How to Rank with Local SEO, Semantics + GBP! ft Paul Truscott

Stuart Vickers, otherwise known as SEO Jesus, welcome to the show. So how are you? I'm Julian, thank you very much. And you're currently working on AI agents for your agency right now, right?

Yes, it's been a bit of a long journey. As soon as I finally sat down with Cloud Code, installed it on a VPS, I was basically taking all our SOPs, all our processes, and trying to automate them as much as possible. And the idea is we could basically have 80-90% of the agency running on a single server. And I have now backtracked some of that, just because of how long I was spending just to fix everything.

Obviously, you're a link builder as well. You know how some webmasters, some will do PayPal, some want bank transfer, and you've got so much variation that we can never get the agent to actually coherently think on its feet and actually adapt each time. Whereas at the end of the day, some of my virtual assistants are not that expensive, and I realized they can just run these things for you. So I think there's almost been a bit of a U-turn.

I think the automations are fabulous. What we're now doing is actually basically putting the VAs in the driver's driving seat. So they get access to the Cloud Code server, but they can actually think on their feet and manage it rather than just relying on these automations that ultimately blow up in your face. I've had both sides of the situation.

For example, I remember when we switched from like human videos all day to AI avatar videos on the main channel. And I was like, this is amazing. I'm getting the same amount of views. But then conversions just plummeted straight away.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because I know you were always saying about how your AI videos were outperforming the human videos, but then the comments were full of abuse and people were really annoyed. So I thought, is that rage bait that's getting you more reach just because people are engaging with it so much more? So let me let my cat out. I'm trying to let it go for a while.

So yeah, no, that's an interesting one. I actually saw the same thing on Calroos. He's getting like 10 times more views now. But at the same time, there's a lot of people raging in the comments.

I think that you just hear more from the people that don't like what you're doing. So it might be like, yeah, and you probably know that 1% might hate the avatar, but you'll hear from that 1% the most. But yeah, we have the same situation. So I was like, okay, I never need to make human videos again, but I'm still sat here today making human videos because we found like our conversion rate really drops a lot if we don't have any human videos at all.

Yeah. It's the same for me really digging down day after day, just trying to fix all these agents using multiple different LLMs and doing all the evals and audits and trying to keep on polishing it and thinking, you know, we're one day away from this being perfect. So there's that 10, 20% issue. We're going to get over that and then it will just run seamlessly.

But yeah, at the end of the day, we're replacing often $500 VAs with that. Whereas I spend literally three months of my own time fixing all those different valuable experience. I think everyone needs to be on ThoughtCode. And by the end of the day, it wasn't good for business because I wasn't going out doing videos, doing marketing.

And I was just fixing the automations that ultimately and never moved the needle that much. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's an easy trap to fall into, isn't it?

Bear in mind as well, you're probably right in the top 1% of people actually using it in their business. And so like for you, it's kind of, this is all brand new. Like no one has sort of followed this path before, have they? No, exactly.

I feel like obviously there's a little hype with an A10 and ultimately still even today, most people's use of AI is writing a couple of emails and that's the majority of it. And so you're going to a corporation and how are you using AI? We wrote a blog post, we wrote an email. Okay.

Text generation is really not reinventing the wheel that much. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.

What we're trying to do is literally we've got every client call recorded, every touch point, every email they send us. We want all of that to go into a client library so that basically all the work we do constantly refers back to that single source of truth. So whether it's content writing, whether it's link building, every single preference that client has actually expressed throughout the whole process, all the agents will come to that. Whereas as we know with a human team, it's very easy.

Some people will go off on a tangent, do what they're used to doing. They've not watched all the sales calls with the onboarding. And then you realize that client had very specific requirements that somehow didn't feed through the chain correctly. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I can see how that would happen. Definitely. One thing that actually still surprised me is like we have a small number of clients who absolutely refuse AI content.

And so we still have a human content writer, even in 2026, which still surprised me. I had a South African content writing, I was paying 1,500 a month, who I hired pre-ChatGVT. It was really good, really high standards. I kept them on for a very long time.

