We Discuss Local SEO and Speed to Lead in 2025
Master Local SEO and Speed to Lead techniques that convert searchers into customers instantly. Transform your local marketing today.
In this show, we delve into the key elements of Local SEO and its impact on your business’s online visibility. Discover how optimizing your online presence can attract local customers and drive foot traffic to your store. We also explore the concept of Speed to Lead, explaining why quick responses to inquiries can significantly enhance conversion rates. Join us as we unpack these crucial strategies for success — don’t miss out, watch now.
With Special Guests Ken Tucker From Change Scape Web Agency.
#1 – Ken, can you provide the tribe with some more information on your background and how you got into running a digital marketing agency?
#2 – What have been some of the major changes in Local SEO over the last couple of years?
#3 – What are some of the biggest misconceptions small business owners have about adopting AI, and how do you help them overcome those fears?
#4 – You emphasize that Changescape builds “websites that generate customers.” What are the most critical elements that turn a website from being a digital brochure into a true lead-generating machine?
#5— Are there any AI tools or services you have been using remotely or regularly that you would like to share with the WP-Tonic tribe?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give?
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:01.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 978. In this episode, we’ll be discussing all things local SEO and speed to lead. The guest came on my radar. I thought he would be a great guest to talk about this. I’m sure you have numerous discussions with your clients about this. So I think it’s going to be a great discussion. As we mentioned, we have a special guest. We got Ken Tucker from Change the Scape Web Agency. So, Ken, would you like to just give a quick 10 to 15-second intro? And then, when we move into the main part of the show, you can provide more details about your background. Okay.
[00:01:24.620] – Ken Tucker
Yeah. So I’m Ken Tucker with Change Cape Web. I’m the founder and marketing solution architect. I started my company 20 years ago, so I’ve been involved in digital marketing for the past 20 years or so.
[00:01:36.540] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:45.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Certainly. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own a company called MananaNoMas. We primarily focus on membership and learning websites, working directly with the great folks at WP Tonic.
[00:01:54.820] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. Before we delve into the main course for this great show, I have a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to take the opportunity to point out that we received some great offers from the sponsors, plus a list of the best WordPress plugins that we have personally used, both by Kurt and me. Additionally, we created a list of services aimed at the WordPress professional agency, which will save you a ton of time. You can get all these free goodies by visiting Wp-Tonic.com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. I can see that Ken is already typing to get the offers. I’m just kidding. But go over there. What more could you ask for, my beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. They just love me saying that, Ken. I don’t know why. So, Ken, can you give us some more details about how you got into digital marketing and then started running an agency for a living?
[00:03:19.500] – Ken Tucker
Yeah. I come from an IT background. I previously managed a division that delivered approximately $60 million worth of IT services and solutions annually. To compete and win projects, I needed to build a marketing team. And so I built up our own internal marketing team. That got me hooked on the world of marketing. And so, when I was ready to step away from that, I started my own company and was actually able to get into the world of digital marketing pretty quickly. Initially, when I got involved, it was largely just developing websites and maybe doing some email campaigns. However, with the explosion of social media and Web 2.0 at the time, it transformed everything. I became an early adopter of many of those technologies for small businesses. I work with numerous small businesses.
[00:04:28.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:04:32.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
I, too, work with small businesses. I have two passions. One is moving enterprise eLearning projects over to cheaper platforms, and then the other is startups. I love working with startups. What do you think are some of the major changes startups and local businesses are looking at with SEO, especially over the last couple of years? It seems to have really changed a lot.
[00:04:56.220] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, I mean, yes or no. What’s interesting What’s interesting is if you’ve been doing good practice, white hat best practices SEO, that still works every bit as well today, and maybe even more so today, because the large language models actually want that information. So when I talk When you talk about local SEO, I mean, obviously, if you’re a business that does business in a local area, the Google business profile is absolutely critical. But beyond that, if you’re going to build on top of that, you really need to have a content driven strategy. And that content driven strategy is working really well. Now, you have to adapt because we’re in a world where people are asking many more questions through a variety of different devices, whether it’s AI through ChatGPT, whether it’s through Apple or Amazon devices or the computer or whatnot, it’s become question based. So I think a huge missed opportunity that a lot of small businesses have in particular is if they do frequently ask questions, they’re really simple, and maybe they’re five. You really need to get in-depth with your frequently asked questions. For Every product or service or solution or maybe even geographic area.
[00:06:19.180] – Ken Tucker
Build those out because that is fantastic information for the transformative world that we see as AI comes into play. And it also, a content Content strategy, publishing on multiple platforms, that is future proofing the direction that AI is going. I had ran Fishkin on my podcast a couple of months ago. He’s talking about zero click search. Right now, local businesses are largely immune to zero click search because what’s really being hammered are those informational searches like how old is David Ducoubne or Ricky Gervais, somebody like that. Right. Those are really being hit hard. But for local businesses, that hasn’t rolled down yet. Now, the search volume in Google still is holding pretty well for most of our clients, where ChatGPT is not really pulling away a lot of search traffic and a lot of website traffic for local businesses.
[00:07:30.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. I mean, I think about my own buying tendencies, right? If I’m looking for something local, I’m on Google Maps. Are they open? Are they close? Where are they at? Do they have a website? And then click through, typically. Whereas if I’m looking to shop at something in local is not my focus, well, then I just do a Google search or ask an LLM. I’m interested in your answer, and I want to just get some clarification for the listeners and viewers. When you said publish on multiple platforms, So most businesses have their website, right? And then are you saying do the newsletter and LinkedIn and then have a medium page and stuff like that? Is that what you’re referring to?
