your authority across Google Maps and AI search.

John Clendenning [01:06:52]:

So you become the obvious choice, not just getting more reviews, but engineering your reputation, engineering your trust. Right? So you have a request for feedback from every customer. We just talked about benefits of feedback. You end up with more online reviews, but you end up with a better feeling customer as well. It’s been proven. So there’s a bunch of tools out there. Ours is called Repugnition. People fill it out, they get the survey, they get the reviews, they get the feedback, all that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:07:20]:

And then, and there’s a bunch of different ways to do it. If somebody says, I just want more Google reviews, okay, well, we can just send the text first to Google reviews and then ask for the feedback by email secondary if you really want. That can be done, right? That’s how some of these other ones kind of work. Oh, we’ll just send a text. Right? And then they keep everything on their system nearby now, and Customer Lobby and BirdEye and all that kind of stuff, right? So we built this years ago with a whole bunch of other, um, SEO companies, a couple million dollars in development, uh, and growing. And Repugnition does it the right way with the right psychology. And then we also market out the feedback and the reviews on social media, on Google Maps, on citation sources and directories.. So anywhere anybody goes, there’s some pictures, there’s some text, there’s some words of encouragement.

John Clendenning [01:08:10]:

We even do a video on a regular basis and stuff like that. So you’re just really dominating the marketplace. Align your website. On-page is a huge local maps ranking factor. I showed you that. So each pages are about each type of service you offer, not one page with all your services. Mention your keywords and cities served. On your homepage, in your title tags, in your H1s, in your— and make sure you’re mentioning your keywords and your— and the cities that you serve in your pillar content and your supporting pillar content as well.

John Clendenning [01:08:42]:

Service area pages with links to neighborhoods, points of interest, things nearby, all of that kind of stuff. If your team is near a monument, park the car, take a picture, throw that up on a secondary page or a blog post. All of that is just really helping feel right about it, right? That’s how we run real businesses. So full NAP in your footer— name, address, phone number— or on, you know, or on homepage link to your Google Maps listing. Make sure you have local schema embedded properly, all the right schema connecting all that together. There’s a lot of technical stuff to build a proper website. This is not a Wix website that you throw up for $40 a month and go, I got a website. No, this is actually building a proper business.

John Clendenning [01:09:23]:

Right? So you’ve got service pages, you’ve got schema, you’ve got city names mentioned all over, different cities, different areas, right? You’ve got service area pages, you got links, you got secondary, you got point of interest, all of that stuff. So let’s recap. The visibility is shifting from ranking to AI selection. Google Maps is becoming an AI feeder. That’s why your calls are going down, and they’re going to continue. This isn’t a blip, this isn’t a slowdown, this is a fundamental change. Go listen to all the recent trainings. Conversation is the new search intent.

John Clendenning [01:10:04]:

Are you in the conversation? Like, that’s a, that’s a bit old marketing axiom, that marketing is just, is all about entering the conversation that’s already going on in somebody’s head. Now it’s about entering the the conversation at all? Are you even in the conversation with AI? The great divide, reactive versus authority-driven business solutions. A lot of businesses are still in the reactive mode. Oh, things are slow. Things are slowing down. I know what to do. And while somebody in your marketplace is going, that’s fine, I’ll take it all, right? And it’s happening. You need to be telling real stories.

John Clendenning [01:10:37]:

You need to be doing all the stuff we just talked about. So takeaways. Hopefully you have some takeaways. Next step, you can audit your marketing. There’s two ways. There is the scan, and then you can also go to our website and download the Ultimate AI Marketing Checklist. Fill out the checklist, see if your website and your marketing is AI ready, right? We’ve had this out for about a year now. One of the first people that even talk about being AI ready.

John Clendenning [01:11:03]:

Now it’s essential, right? Implementation is everything. We all have good ideas. But if you don’t put them in place and you don’t execute, they don’t get done. The key to growth is taking immediate action. Marketing is not a side activity. It is the business you’re in. The best businesses are not the best operators. They don’t have the best truck mount.

John Clendenning [01:11:24]:

They don’t always have the best wand. Oh, I got the zipper. I got— well, yeah, that’s nice. I got more customers and they’re all millionaires, right? So they are the best marketers who then need to refine operations as they scale. You market better, you get busy, you solve the problems that being busy creates. Better technicians, better systems, better, you know, how do I make sure my guys show up every morning and look good and smell good and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, figure that out. Maybe you need a shirt service that delivers shirts every week. Maybe you need to buy them sick shirts.