And for the exact same reason, we actually burned the client last year when we were doing the guest post approvals. And we weren't absolutely clear enough that these are your third party guest posts that are going on other websites just to get the links. They're not going on your website. And they put it through whatever AI detector they wanted.

And they came back outraged saying, this is flagging up with a high AI score. I'm saying, first of all, the Bible and Shakespeare comes up as high chance of AI. But secondly, we're looking at the outcome here. We know that AI content ranks.

And I know people are saying, you know, it'll burn in three months time, maybe if you do a thousand articles, but I've got websites that are much smaller, denser, they've still got basic ChatGVT content on them, and they've been performing for years. So AI content, it's not the issue itself. And they always want to be working with clients who really believe in the outcome, regardless of how you actually get there. Yeah, I've seen so many.

I mean, like Backlinko, I think they got absolutely destroyed this year, didn't they? In terms of their content. And I can only imagine how many human hours went into that content and very little AI. I think human content can get tanked as well.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, with HubSpot, for instance, when you go after the pure volume game of doing emoji meanings and every highest that you could go in the funnel of information content that didn't really have any actual intent behind it. Yeah, definitely. Have you seen any differences in, say, what you sell, you know, pre AI to now?

Or is it the same sort of link building service? It's very similar, I think. As we know, to rank in AI, everyone's arguing at the moment, is AI SEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it? Is it just SEO, but slightly different?

And overall, I would say yes. We know we're moving more towards branded anchors, especially if you can get the semantics in. So basically, client's brand name is a provider of X product or service, and you want that repeated across the internet. So we're doing a lot less keyword rich anchor text and going much more after the brand mention.

And generally, in terms of the service, pretty much the same. Google's still got a massive market share for bottom of funnel. It depends on the niche, but there's still plenty of businesses out there where people aren't going on to chat GBT. They are just going to Google, skipping past the AI overview and making a call.

So that's not to bury our head in the sand and say we don't want the AI search. And I feel like SEO is still the core grounding. Google's, as we know, it's a genius algorithm that's been around a long time. And because they're really intelligent people who put a lot of work into that kind of ranking.

And so it's quite natural that the ways to rank in AI are not going to be that far detached from ranking on Google. So maybe it's fewer guest posts, and we're doing more listicles instead, but that's still outreach. That's still ultimately placing links and brand mentions. Yeah.

It still shocks me to this day that there's no tool that's just replaced what link building agencies do. I mean, for example, I can imagine it's quite easy to automate the email outreach. It's easy to automate the interactions when it comes to organizing, like building a backlink on another website. But it's almost like that hasn't been replaced yet.

People still don't know how to automate that. No, exactly. That's exactly the issue I was having with building. And what I found was, never mind how long I was spending to fix it, but also the automation was only taking the first quoted price from the webmaster, whereas I trained and trained my team to keep on negotiating, play hardball, try and do some kind of volume deal and say, if we can get the best price here, then we're willing to place 10 links with you tomorrow.

And despite repeating again and again and again in the prompting, the automation just wasn't doing that. So it actually cost me money because my $500 VA was a much better negotiator than Claude's code was. Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

I mean, as well, I think the models are getting better all the time, but for sure, even when I use Fable 5, it's like, how is it getting this so wrong sometimes? Yeah. I was really hoping when Fable came out, that I'd just be able to press a button, then it would just go through and fix everything that wasn't working. And we're still not there yet.

But yeah, to your point, it's only going to get better. So I think to have all that as bare bones, we can keep coming back every six months and see, has it actually improved? If we just apply the latest model across our full stack, what changes? Yeah, for sure.

How do you find managing an agency? Same as you, I think. Yeah, it's exhausting. And I think we've both got the same thing where we've got info products on one side, which are low ticket, high margin, quite low headache.

But equally, you've got to sell a lot of info products to actually get up to the same kind of levels as an agency. And so fundamentally, I still recommend it to everyone. Even now, if we've got clients coming to us who are very technically proficient, and they are going into Claude Code, just standard Claude and auditing their website, doing everything they need to do. But there's still that extra level of information.