[00:08:12.280] – Ken Tucker
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that’s 10 years ago, press releases were a great strategy for SEO. But what we found is that most of the large press release systems that are out there, I won’t mention them by name because they might get They got at us. They kept the SEO for themselves. But what we’ve seen over the last year and a half, two years is really this concept of mentions has become super important. So we’ve always had citations where being listed in business directories, having that information accurate, the name, address, phone number has always been an important thing. It still continues to be an important element. So you want to publish to those, but also Also just publishing content that is going to generate signals from other websites, even if you don’t get an inbound link, getting a signal is still very beneficial. So there’s a new revitalized strategy around press releases, not using the traditional tools, but just publishing articles and getting those out there on nice authoritative sites that will provide the do follow links back. Now, not all of them will, but some of them will. And And if you’re targeting the right set of publishers when you’re putting that content out there, if you target 20, you’re probably going to get at least a couple of quality links, but you’re certainly going to get mentions from all of those if they accept the article.
[00:09:48.540] – Ken Tucker
And the other thing is, right now, social media has become revitalized as well, thanks to TikTok. It’s really become much much more about interest-based as opposed to the platforms historically determining what you’re going to see based on who you’re following or who’s following you. So it’s a little bit more wide open. But most importantly, I I think is putting content on YouTube, especially Shorts. Youtube Shorts are performing really well right now, and Google loves Google. So publishing content on your Google business profile, questions and answers through your Google profile, regular posts through your profile, making sure you’re publishing pictures and videos as it makes sense for your business is really important. And then absolutely I think every business should come up with a video strategy. We have a content domination strategy we use where we start with video first. Take that video, transcribe it into a blog, transcribe it. Also, Also, rewrite it to turn it into a blog post. Put the video embed on the website, put the blog and the transcription on the website. Now you’ve got an entire set of repurposed content that you can also use to turn it into short form videos.
[00:11:15.700] – Ken Tucker
Every blog post gives you five to seven image-based posts. If you wanted to do that, hitting each subhead that you have is actually probably a pretty good candidate for a social social media post. And just generating that. And even though social media channels typically don’t generate the signals that we’re looking for, it still increases your visibility. And the more traffic you get on your site and the longer you can keep people on your site with robust set of content, that is an element of SEO for sure.
[00:11:54.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Perfect. Thanks. Jonathan?
[00:11:56.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ve got a few follow-through questions, and I’m going to let Kurt answer and have question three because I’m going to have a few follow-through questions here. Ken, I’ve just moved lately. Over the last couple of months, I’ve moved states. Quite a big move, Ken. I’ve had to employ the services of a lot of local service providers, local service business in the new area that I’ve moved to. As somebody trying… Obviously, I have some resources to ask for local recommendations, but other times I’ve just utilized the services of Google. I know is that there was a smaller minority of the service providers that really get it, or they’ve hired our agency that really gets it. Their Google business really showing up on the Google Map pack. They’ve got a lot of reviews. When they get a bad review, they answer the bad review in a logical, fair way. They’ve got a decent website. It doesn’t have to have a ton of articles, but they’ve got some evergreen, good quality evergreen content on there. They’ve got some decent videos. They make it easy to have their phone number prominent, all the fundamentals. But then I would say that’s about 20 to 25 %.
[00:13:40.460] – Jonathan Denwood
But the larger their web presence is awful, absolutely awful. First of all, would you agree with that? Is that based on your experience, similar? I would imagine in more, I’ve moved a small town. It’s not a major city. In major cities, is that percentage very different? And would you fundamentally agree with what I’ve just outlined?
[00:14:11.840] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, I know. I think it always amazes me the number of small businesses that don’t even have a website. It used to be that you could get a website through your Google business profile. Well, Google took that away a little while ago. And so people, a lot of businesses are trying to live off of having rented property. You don’t own your Google business profile, ultimately. I mean, the number of suspensions that you see just willy-nilly because of AI reviews from either Facebook for a business page or Google for a Google business profile page is starting to become really quite alarming to me. I mean, I’ve had clients that they moved to a new address. They demonstrated all of the things that you’re supposed to do for proving to Google that you’re actually physically located where you’re at for your Google business page. And they got suspended because they updated it, and they did nothing wrong, absolutely nothing wrong. And that takes sometimes months to get fixed. So I wouldn’t want to rely on that. I mean, obviously, Google business This profile page is a massively important piece of the equation for small businesses. But again, keep in mind, you do not own it.
[00:15:41.040] – Ken Tucker
You’re ultimately at the mercy of Google. And you’re also ultimately at the mercy of Facebook. So if you’re not taking control of your own online presence, you’re very vulnerable. I would agree that I don’t even know if it’s 20 %, Jonathan. I think that It might be high.
[00:16:01.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I was being generous there, but I didn’t want… It’s very difficult to quantify. I’m not expert in this area like you, Ken.
[00:16:08.520] – Ken Tucker
Yeah. I do a lot of website reviews and website And in almost every case, there are some major flaws that can be found. And now there’s a lot of good that a lot of people are doing. And I want to complement a lot of businesses that are out there that are doing a lot of good. And even if it’s only 50 % good and 50 % have issues, still, I want to recognize that people are putting forth some quality products that are out there. But there are just a lot of missed opportunities is really the key.
