AI Search for Local Business – Part 2

0:00 Welcome to AI Search Session Two
Hey, I’m Jeremy Ashurn with Push Leads and welcome to session two of AI search for local businesses. So, this is all about making your business AI ready. And now that you understand the fundamentals, it’s time to learn how to prepare your business to be found and recommended by AI. So, the first thing you have to understand is that AI obviously we learned this in the first session. AI is a lot different and so it you have to understand that having a strong technical foundation is a super important aspect to the whole thing here. So, and the first thing we’re going to look at is ensuring that your website meets the basic technical requirements that AI search engines need to access and understand your business. We’re also going to learn about information architecture. We’re going to learn how to structure your business information so that AI can easily understand, find, and recommend you. And then we’ll talk about mobile first optimization. Believe it or not, AI even look at your website and figure out how fast does it load on the mobile? Does it look good on the mobile phone? And then we’ll talk about essential business data. We’ll talk about adding the specific information the AI platforms need to categorize and recommend your business. So, let’s jump into it. So, here is your five-step plan to getting

1:12 Five-Step Plan to Get Found by AI
found by AI search. The first thing we want to do here is make sure your website loads fast. We want to look at the technical basics. Make sure your website load fast, works well on phones, and AI needs to be able to look at um AI looks at how fast your website loads. They want to make sure your website looks good on mobile phone. So, make sure you do that first. The second thing you want to do is rewrite your service pages. You don’t want salesy content that says, "We’re the best HVAC provider in all of Central Florida." You want to have um headlines that are more like um H quality HVAC services with 100 plus trusted Google reviews. Something that’s like factual that that an AI understands that’s not salesy that’s more like just a headline that gets people’s attention and also how are you helping the customer. So your headlines need to be less salesy and more just like matterof fact. Um and um so what they’re saying here is um like if you’re if you’re person if you’re somebody that does uh has a dog walking business, right? Uh what does our dog walking service include? Um and you want to give bullet points there. And you also want to answer questions like have an FAQ section on the page. Almost every page need to have an FAQ section. The other thing we need to be doing is building

This is part of our AI search visibility guide.

2:32 Building Reputation with Reviews
your reputation by getting more customer reviews because guess what? AI looks at your Google business profile. They look at how many reviews you have. Think of an AI like a super smart librarian we talked about in session one. Instead of going through and hunting a hundred different places. So AI is like that super smart librarian that instantly looks the checks the index for hundreds of thousands of books. And so an AI knows exactly what your Google review is and they know that someone’s talking about you on Reddit or they know you’re not even on Reddit. They know you’re doing social media. They know all. Just kidding. But it does seem kind of like they know all. So, show off your experience. Show off your certifications. Also, um, join local communities. So, be helpful in Facebook groups and neighborhood apps like Next Door and online local forums. The more you’re giving back and you’re not salesy with your approach, but just answering questions, the more an AI will recommend you over over somebody that’s not doing any of that. And then you can track your progress by, you know, checking to see

3:37 Asking ChatGPT to Audit Your Visibility
if people are finding you online, um, and asking about your services. So, there’s a lot of tools to track your your progress. We can go through that in the future, but one of the things you can do is just ask an AI, you know, um, if they’re recommending you. And then if they’re not recommending you, why are you not re recommending me? Like I did that the other day with Chad GDP. I was like, okay, so I’m showing up for Asheville SEO. I’m based out of Asheville, North Carolina. So, I’m showing up for Ashual SEO services and those kind of searches most of the time, but some of the time I’m not. So, I said, "All right, Chad TDP, can you do an AI audit and tell me where I’m showing up in Google?" Um, sorry. So, he used to say Google because that’s what I do for so many years, but now it’s showing up for AI. What, you know, what search terms am I showing up for? And then what can I do to improve my own SEO? Uh, my own AI SEO. Um, and so ask an AI that question and get the feedback from the AI and ask chat to be the hard questions. It’s okay to ask the hard questions, right? Um, and so um, so let’s look at some of these aspects

4:44 Technical Basics Making Your Site AI-Friendly
here. The technical basics of making your website AI friendly is really making sure that an AI can find your website. Um, so the most common mistake is accidentally blocking AI from reading your website. This happens in a file called robots.txt. txt. So, if you don’t know anything about this, check with your web developer or if you’re on a platform like Squarespace, make sure that that robots txt is not blocked, right? Um, and then the phone friendly website rule. Most AI search happens on phones, right? So, if your website is slow or hard to view on a mobile, a is not AI is not going to recommend you. So, your site needs a load in under 3 seconds. A fast loading website uses compressed images and simple designs.

5:27 Mobile-First Design and Page Speed
So, Google has a free tool called page speed insights that can test your website speed. Check that out with that tool. There’s a bunch of other tools as well. You need to have a mobile first design. This is what all of us web designers and SEO people did years ago. So, your website should look function great on a mobile phone and tablet. Look at your site on a phone and have a friend look at your site on the phone and see how fast it’s loading. How clear is the website? All those things that AI looks at. And then um your code needs to be simple. Um so avoid complicated website builders. Um I usually like if

6:02 WordPress vs Squarespace for AI Readiness
you want something simple, I like Squarespace because you can customize it. But um if you really want something customized, I recommend building your website on WordPress because once you’re on a platform like WordPress, then you can have API connections, you can have outside connections, and we can use our tools to publish inner pages on your website. Or you can do that. You can hire a developer to come up with automations that improve your your website’s functionality by publishing content on automated on a auto automated basis. Right? So anyway, um so and then how to structure your business

6:38 Structuring Business Information for AI
information for AI. So what I would suggest you doing when you’re structuring your business information is answer questions directly. Have like an FAQ section on every page. Um instead of just off saying something like a salesy headline, hey we offer great service or you know instead of saying something like that say what makes our lawn care service different and then answer that with what makes you different. Make each section complete. So um don’t say things like as mentioned above. Uh each part of the website every page needs to need needs to be unique needs to not have repetitive content. And then you can build trust with real examples, sharing your testimonials, before and after photos, specific videos, also getting mentioned by others. So AI trust and AI actually trusts what other people say more about you than what you say about yourself. So getting active in local community groups like Reddit and Facebook groups and answering questions, guess what? AI looks at all that. So, it turns out the more you help others, the more AI will help you because AI believes in in the law of givers gain.

7:48 Essential Business Data AI Needs
And if you’re a BNI member and you you know about givers gain, just understand that that’s exactly how AI is. And if you’re not a BNI member and you’re part of a local you have a local business, join a BNI and get involved and do some networking in person. Random shameless plug from a BNI member, like a 10 or 12 year BNI member. Um, okay. So moving on here, you can also add specific or you can add special information in special business information for AI. So your business details, your business name, address, phone number, the hours need to be consistent on every page. You need to have an FAQ section on every page. Um you need to use exact questions that people looking for and you need to have information about your business, including information about how long you’ve been in business, what makes you different, things like that. So all of that makes a difference. And so in session two, we covered the technical foundation. We covered the informationational the information structure. We covered the business data requirements. And we covered um different trust building elements. Now in session three, we’ll focus on creating content that AI platforms want to quote and recommend. So stay tuned. I’m Jeremy Ashurn with Push Leads. X.