They still need that experience, that more hands-on. Because as we know, you go into any LLM, whether it's ChatGPC or Claude, and it always comes back a bit surface level. It's a bit like reading a Neil Patel blog. There's nothing wrong with it.

But you and I, with all our experience, we know the extra 20%, and clients still really value that. Yeah. I mean, if you had no SEO experience, and then you just handed over your website to AI and just said, rank this, it's going to go nowhere fast. It just doesn't have the depth of expertise I can imagine.

But yeah, I agree with you. It's one of those where managing an agency, because there's so many people, everything becomes a people problem, right? And it's people on the customer side, and there's people on the internal side. So yeah, a lot of people involved generally.

I'm really not the best people. I'm a people person, but I'm not good at the... I'm kind of a big ideas, vision guy. So when it comes to actually piling all that down, turning it into a process and holding people accountable, and getting on calls every week, that tends to be where I fall down.

So if I could press a button and just scale the school to the moon, then that'd be great. But in the meantime, when you get those clients coming along paying you 5, 10, 20k a month, it's okay. Running an agency isn't the best business model in the world, but it's far from the worst, to be honest. Yeah, 100%.

I mean, there's plenty of good points as well. I mean, I think probably the hardest part is when you start handling the sales team as well. There's just so many moving parts of that, it's like, I feel like managing a sales team, they're not going to follow your instructions, your SRPs. They're not going to do what you say half the time.

It's a totally different mix. There's always that stereotype with sales guys. And we did have to go through a few to get the right ones. And plenty of horror stories there.

And anytime I've mentioned my horror story, someone else will immediately pipe up with their horror stories. And yeah, it's all the, a lot of the same old stereotypes. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But you're right, it's all about the visibility and accountability.

So every call needs to be recorded. It's process compliance. Are they actually following the right steps? And early on, we had a salesperson where they had the full SOP, they had the full training.

Here's how you go and do the mini audit in Ahrefs. And then it was months before we realized he didn't even log into Ahrefs. Yeah, the close rate wasn't too good on that one. Yeah, well, it's an interesting one, because I've met some people, they literally do not follow the process, but they get great results.

And I'm like, you know what, as long as that lasts, I'm not going to be too hard on them. Because I know if sometimes, well, if you're too hard on a salesperson, like they just, they're like, right, I'll quit. Because they value freedom more than the actual job itself, you know? Well, exactly, it's the classic sort of disc pipe thing you've got to, it's different skill sets, different personalities.

But it's just same as any other incremental improvement. Eventually you find the right people. And then it all locks in together. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Do you have any plans to rejig your services based on how AI is changing SEO right now? So for example, yeah, I'll give you an example, like, you know, speaking to Jubezi of a week, and he was basically talking about how he's kind of switched over to LLM optimization and selling listicles and guest blogs. Is that something that you've looked at? Yeah, we already do it.

Having said that, we still find the majority of clients, it's still just the classic Google rankings. It's the ITP really is, we want to rank on Google and ideally get some chachaputi visibility, basically. We haven't really fully managed to productize AI rankings perfectly. We have services that fit it that do get results.

But we're finding there's just less excitement. I think we're still so early, people are still a bit vague about what it actually looks like. And therefore, I think most clients are not, they really want that sort of off the shelf, here is the product. And here's exactly what it does.

And whereas I think all of us, we've all got all these different LLM ranking strategies. And therefore, I think the market hasn't really matured enough yet for people to be that buyer aware about it. Yeah, I agree with you. The thing that I'm seeing that's changing in the SERPs, for example, particularly on the SEO agency side of things, is I'm seeing more and more impressions on my website for keywords around AEO agency, or for example, GEO agency.

I feel like all these... We can't even agree on the acronym, never mind the process. And I think there's about 10 or 20, or maybe even 30 different acronyms that come along with this. But I think, yeah, there's going to be a big shift, I think, over the next 6 to 12 months.

I just don't know what it looks like. Yeah, 100%. About the same time, SEO has always been changing as well. So yeah, we're used to adapting with every Google updates.