[00:16:45.140] – Jonathan Denwood
It was what amazed me was, it might be less than 20 %, it probably is, but those that were getting it, their websites were so, so much better than the in the local area. It was obvious either they knew a lot about digital marketing or they hired an agency that knew a lot about digital marketing. It was an attractive website. It loaded quick. It operated really well on mobile devices. It had the phone number everywhere. They were tending to use third-party platforms to book schedule an appointment. Then the platform they were using was texting me to confirm the appointment. It was texting me too many times because obviously they were worried I wasn’t going to be there for the appointment, but they had it all integrated. It was nice to see. I actually identified a couple of the platforms, and they did provide website But a lot of the companies was still using WordPress, but they were integrating it with one of these third-party systems that text had the booking inside of it. I agree. I think video also has become really important, isn’t it? My understanding is that Google now is indexing Instagram. I’m not sure if they’re indexing TikTok, but I think I’m correct, they’re indexing Instagram, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, getting this video.
[00:18:36.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you agree for small business? They got to get the website, but really, they got to work with you and get a lot. It’s probably best to work with you to get a load of video out. What do you think, Ken?
[00:18:47.780] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, I think video… The two things that I think really are powering SEO today for locally focused businesses are questions questions and video. So like I said, a really robust set of frequently asked questions. Reddit has all of a sudden become a real nice powerhouse for… And And it actually carries a lot of weight from an SEO perspective when you have a link from Reddit to your site. So question-based, and by And by the way, those questions are great ways to see your video content, right? So every question that a customer has is a great video that you could do for your business. And if you do a longer form video where you answer a family of questions around a particular topic. So, for example, James Hardy Siding. If you’re a Siding contractor and you offer James Hardy Siding, what is it? Why is it important? How does it help with energy savings? How does How does it reduce your maintenance burden over a period of time? How does it add? Curb appeal, resale value to your home? Each one of those is a question that you could answer through a frequently asked question. But when you put all those together, now you have a nice three to five minute video that when you transcribe that, you write a blog post about it.
[00:20:23.860] – Ken Tucker
Now, guess what? You’ve got some real content. You turn that into press release, email marketing campaigns.
[00:20:32.150] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I interrupt slightly, Ken? I agree with everything you say, but you got any tips or insights about how you overcome resistance? Because a lot of these service providers, if they’re really small, one or two, three people, service providers, they’re doing the actual work, the administration, everything in the business. Also, they don’t want to be on video. They don’t want to be on video. They don’t have the time. Unless they’ve really done a lot of research and they really understand and bought into it, you’re going to get a lot of resistance. I might be wrong, but I think you’re indicating that you agree. Before I throw it over to Kurt, you got any tips and insights to our audience about how you can overcome this resistance.
[00:21:19.160] – Ken Tucker
Oh, yeah, absolutely. You can create fantastic video content with just B-roll pictures of work that you’ve done, just still images that you can incorporate into video and use AI voice to deliver the voiceover at a fraction of the cost. You don’t have to film any live video. You can even, I mean, I do this extensively. I’ve created an AI video clone using Hey, Jen. I think Hey, Jen is one of the best tools around right now. And so you And if you don’t want to be on camera, just do it enough to train Hey, Jen so that you have a great quality AI video avatar and an AI cloned voice. If it’s important for you to be that face of the business. But if you’re not comfortable with that, guess what? Tools like Hey, Jen, and there are a whole other set of tools, they have great AI video avatars already created for you that you could tap into and use.
[00:22:27.580] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re totally right there. I’ve got colleague that has a high-end SEO agency for high-end real estate brokerages, and they’ve used that technique themselves with a lot of success. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:22:45.000] – Ken Tucker
Kirt, you’re muted.
[00:22:48.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sorry about that. My dog was making noises. In your question that you answered for us, Ken, you had mentioned a little bit about AI or AI reviews. What are some of the misconceptions that small business owners are having, either adopting AI or abusing AI? I’m sure you have to advise people in both directions.
[00:23:11.100] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a huge fear of AI. So the first thing is we all have to work to help people overcome their fear of AI when it comes to marketing. There are a lot of burgeoning problems that are going to be massive, honestly, when it comes to AI. But take advantage of AI for your business, because if you’re not doing it, your competitors are or they will be very soon, and you’re going to be at a huge disadvantage. And if you’re competing against larger companies that maybe have franchises in local markets, guess what? They’re going to be doing it. And the big guys are going to win because they are making that investment unless the small guys jump in and start to So step into it, test it, find something that you’re comfortable with, whether it’s going in to ChatGPT and asking it to write a press release for you or an email to outreach to customers for a customer reactivation campaign. Craft an email to send to my current and past customers to get them to buy from me again. Here are the list of services I have and come up with a recommendation on an incentive to get them to do so, and see what results you get.
[00:24:40.340] – Ken Tucker
Now, don’t just take what ChatGPT generates for you. You’ve got to vet everything, right? So I’m a big believer in using AI for the brainstorming, for cranking out a lot of the grunt work. It’s smarter than humans right now. It’s already smarter than humans. It’s got an average IQ of well over 150. I think it’s 175 is the latest version of ChatGPT.
[00:25:08.780] – Jonathan Denwood
I got to really disagree with you there. I don’t think it’s got any intelligence at all.
