The Local Marketing Handbook

The new fundamental. Nobody in your town is doing this yet.

This chapter did not exist in the first edition, because in 2021 this was not a way anyone found a local business. Now it is. Customers ask an assistant for a recommendation and get a short list, or a single name.

Here is the good news, and I want to be clear about it because there is a lot of noise out there. There is no separate AI marketing. The systems making these recommendations read your Business Profile, your reviews, your website, and what other sites say about you. Those are the same four things that have always driven local search. If you did the last three chapters, you are already most of the way there.

What is different is the standard. Search engines matched keywords. These systems build a picture of your business and then decide whether they are confident enough to name you.

Confidence comes from consistency and detail.

Four things that move this

• Say the same thing everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, and services identical across your site, your profile, and every directory you are on. Contradictions make you a risky answer.
• Be specific about what you do not do. "We service residential HVAC only, no commercial" helps a system route the right person to you and keeps the wrong ones from wasting your time.
• Get mentioned by somebody else. Your chamber directory, the local paper, a supplier's dealer page, a neighborhood association, a partner business. Third-party mentions carry real weight because you cannot write them yourself.
• Answer real questions on your site. Not a blog nobody reads. The actual questions customers ask you on the phone every week, written out plainly, one per page or one per section.
  

Check whether it is working

Open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and ask, exactly the way a customer would: "Who should I call for [your service] in [your town]?" Do it a few times with different phrasings.



If a competitor comes up and you do not, read why the system recommended them. It will usually tell you. That reason is your to-do list.

The thing everyone gets wrong

Because anyone can now generate unlimited content, generic content has stopped working entirely. The businesses winning here are the ones publishing things a machine could not have invented: the actual intersection, the actual customer, the actual job, the actual price. Your unfair advantage is that you are really there. Prove it in writing.

Your 30-minute task

Ask three AI assistants who to call for your service in your town. Write down every business they name and the reason given. That list tells you exactly what your competitors have that you do not.