John Clendenning [01:12:00]:

Monday to Friday, one to wear when all the other ones are in the laundry, right? What— like, you build operational systems because you’re so busy you have to solve those problems, right? Indoor shoes versus outdoor shoes. Show me your indoor shoes. No, you didn’t bring your indoor shoes. Wear, you know, almost like a bowling alley. Go grab another pair off the shelf. You need to be bringing your indoor shoes every day. That’s one strike against your performance bonus. Think I ever had to do this? Course, because I figured out how to be a marketer of cleaning services, got out the truck pretty quickly, and then I had to manage the business, manage the operations, grow that, create systems in place, read the E-Myth, put it in place, and then hand it off to my ops manager in the company, the office manager, so that I only needed to be available 5, 10 hours a week at the most and could do coaching and consulting and run other businesses.

John Clendenning [01:12:52]:

Right? So what top 3 Google Maps initiatives do you need to implement right now? Do you know how to stay accountable? Everybody’s got a great idea. Everybody’s got a great plan until they get punched in the face, as Mike Tyson says. So do you know how to do this even when, you know, all of a sudden the pump blows out tomorrow and you’re spending, worrying about fixing? Oh crap, all that’s all next month went by. I didn’t do any of that. Right? Reminder, AI is now the great equalizer. AI commoditizes and makes every business look the same. If you don’t stand out, if you don’t stand for something different and compelling, AI will blur you. What do you stand for? What is your risk reversal guarantee, compelling sales proposition, founder story, and impactful branding? Your foundation.

John Clendenning [01:13:37]:

Is it on everything? Is it different? If not, you’re a commodity. It’s a race to the bottom, the lowest price, as the lowest priced consumers have less and less money. The winners are the authentic, trusted businesses nurturing human relationships done well. The best— being the best-known cleaner wins over having discounts and deals all day long, every day. And that’s, that’s by intent. That’s not luck. The best-known cleaner in your marketplace is manufactured. You have a strategy, a marketing strategy to become the best-known cleaner.

John Clendenning [01:14:08]:

If you’re still in the truck, Cool. That happens all the time. I was in the truck until I wasn’t. You still, you start straddling over working in the business and on the business, in the business and a little bit less in. You hire Tommy the tech, he comes out, he gets learned, he gets taught with you, and then now you start working more on the business. You can do a couple more jobs a day, but, and so he’s free, right? He’s free. You hire Tommy the tech, you can do an extra job a day. You got marketing going well.

John Clendenning [01:14:37]:

You just paid for Tommy. Then all of a sudden, you give them Tuesday mornings and you go out and do more on. Then you’re not in the office, not in the office, out in the real world. You go, you start working more on the business. Then you do Thursday afternoons. Now Tommy’s out on Tuesday morning, Thursday afternoons, then all day Fridays if that wants— you want those to be your stop-around days, right? You might work in the evening pulling your database and doing stuff like that. That’s not a day job. Day job is out meeting other businesses and stopping in, meeting and greeting, and doing that kind of stuff and building that the, that part of your business.

John Clendenning [01:15:05]:

And then you do a little bit of office work. And you can eventually, within 3 months, done well with good marketing, good marketing company behind you, good marketing, get out of the truck. But, or you could be 20 years and I meet those as well. Same. Nope. Oh, until I get busier, I can’t do any of this stuff. No, you won’t. Until you do any of the stuff, you won’t get busier.

John Clendenning [01:15:28]:

So customers don’t buy based on price alone. And in fact, it’s about 5th or 6th on the list when you ask customers what caused them to buy. The right customers, the repeat retention, high-value customers, they buy from brands they know, trust, and respect, and then they stick with them as long as you stay in touch with them. They stick with them as long as you stay in touch with them. So there’s an entire blueprint for this. I keep talking about it. The Blueprint for Success. It was the old coaching program I ran in 2007, ’08, ’09, ’10 until I got hired to help the flood restoration company build and sell to Belfor in 8 years for millions and millions and millions of dollars while still running my cleaning companies and all that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:16:06]:

And we’d stop that. So the Blueprint for Success teaches you how to build your lead generation before the sale business from leads, referral partners, a lead database, the right offers, building your foundation. And then there’s the service delivery business. The middle hat you wear, as we say, where from the moment they call or reach out and say, I’m interested, to the moment you go, bye, ma’am. Thanks. See you next time. Or the technician does that whole entire experience window from when they actually enter your world. Before that, you’re in their world, but they’re doing it on their own.

John Clendenning [01:16:39]:

And then once they enter your world by reaching out to the moment you leave, that whole thing needs to be orchestrated, scripted, planned, process and then hand it off to technicians and staff and stuff like that. When somebody calls and books, what do you do between the booking and the day, the moment you show up? If you don’t market in that moment, you’re going to get no-shows. If you market that moment well, you’re going to get twice the job value. It’s just a learning process, right? And then on the back end of that, you’ve got your, your client retention and referral business. It’s a whole separate business. What do you do to recover people that are unhappy? Can you recover them to the point where they are so happy they write a glowing review because there was a spot that came back or a problem. That’s the best way to recover somebody, is make sure that you want them to complain if they have to. You’re going to solve it with bells on and overdeliver.