[00:25:15.960] – Ken Tucker
Well, it’s got a lot of intelligence, but it has to be grounded and checked with your voice. You’ve got to integrate the human element and and the voice of your business into what AI produces. So while AI may be able to think about a solution that the average person may not come up with because it has access to massive amounts of data and information, that doesn’t mean that it’s right or that it’s accurate for your business. So you have to vet everything and make sure that it aligns to your business and that it speaks in the voice of your business. A lot of people, the And the big mistake that I see people make is they’ll go in and they’ll say, write a 500 word or 750 word blog post on this topic. They’ll grab that, they’ll paste it right onto their website. And it’s generic content. There’s no value. There’s nothing that’s different about that content that was produced because you just put a simple prompt in and you didn’t train it on your business. You didn’t ask it and challenge it questions and make it right better. And so As a result, you’re failing the criteria that Google’s established with EEAT when it’s coming to the authority because-Yeah, I want to slightly…
[00:26:42.170] – Jonathan Denwood
I totally agree with you there, but I want to slightly push back as well. But I think we’ll leave that to the second half of the show because it’s been a fascinating discussion so far, but we need to go for our middle break. We got a couple of messages from our sponsors. We’ll be back in the second half to give you more insight about local SCI and AI, and Ken’s a true expert. It’s been a great discussion so far, but we’re going for our middle break, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a great first half. I think Ken’s done a great job. But before we go into the second half, I want to point out, if you’re looking, if you’ve got a large or community focus build out to do on Buddy Boss or Lifter LMS or LearnDash, and you’re looking for a great hosting, but much more a great project partner, why don’t you look at becoming a partner with WP Tonic. We’ve got some fabulous affiliate programs for freelancers like you. To find out more, all you have to do is go over to WP-Tonic. Com. Wp-tonic. Com/partners. Wp-tonic.
[00:28:04.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Com/partners. It’s got some great info. All you got to do is fill in a quick form and then we can have a chat and see if we’re a good fit. Let’s build something special together. I was going to give you a bit of pushback. It wasn’t that I totally disagreed with what you were saying, Ken, because most of it I did. But not in the local, but in especially the WordPress, people said, I totally agree. If you write content using AI and put it on your website, you’re going to get hammered. Google I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t know if the consequences are so severe when it comes to local SEO, but if they, through their technology, can see that it’s AI content, you’re going to I’m not talking about a manual penalty, I’m just talking about their general technology. But on the other hand, when it came to the WordPress space, there was quite a few players that was knocking out an enormous amount of content, Ken, and they were using offshore content farms, paying $5 an article or less, and the stuff was dribbled. And this has been going on for years, and they just flood the market and use gray hat networking techniques.
[00:29:36.390] – Jonathan Denwood
If you think you probably, and I’m not such an expert, but I know a little bit about it, Ken. I think there was a lot There’s a lot of snobbery out there as well because there was a lot of junky, really crappy content out there anyway. How would you respond, Ken?
[00:29:57.160] – Ken Tucker
I agree. I think that that’s a dangerous path. And the best case scenario is if it’s not penalizing per se, but it’s like you said, it’s just no value. So it’s not helping you. You’re paying money to solve a problem that you think is being solved, and it’s not solving the problem for you. I mean, it’s literally putting a lot of content on your website, perhaps.
[00:30:30.320] – Jonathan Denwood
But- I think if you can edit it, and it’s always filled with a lot… Well, it’s filled with a lot of inaccuracies because it’s normally based on older content. If it’s dealing with stuff that’s ever changing, it’s filled with inaccrecises because it’s utilizing old data. You got to really… The prompts you use, you got to give it a lot of guidance, and then you got to give it a really good edit, and then you got to use techniques that will hide, because I can say, if Google senses in any way that you’re using AI content, they’re just going to ham you. Don’t matter if It could be even… You could do everything I’ve suggested, and you might disagree with me, but I’m based on my own experience, Ken. You might spend a load of time editing it and making it better than the janky content that’s out there. But if Google senses it’s AI, you’re finished.
[00:31:33.820] – Ken Tucker
Yeah. I mean, everything has to be human-edited. There’s no doubt about that. Otherwise, it’s just junk. I mean, And so it’s absolutely critical. Where AI is exhaling right now is in ideation, in brainstorming, in deep research. That function of of AI through ChatGPT is, I think, a really powerful feature to help you gain a lot of valuable insights. But you have to take that and you have to… Humans still have to drive the train, and they have to edit the content to make it sound like it’s human. Ai written content still has signals and indications that it’s written by AI.
[00:32:25.850] – Jonathan Denwood
And people who-Yeah, I’ll push a little bit back. I I understand where you’re coming from, but like I say, in the WordPress, a lot of this stuff that were pushed by certain people in enormous quantities, Ken, was really low quality offshore written content with very little editorial control. And it was just done by content farms, where they had 200 people offshore, and they’re just knocking it out. And so I see where you come from, and I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I see a middle place where your statements are my statements. I don’t know if that’s making sense, Ken.
[00:33:11.680] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, no, I agree. I would never advocate that content farm-driven strategy. I think that that’s a bad strategy.
[00:33:22.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, but the thing was, Google for a number of years, if you I think it was pretty cynical about this, Ken. I think if you spent a lot of money with Google through Google Ads, and they weren’t so hard on you when it came to knocking out the content farm stuff, and they didn’t really seem to do much about it. I knew some players that they weren’t breaking the law or nothing, but they pushed the limit way past what I thought Google would allow them, and there was never any consequences. Yeah.
[00:34:05.740] – Ken Tucker
I mean, that’s always going to be part of the challenge. How do you overcome competitors who are going to be doing that? And I think it really comes down to how are you appealing to your ideal client and speaking to them? Because I think a lot of the content farm-driven stuff was just throwing stuff on a wall and hoping a bunch of stuff stuck so that you got a large-Well, you do any…
[00:34:38.100] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s totally out of your area expertise. I’m going to leave it now because I’m drawing this conversation out of local SEO. I’m going to throw question four over to my very patient co-host. Get back on the subject. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:34:56.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Thanks, Jonathan. A couple of things, Ken. One, ChangeScape, when we look at ChangeScape, it says it builds websites that generates customers. Great catchphrase. Awesome. But that means it’s more than just a digital brochure. It’s actually some a lead generating type machine. So my question is two fold is, in your opinion, what’s the difference between standard brochure marketing site and an actual lead site? And then I was curious because I was doing some research before the show, and I see that you are certified in story brand. And I was wondering how much of a part that story brand training plays into this type of messaging or user experience that you create.