In fact, really, in a big way, I think a lot of the limitations we're seeing now, it's not just because of the LLM stuff. I think it's much more to do with just the classic Google SERP changes, where we've got more ads than ever. We've now got something like five or six at the top, even some in the middle of page one, and then all the different feature snippets and carousels. There's less real estate on page one of Google than there ever has been, basically.

Have you seen... Yeah. I was going to say, have you seen demand change for link building? Do you still see it as in demand as it was previously?

I wouldn't say so. I feel like, again, even pre-tractability, even within SEO, there have been very distinct boom and bust cycles, basically. So we can all name... Yeah, like yourself, we can name these link building agencies that have been hyper-productive.

They aren't a 360 SEO agency. They purely do backlinks or a selection of different packages. And I think probably around pre-pandemic, some of those were doing really well. But then since then, we've had all link building marketplaces come out.

And now everyone's got a link building marketplace. So I think that alone has been a very big shift in the market. I agree with you. Yeah, that's something that I've seen.

It's like the link building marketplaces are growing. And then it's like, I'm seeing the demand for agencies just drop a little bit, especially like year on year. If I look at the figures, I'm like, okay, sales particularly has dropped. Yeah.

I think that's the scary thing with more of the AI, especially the cloud side where clients are able to do a lot more of their own stuff, which is great because ultimately it's going to grow the total adjustable market, more people getting into SEO, more people actually building businesses. And we therefore want to come to us for that final 20%. But at the same time, I'm sure you've got the same experience. You'll get that client who's just signed up with you, come and dump you with a 20 page document.

That's their cloud analysis of their website saying, why haven't you done this schema and that schema? FAQ schema hasn't really done anything for about four or five years now. So that really wasn't a priority and it's not good. We'll implement it for you.

Sure. But it's not going to move the needle in the way you think it is, especially as you're trying to rank for injury law in Miami with a 2k budget. Your FAQ schema is not going to change that. We actually had that problem so commonly, like so many people are coming to us saying like chat GBT says this, applaud says this.

And like, obviously it's like confidently hallucinating because it doesn't have any like domain expertise to the point where I have to like sit down one weekend and just record like a 20 minute video explaining why these AIs are so bad for analyzing a website, particularly for link building, because they don't even have any link building data. And to your question actually, sometimes I always think, is that an opportunity in that should we build SEO services that specifically target what the LMs are recommending people to do? So therefore when we do a proposal for someone, is it just all the on-page stuff, all the schema and everything else that Claude and chat GBT recommend, because that's what people are being told that they actually need when they're self-educating and therefore downplaying the link building and some of the other products. Yeah.

That's something that I've looked at because for example, you can easily get an API like data for SEO, and then you could just, you could easily vibe code a website that does that in like a weekend, I think. Yeah. The other thing I've looked at is like, and I actually tried this out last year, is do you actually need a sales team or should you send traffic directly to, you know, like an SPP style portal page where people can order online? Have you split tested that by any chance?

Not split tested scientifically, especially doing email campaigns and email launches. Yeah. I love just direct e-comm style, CTA straight to the offer. But you know, most people never going to follow through.

And then if they do, they buy the cheapest one. So again, it was such a process getting the sales team locked in. But once we got there, of course it paid off. Because suddenly you're doing much more of a negotiation when you do the proper discovery.

If you've got the sales team that actually follows the process, does proper discovery. In other words, what made the client come to them? What are they looking to achieve? Rather than just straight pitch of here's what we offer and shoehorning into what we think they want rather than finding out what they're actually looking for and therefore pivoting and tweaking the offer to suit that.

And with that, you get over a lot of the budget constraints as well. Because of course, every business comes to you saying my budget for us, you do SEO. I want SEO and my budget is $500 a month. As soon as you flip that round into, okay, forget about the SEO, the acronym, whatever it is.

If we could look at this one keyword where we can get you into the top three and that's going to print for you five to 10K a month, how much are you willing to make five to 10K a month every single month? And suddenly the whole $500 budget just evaporates. And I'll give you 3K a month right now, once you're doing that full process. So honestly, I like both, especially for time limited style offers.