John Clendenning [01:17:33]:

We call it recipe for recovery. And you’re going to get— you’re going to turn them into a cheerleader because of how well you did that moment. That’s running the great ops of a company, right? So if you’re interested in any of that, we have reopened up the Blueprint for Success coaching for about the price of one job a month. You’re gonna— anything I taught you here, you got, you got more than one customer a month just from being on this free call. Any— for about the price of one new customer, average small customer a month, you can join a program that we will talk about this every single week. We will go through these programs, we’ll go through these trainings, We’ll go through— if you guys were on the winter database training there last week— exactly how to do it and how to use AI to make it 20, 30 minutes, not the 2, 3, 4, 5 weeks it used to take me to sort of build the programs and write the letters the first time. Next year was easy. It was like 20, 30 minutes of time, pick the list, boom, off it goes.

John Clendenning [01:18:27]:

The first of everything was hard. In today’s day and age, the first of everything is a custom GPT a skill, a prompting chain, a way to get it out of your head, because I provide that, because that’s what I do all day long. Our marketing— my world is now building AI and working with AI every minute of every day. So I’ve got Sam on my phone, I’ve got Manny on my Telegram. I’ve got— these are all AI agents that help me do more by large, and I can help anybody else who’s interested as well. So if you’re interested in, um, any of the marketing, becoming the best-known cleaner in your marketplace, ramping up, adding customer database, um, marketings and mailings and stuff like that as well, um, we’ve got Carpet Cleaner Lead Pro, which is your lead nurture automation, ties into things like Service Monster and Housecall Pros. And then we’ve got, um, enhancements around database marketing and outreach marketing and stuff like that with the new one we’re just, uh, beta testing right now. You know, for safe, safe and healthy home, scan here on the side of your van, on a QR code, on door hangers, wherever you want them.

John Clendenning [01:19:34]:

And that starts a two-way conversation with a fully trained AI chatbot that knows everything about your business and just has a conversation. See, see if they’re interested right now for a quote or jump on a call with somebody, get handed off, or they just want some more information about your pet urine recovery guide, all of these kinds of things. So do you want to go into your funnel? Way better than just having a landing page, fill your email out, get Pet Earring Guide. This is now use real human chat built into an AI tool. So anyways, we’ve got all kinds of stuff that we’re helping with because the world’s changing around us and we’re changing as fast as we possibly can as well. So, um, and keeping up with all that, I run the AI Marketing Experts podcast every Friday as well with a host of 4 other, uh, really good friends in this exact same world. Um, so this is, this is the world I’m in and this is the world we can help you with. So If you want to reach out, carpetcleanermarketingmasters.com/schedule.

John Clendenning [01:20:25]:

For sure, if you want to have any comments about any interest in joining the coaching program and learning everything we just talked about and making it easy to implement, lots of ideas, how do you put them in place? How do you stay accountable? You’d be part of accountability group. I was part of an accountability group in 2007, way more than what we’re charging right now. And investing into that program. 30 years ago, I was in part of Howard Partridge’s group. Hey Howard. I was part of Strategies for Success and John Dons and, and, and, and learned how to do all of this stuff because I had to learn it. Michael Gerber, E-Myth, Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad. Not, not just the books, but part of their groups, part of their masterminds.

John Clendenning [01:21:09]:

Learned how to implement and do Profit First, recent one, things like that, right? You’ve got to be a student of growth. Growth. And right now, the world’s changing around us. We’re here to help. So if that— any of that makes sense, love to have you aboard. Um, if there’s anything you need from us at all, don’t hesitate to reach out. Um, definitely love to help you with anything we can. We’re on the cutting edge of this.

John Clendenning [01:21:30]:

I’m one of you. I’ve been in the truck, didn’t even finish high school, went on the road with a band, um, built all of this out of necessity and passion. So if, if that fits into, uh, what you like, then definitely reach out to us. We’re here to help with this massive changing world around us. Keep an eye on our podcast, go to our YouTube channel, check out all the stuff that we’re, uh, we’re putting out there as well. Um, if you want to jump on a podcast and be interviewed, it’s great for Google Maps and all this omnipresence. Reach out to Sarika or the team and see if you qualify to be a podcast guest. Even if you go, I’ve never been on a podcast before, good.

John Clendenning [01:22:03]:

We don’t do it live, we record it. Be a guest on the podcast, let us tell your story, share it out in your local marketplace. You become a local hero, you get more jobs, you look better than your competitors as well. All these little things help. So anyways, any of that make sense? Cool. Would love to have a chat with you. Otherwise, peace out till next time. Thanks so much.