[00:35:43.560] – Ken Tucker
I think it’s a huge It’s a huge part of it. For me, Story Brand is, what I love about it is a lot of marketing people talk about story as the story of the brand. So Story brand flips the script, if you will. And instead of the business being the focal point of the story, your customer is the focal point of the story. They’re the hero. They’ve got a problem. They’re looking for a guide, which that’s what your business is, is the guide. It’s not the hero of the story. It’s the guide that calls them to action, gives them a plan, and helps them achieve success and/or avoid failure. So that’s the formula of story brand. And that’s how I really like to lay out a website because I was actually in a workshop with Perry Belcher a few weeks ago. And he said that you have milliseconds now because of all of the activity that’s going on online, all of the different choices, milliseconds for people to make a decision on what your business is doing and whether or not it solves the problem that they have. And 80 % So a lot of people do not scroll when they land on a page.
[00:37:04.300] – Ken Tucker
So if you don’t have a crystal clear message from the get go about what you do and the problem you solve for your customer, you’re missing the boat. And then if you don’t have a call to action to get them to take that next step. It’s amazing to me how many businesses do not have a phone number. They have a contact button, but they don’t have a phone number. You’re making people You’re making people scroll down to find your phone number. Eighty % of people aren’t doing that. So you’re not converting those people. And so I think that’s critical. People want to see that you understand their problem. You have the empathy, but also the authority to be able to help them and guide them through the process to solve that problem. They need to understand what their life is going to be like after you solve that problem. But also what What are the consequences of inaction or continuing to do the same thing are. So you’ve also got to work in the chemical reactions that people have, the serotonin, the dopamine, The things like that that actually are the drivers that chemically trigger action or trigger flight, because if you’re not careful, you can drive people away from your website very, very quickly.
[00:38:31.680] – Ken Tucker
So the other critical thing I think is important is we’re in a world where more and more and more and more every single day people expect speed. They put a premium on speed over almost anything else. And I had Jay Baer on my podcast a while back, and he talked about he wrote a book. His last book was on basically speed to lead. And he’s done a lot I’m going to research to find that if you’re the first to respond, not only do you have a fantastic chance of winning that business, it’s like 70, 80 % likelihood that you can win that business. It’s irregardless of price. So if you’re tired of competing on price and always having to go down that rabbit hole of discounting your price to be able to win the business. You know how you get out of that? Be the first to respond. And you know how you do that? You implement AI in a in a smart way so that you answer every phone call. You have an AI driven chatbot that is trained to answer questions that keep people on your website and that lead to action so that you deliver people who are ready.
[00:39:47.720] – Ken Tucker
When they are ready to talk to a human, you’ve got to make that transition. So it’s not 100 % AI driven, but let AI make sure that you are always answering the phone. If you have a receptionist at your office, let’s say you’re at a dentists office, you have one person who answers the phone, what happens when two or three people call? Statistics are 80 % of people will not leave a voicemail if they get voicemail in today’s world. And so now, if they’re an existing customer of yours, they’re going to leave that voicemail. But if you’re trying to get new customers, they’re not going to leave a voicemail. They’re going to call the next dentist or the next chiropractor or whoever it is because they’re looking for somebody who solve their problem. And speed is become, and it’s probably one of the most important, if not the most important element to that. So make sure you capture every call, even if it’s just to be the first to respond and say, Thanks for calling us. Let me get your contact information. We’ll have somebody contact you right away from our office. That’s a huge win because it’s probably going to stop them from scrolling and give you a little bit of grace if you fulfill your commitment to them of calling them back within that time frame that you told them.
[00:41:06.050] – Ken Tucker
So I think AI is very, very powerful in that regard because it will allow you to answer pretty much every phone call. And also what it does is it also filters out a lot of noise because I don’t know if you guys experience this or not, but I mean, I get a tremendous amount of spam phone calls. And there’s another statistic out there that I came across recently. Whenever you’re interrupted, it takes you 15 minutes to get back to being productive working on what you were working on. So every time you answer the phone where it’s a spam phone call, where people are trying to tell you that your Google business profile isn’t claimed or optimized, guess what? They cost you 15 minutes with the productivity time. So AI is great at filtering out that crap. I know a lot of people are concerned that it sounds very robotic. It doesn’t. What I’m talking about is a conversational AI solution.
[00:42:11.200] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s not- Have you got any actual products? Well, I suppose we can leave that to question five, can’t we? I’m interrupting. We can leave that to question five. Maybe you can give us some recommendations in that area. I’m going to leave question five to Kurt, and he probably will have to go. But I just wanted your response because I think when it comes to local SCI, and you’re the expert, but I really think testimonials and reviews and how you generate reviews and how you respond to bad reviews. I think this People really do read them. And what’s your experience and what would you advise in that area?
[00:43:09.200] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, absolutely. Reviews are absolutely critical. And, sadly, if you don’t ask for reviews, you’re probably not going to get the volume of reviews that you should be, good reviews even. If you rely on people to just write reviews without you prompting people to do so, they’re going to skew to the negative because we’re wired to, driven by avoidance of pain is a big driver. And so if people have a bad experience, they’re going to go write a bad review. But if they have a good experience, they’re not nearly as motivated to do so. And so if you’re not asking them to do so, or not making it super easy for them to do so, they’re probably aren’t. If there’s no reviews about a business or very few, if you have five five star reviews and that’s all you have, you’re probably letting somebody fill the gap of communication. And they’re probably thinking, Gosh, people don’t think enough about this business to write a review about them.