But even then, increasingly, we're doing a lot more. Obviously, emails get penalized for having too many links. So what we're finding working really well is the classic just reply to this email, and then that then goes straight to the sales team. And that client is already in the funnel, they've seen the offer, they want it.

But again, we're going to find out, do proper discovery, and work out what they're actually looking to achieve. Yeah, I think that's a great way of doing it. It improves your email deliverability, and then also they're straight in the funnel in the conversation. But I agree.

I still just love getting the Thrivecast or Stripe notifications. We have had people buy 2, 3K, just e-comm style without a call. That only really works, we find in the time limited offers. Yeah.

I mean, when it really worked last year was around Black Friday. And it's just like, that's when everyone's spending online. So they're ready to put their credit card into a system, I think. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. How about, for example, and because I can totally relate to you on this, selling an info product versus selling a service. How do you get a balance between pitching both in, for example, your content or your marketing? I don't, I drift between.

So it was about two years ago now, I was very close to just bidding the agency where my courses were doing around 30, 40K per month. And bearing in mind that full margin, most agencies, even good agencies, their margin only really tends to be 20 to 30%. So to make 20 to 30K in courses is the same as 100K agency month. Yeah.

Now 100K agency month, I know is a lot of headache, whereas one course launch, not necessarily. But very quickly, you realize you're going to be constantly launching and every month you need that new course ready to go. So these offers do burn out, basically. So same with yourself, I have now flipped over to school.

But even then, that's not as, obviously, this is a dream, you sign up everyone for $30 a month, whatever it is, and then they stay on for at least a year or so. And the reality you find, as I'm sure you found the same, people sign up for $20 and then they cancel the month one. And because the problem with the recurring model is the reason people buy courses is, it's the idea of a shortcut, there's a bit of a placebo that if I throw money at this problem, it will solve that problem for me. But very quickly, they work out, they've actually got to do the work.

And so with the community, it doesn't matter how much value you give, you find pretty much everyone gets to month three to four and realize I've still got that problem I tried to solve. And now I'm paying $50 a month for it. And the problem is not solved yet, because I've actually got to log in, go through the courses and then do some work. So that was a real ceiling I hit with courses, really nice profit for a while.

And but yeah, it's not like you're getting these 5-10k a month retainers where they can stay for a year or two years. And so I do like both. I think to answer your question about the balance, it comes down to an integrated funnel. So I've got my free Church of SEO Jesus school community, and very similar model to you, I think, and then my paid disciples of SEO Jesus community.

But regardless, every single one of those who joins, then gets contacted by the sales team to try and again, do discovery. Are they potentially a fit for a service? Or are they an agency who could white label us? And we've got so many different offers, so many different things we can sell to them, depending on these different customer ICPs.

So it's all vertically integrated. Everything goes into the free community. And then we've got all the courses in the paid community. That way, I'm promoting everything at the same time, both the courses and the agency.

Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah, you got so you can like upsell them, depending on which part of the journey they're from. Yeah, exactly.

And there's always that debate in terms of do people buy courses, you know, somebody buys a course, they're not going to then buy a service from you because they're different customer profiles. And that's not true. That's an excuse. We've had clients who signed up for 20k a month, having bought the course originally, and stayed with us a really long time.

So you really don't need to worry too much about that. I see the sales calls getting booked in. And it used to be I would see every single one because they all came through our application form. Whereas now I'm seeing the calendar filling up with these people I've never even heard of.

And it's because someone joined the free school community two nights ago. I've got we get so many members joining that I have to keep that Slack channel on mute because we're getting a decent number coming through every day. And but then they get dialed and some of them end up on the calendar for a discovery call. Nice.

Yeah, that's awesome. Cool. All right. Well, I appreciate you being on.

Anything we can link to? My pleasure. Well, I wasn't too jet lagged. No, no.

You did pretty well considering you jet lagged. Well, it's jet lagged and tongue over, unfortunately. Is there anything we can link to in the description for you? Yeah, probably the Church of SAO Jesus.

That'd be best. Perfect. We'll add that in. All right.

Cheers for being on. Hey, great. Talk soon.