[00:44:17.780] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t make my living at this, but I have people ask me advice because they know I’m in the internet, and they’re very scared about what they should do about bad reviews, and they get totally fixated by it, Ken. I mean, you’re in business, you could be Jesus on the world, the second coming. But there’s some customers, you’re going to get a bad review. I’m not trying to be funny here, but you are. I don’t know what you do. You’re going to get a bad review. When I was advising a couple of years ago, I was one guy, they go absolutely bonkers if they get a bad review. Got any advice how you deal with a client that’s going bonkers? And what do you say to that type of client, Ken?
[00:45:14.980] – Ken Tucker
Yeah. So you do want to respond to every review that comes in. With bad reviews, you don’t want to put gasoline onto the fire. So you have to… I think the best strategy is acknowledge that somebody had that experience and then try to take it offline. The benefit of and say, we’re sorry you didn’t have a great experience. We want to try to make it right. Please contact us at this email address or this phone number and leave it there. Don’t get into a back and forth. Now, if they’re not a customer, I think that’s okay also to say, hey, look, we’ve never done business with you before. There are plenty of people who write reviews who are not customers or they’re confused about the fact that they got the wrong business, and they wrote a review about that business. That’s happened to some of my clients before. You can challenge those reviews from Google and say, This isn’t a client of mine. I’ve never done business with them.
[00:46:11.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you get anywhere? Because if I know about Google, it’s like talking to a black box trying to get Google to do anything. Or am I cynical about that?
[00:46:20.000] – Ken Tucker
It can be hard, but we actually have a client right now that just got hammered with 12 bad reviews. All of them are bogus. And And Google has a feature that is pretty new that will allow you to challenge those reviews. And they got removed immediately, which I thought was a really nice addition. That was a surprise. But yeah, you can remove bad reviews. There’s no guarantee. But Google is smart enough to know that there are people who go out there and just hammer on businesses over and over and over. And all they do is write bad reviews. Google will usually remove those. If you can convince Google that that is-Well, I got to say to you, Ken, me and my team, I think in general, we go beyond the core duty to try and keep people happy.
[00:47:18.640] – Jonathan Denwood
But there’s some people, if I came back for a second life, I wouldn’t want them using my services again. I never want to see them again in my second life. I believe in recarination, and I don’t want them coming up in my next recarination, to be truthful. But over to you, Kurt, for question five.
[00:47:43.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
Okay. We already asked, and then we put you off, Ken, but the question was, what AI tools do you recommend for folks in the space, if you have any?
[00:47:59.080] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think ChatGPT is a great place for people to get started if they’re not comfortable using. But don’t just do… Look, they call it chat for a reason. It’s a dialog. So when you’re prompting, it’s going to come back with questions and answers for you. Make it conversational, but also challenge it. It’s like, okay, well, that’s great, but I want something better and push back on it. And that kicks in a different level of response from just a simple ChatGPT. So that’s a good place to get started. We actually offer an AI voice and AI chatbot solution that’s out there. So They’re delivered through our CRM platform called Local Leads IQ. It’s called AI Assistant IQ and AI Bots IQ. Our particular solutions, I think a tool like Hey, Jen is ridiculously good for video creation. Descript has also got some really nice features to it that can elaborate. And there’s a whole series of content repurposing tools like OpusClips, Exemplary AI that will take content and parse it out and and chop it up into bite size chunks that you can use for social media or to create short form video, repurpose a landscape video into a portrait style video for shorts.
[00:49:32.780] – Ken Tucker
Those are the kinds of things. There are some decent writing tools that will give you pretty good results. Write Sonic is one I’ve used in the past. But again, everything has to be vetted by a human.
[00:49:49.780] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s like that, okay?
[00:49:51.580] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, and it has to be put into your voice.
[00:49:55.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you think some of these people on YouTube, when they AI came out, there were certain influencers that were telling people, Just produce like a thousand pages AI, and they were building their channel. There was a couple of influencers that, just use AI, make 500 pages, get old domain that’s got domain authority, burn it all on. They were building the audience so they’d whack, they got wiped out, didn’t they? Their YouTube channels are no more, are they? Do you think those people have any conscience at all about the shit they were telling people?
[00:50:39.200] – Ken Tucker
Probably not. Honestly, probably not. I mean, a Part of the job that makes our jobs hard is all of the bad actors that are out there that give bad and incorrect money.
[00:50:52.240] – Jonathan Denwood
And they’re all making more money than me, Ken. I know. There you go. It’s so easy to go on the dark side, isn’t it, Ken? We’re going to probably wrap up. Are you able to do 10 minutes extra content, Ken? Yeah. All right. We’ll probably have some bonus. We have bonus content. You’ll be able to watch the podcast and the bonus content on the WPTonic YouTube channel. We’re going to wrap up the show now because my co-host has another engagement. So, Ken, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your ideas that you’ve been so generously sharing on this podcast?
[00:51:32.440] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, so my website is changescapeweb. Com. That’s C-H-A-N-G-E-S-C-A-P-E-W-E-B. Com. My YouTube channel is @changescape, so youtube. Com/@changescape. And there you’ll find my two podcasts that I do, AI guides for small businesses and marketing guides for small businesses. And there’s a lot of great content there.
[00:51:56.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s great stuff. Am I ever patient and cooperative co-host? Kurt, where can people best find out about your views, ideas, and what you’re up to, Kurt?
[00:52:12.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I do post a fair amount on X and Facebook, and that’s all under the Manana Nomas name for business. We have manananomas. Com. But for personal contact, hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn almost every day, and connect with me there, and we’ll have a conversation.
[00:52:29.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. If you really want to support the show, me and Kurt, the best way to do it, you’re probably listening to this on your phone, Android or iOS, on iTunes or Spotify. If that’s the case, you can leave a review really easy. One star, five star, we don’t care. Give us some feedback, give us a review, tell us what content you would like us to have in new episodes. It just really helps both me and Kirk, and it promotes the show to new people. Also, like I say, if you want to watch the bonus content plus the podcast content, you can watch the whole thing on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. And you’re generous, subscribe to that. That also helps the show in general. We will be back next week with another great interview. I think it’s our roundtable show week as well. Next week, we’ve got a fabulous guest. We’re talking about all the WordPress and text stories of the month. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:53:33.840] – Ken Tucker
Thank you.
[00:53:35.500] – Jonathan Denwood
On to the bonus content. I think I’m going to start off with question six, actually. If you had your own time machine and you could go back like HD Wells to the start of your career, is there any little tip, insight that you would like to tell yourself?
[00:53:57.200] – Ken Tucker
I was pretty I’m fortunate when I in my previous career, I managed a large I. T. Division. And, I ran a business within a business. So it was deceptive to me. When I started my own business, I didn’t realize, oh, you know what? I was I was actually able to spend somebody else’s money, and I didn’t really have to fully deal with the financial consequences. So that was a big eye opener for me. And to be honest, I started my business originally a little bit out of spite because I was trying to move the business I was working for in a particular direction. They didn’t want to go there. And that’s the genesis for why I started my business. So being a little headstrong probably wasn’t the best thing.
[00:54:52.820] – Jonathan Denwood
It was meant to be, wasn’t it? You’ve made a successful career at it, haven’t you? Yeah. So I thought you were going to say not coming on this podcast, actually, but you were generous. So you mentioned when it comes to local SEO, AI hasn’t affected it. In my own business, I produce a lot of content, a lot of video content. And about eight months ago, I got hit a little bit and I’ve recovered to some degree. But it’s like being a bicycle, I’m getting an enormous amount of impressions. I’ve doubled the amount of impressions, but my actual clicks are down by a third. But talking to other people, I think I’m doing quite well, actually. But I am researching and changing the content I am, and it seems to be affected by AI snippets, what Google is doing. You’ve got to just you’ve to just say that. But when it comes to local SEO, do you think what you outlined in the main part of the podcast is coming for local SEO in the next year, 18 months?
[00:56:14.040] – Ken Tucker
I think it will. I think the businesses that do what I consider omnichannel driven SEO, even for local businesses where you’re in Incorporating review management, social media content, video content, written content on your website, building a quality website, doing the classic traditional SEO things where you don’t want to leave. Look, in today’s world, if you don’t use AI for anything other than this in regard to SEO, use it to find problems. Don’t necessarily Not necessarily implement the recommendations it has because it will give you a lot of false positives, but use AI to find the problems fast so that you can get them fixed faster. That’s an easy way to adopt AI. And I think if you’re sloppy with the way you build your website where you don’t have really good H structures, H1, H2, H3, you’re just giving Google an opportunity to knock you down a little bit when you could be ranking pretty easily if you just adopted some good structural content. And you got to have schema markup on your website. If you don’t have schema markup. And even like nobody talks about the importance of Bing, but guess what?
[00:57:56.260] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s that, Ken? What is it?
[00:57:59.440] – Ken Tucker
Why We have a relationship. And so making sure your Bing local business profile is updated and optimizing for Bing, through Bing search master, our search tools is something that can give you just that little bit of edge as AI becomes more and more.
[00:58:22.720] – Jonathan Denwood
I want to put this to Kim because when you were saying you can utilize some of the video tools when it comes to local SEO, when people are very reluctant or very resistant, I think it’s great. But I notice when it comes to my YouTube, and I listen to a load of podcasts because I do a lot of walking because I’m in front of this bloody computer, 12 hours of bloody day. So I got to be out walking because I go mad. I listen to a ton of podcasts. And I know, and I watch too much YouTube, but it’s better than an American television television, is that there’s a lot of people… I do it myself. If I see that it’s just… If I sense that they’ve got a good fun now, and when I start watching it, it’s offshore-generated AI optimized YouTube video crack. I unsubscribe straight away. I tell YouTube not to recommend that channel to me. I want to see a real person or if I sense it, it’s an actual AI bigger head, if I get any sense. But I’ll probably drop them. I want a real person or real people telling me stuff on my YouTube channel.
[00:59:48.620] – Jonathan Denwood
I also think, I don’t know if you… And also at the present moment, the large learning models are a bit like black boxes, but I’m sure, and I think you can already see instances of this in the SEO community, a few podcasts and channels that are religiously followed. Now they’re getting sense on how these large learning models work. I think the SEO and the digital marketing crowd will get better and better insights about how to manipulate the results. How do you I think that’s going to affect things? Because people, I think at the present moment, are having a little bit too much confidence about what the large learning model is recommending to you, and especially when Google puts place advertisement next to their snippet recommendations. I’m cynical, but there’s going to be a tremendous impossible temptation that the snippet is going to recommend the product that’s been advertised next to it, in my opinion. How would you respond to that, Ken?
[01:01:09.860] – Ken Tucker
I don’t know. For years, the SEO community has felt like there’s probably a correlation between if you’re running ads and you’re-Never.
[01:01:24.420] – Jonathan Denwood
It could never happen, could it?
[01:01:26.710] – Ken Tucker
And Google, of course, will deny it.
[01:01:29.340] – Jonathan Denwood
You can rely on everything Google tells you, can’t it? Yeah.
[01:01:33.800] – Ken Tucker
But when you look at this, you see a lot of things that indicate that there is a correlation between if you’re running ads and how you’re ranking. And so, yeah, I think that that’s absolutely a problem. In regard to the AI-produced content, again, one of the people that I really follow extensively is Julia McCoy. And she was a very prolific content writer, and she writes all of her own content, but for a whole variety of reasons. One is she wants to adopt a new technology because she envisions a different world, but two, because she’s had a lot of health challenges and issues. She has created an AI video avatar that delivers her personally written content using AI video clones and She’s conveying really important messaging about the direction of AI. She’s really a great person to track with a lot of the trends that are out there. But she’s using AI to deliver the message, but she’s writing all the content.
[01:02:47.190] – Jonathan Denwood
She’s used to writing all the content. It was a very broad statement. I was making. Thank you for pointing that out. You’re totally right. There are circumstances for health reasons, for content production. I I think it probably… I don’t know how this is going to work in local SEO. This probably applies more to regional, statewide, national. But I do think as the digital marketers get more and more effective, and it’s going to be arm race, just like traditional SEO. But I think the digital marketers will learn how to adapt the large learning models, because what I’ve learned is that it’s amazing technology, but it’s in some ways easier to manipulate than traditional SEO. But I think that will continue. Basically, what these large learning models… I think it was also down, and I don’t know if this was the case with local search, it was also a period of three to four, maybe five years, where the actual quality of the search that were coming from Google were getting worse and worse and worse, and more and more just spam and crap was appearing, and you literally, especially very competitive terms, you had to go to the page 2 to actually find anything that could help you.
[01:04:21.300] – Jonathan Denwood
I think this has affected Google, and I don’t want to recognize it because they were making so much money by producing crap in a lot of the search terms. However, I think many people are… One of the reasons why many people turn to large learning models when conducting their searches. But I think they’re putting too much faith because I think the digital marketing crowd will very effectively be able to influence what comes from that. Or do you think I’m just kidding myself, Ken?
[01:05:02.100] – Ken Tucker
No, I think it’s essential that everyone who wants to be found understands how to be found by Google, as it evolves into a hybrid of traditional purchase delivery and increasingly relies on AI. Additionally, people are bypassing Google altogether and going directly to some of these other platforms.
[01:05:28.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you agree with what I outlined, one of the things that has driven this is over the last few years, the diminishing quality of search results.
[01:05:39.780] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, I think that’s definitely a problem. I think maybe less so local. I guess it is tremendously local. However, to future-proof your business, you have to be focused on both now. Unfortunately, the situation for local businesses is that you have to be focused on both. You have to think about those people who are just starting to use TikTok. I mean, people started bypassing Google search, especially the younger generations. They’re just going and doing a search on Instagram, TikTok.
[01:06:15.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Instagram and TikTok users hardly use Google.
[01:06:19.760] – Ken Tucker
Yeah.
[01:06:21.020] – Jonathan Denwood
To wrap up, let’s return to the area, as you’ve been very generous with me, despite my wandering, and I’ve tried to keep it focused on local SEO. You were saying that you thought I was being generous when I said about 20% of local businesses get it. Now, we’re in 2025. I was out of it until I moved. I’ve moved to a new state, bought a new house, and I was amazed at the crap of most of these websites. I thought, Is it because we’re in a bubble? I have my hosting business, and you have your digital agency, which is aimed at local businesses. I just don’t get it. You gain insight into why so many locals… I understand they probably haven’t got the budget. Well, what these electricians and these service people have been charging me, they should have tons of money, Ken, because my God, they know how to be in charge, Ken. They should have loads of money to give to you. What is it, Ken?
[01:07:37.060] – Ken Tucker
Yes, I think it’s largely a fear of technology. A lot of these businesses have been able to grow and build up the business without doing a lot of digital. And when you look at the statistics on who owns small businesses in the United States, the overwhelming %, I mean, it’s around 60 to 80%, I forget the exact number, are owned by people who are older than 60. And they are not building businesses. For instance, if you’re in the trades, such as a plumber or an electrician, your kids often don’t want to take over these businesses. And so I think- They want to change their attitude about that, don’t they?
[01:08:18.580] – Jonathan Denwood
They might want to.
[01:08:19.460] – Ken Tucker
Yeah, absolutely. However, the current trend is that they are reluctant to do it. And so, a lot of these business owners are older than 50. They’re like, you know what? I don’t need to do anything more. I don’t want to mess with any new technologies. I’m just going to write it out and close up my business when I’m ready. I mean, and it’s sad because they could build a business that they could at least sell and collect a profit for themselves. However, many businesses are simply looking for the fastest and easiest way to get out of it. And the other statistics, the music that’s really eye-popping is that the number of small businesses that have a customer relationship management system of any kind is less than 5 %.
[01:09:12.180] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s quite amazing because there’s a shortage of them, isn’t there? They’re everywhere, aren’t they? They are. I think we’re going to end it. You’ve been a great guest. You’ve put up with my nonsense, Ken. I’ve got on a wander, but I managed to keep it on subject somehow, thanks to the help of my great co-host. But I think we’ve covered an enormous amount of interesting stuff, and I’ve enjoyed our discussion, Ken. Hopefully, in the new year, you might consider coming back for part two. We’re going to end it now, folks. We’ll see you next week with another great WP Tonic podcast. See you soon, folks. Bye. Goodbye.
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